A/N: I was on tumblr-like I do now-and I came across rhinocio and jen-iii's meta about the cluster experiments. Me, being the horrid person that I am, decided: wouldn't it be great if I wrote what that might look like in real time? So that's what this is all about-except it also turned into a character study on Yellow Diamond herself. Oops?
Homeworld always makes the best of a bad situation.
Of course, this situation is as bad as they come. Yellow Diamond never expected Pink to betray the Authority—to betray her.
There are so many long term repercussions of this rebellion, not the least of which are Kindergartens. Without Pink's inherent sensitivity to exo-planetary fertility, how will they know where to direct engineers and installations crews for the birth place of gemkind's next generation? Gems are not a sexually reproductive people, and while they are quasi-immortal time will still eventually wear them down to broken and exhausted nothingness, one by one. Without Kindergartens, there will be no posterity. There will be no more gemkind.
And when Pink turned her back on her own species, she took all of the best knowledge on how to perpetuate it with her.
Obviously, Homeworld can't take that lying down.
Pink is resourceful, Yellow Diamond will give her that. In her entire long life, she has never seen defective gems capable of such feats as she's seen in this rebellion. Her squadrons will be outnumbered two-to-one, armed with only their own weapons and resourcefulness, and they will somehow win anyway.
"I've never seen anything like it," one chrysoberyl gasped to her recently. The violently green gem, for all that she was symmetrical and boasted a Mohs of 8.5, stood before Yellow Diamond awkwardly angled and half dead. If her Mohs were any lower, she would have been poofed and collected by the rebels, just like the rest of her battalion. "They knew we outnumbered them, and they knew our weapons were stronger, so they—they fused, sir. They made themselves so big—and I swear, I haven't seen more cohesive or powerful fusions even amongst symmetrical gems. They wiped us out, sir; our weapons scarcely marked them. The two we managed to break apart just fused right back together picked up where they left off like it was nothing! They're organized, and efficient, and loyal, sir. I didn't realize defects were even capable of fusing at all."
That was not the first report Yellow got on the subject. It also wouldn't be the last.
Organized, efficient, and loyal. None of those descriptions should fit in juxtaposition with defects, and yet here they are.
It is an indisputable fact Pink Diamond's troops are loyal above all else. They don't care one iota about their own destruction. It doesn't matter if Yellow captures a foot soldier or a commander, whether she interrogates with bribe or torture. Whatever Pink has made them think they're fighting for, her people are willing to die for it.
And they have. After all, what use is a prisoner of war if they refuse to give up secrets about troop movements or Pink's brainwashing techniques?
"But we can still repurpose them, can't we?" says a magenta-hued topaz. She stoops down and picks up the dioptase she's just violently poofed from the floor of the bunker. "You can never have enough backup generators powered by—"
"A defective gem will provide substandard energy," Yellow says tersely. Does this topaz know nothing? "The Diamond Authority will tolerate nothing less than optimal productivity. Ultimately, the costs of repurposing defective garbage like that—" she gestures dismissively to the trillion-cut gem with a flick of her wrist "—will always bring us to deficit. Shattering and recycling the minerals is the best way to absorb the loss."
The pink topaz glances at the asymmetrical gem in her palms for only a moment before shrugging and bubbling it. She's sent it off to the recycling facility by the end of the next moment—after all, the Diamond Authority knows best.
Even if Rose's captured troops had given up everything they knew, Yellow would have shattered them anyway. Gemkind is a proud and beautiful race that was never made to be tainted by the sloppy likes of asymmetry and behavioral glitches. Yellow could never tolerate the indignity of being served by something that never should have walked out of a Kindegarten.
And yet.
Yellow Diamond gnashes her teeth. Ever one for swift efficacy, she never gave the utility of reject gems so much as a passing thought. Why waste the time on a gem who will never be as strong as a symmetrical one? Train them for centuries, for all the good it will do you—it is an indisputable fact that they will never rise to the standards that their symmetrical counterparts have already set and met.
And yet the results of Homeworld's most recent skirmishes with the rebels cannot be denied. Their fusions are formidable. Their formations can think on their feet and seem to know how to defeat Homeworld's forces before the battle has even begun. How did Pink know they were capable of such things?
Better yet, how is the utility of asymmetrical gems only coming out now?
Pink—no, she doesn't deserve that name anymore, the traitor. Yellow Diamond used to call her sister, and now the shame of that burns on the back of her tongue like acid. This war is about more than simply crushing dissidents into powder to prove that the Diamond Authority can keep order, this is personal. That traitorous pink creature has stolen the keys to their people's future, and spit upon the gems of her sacred family. Yellow Diamond has never had a soft personality, but there will be absolutely no mercy in how publically and violently she will render this little rebellion to nothingness.
She wants to call herself Rose Quartz now? She wants to renounce her given name, her inherent self, every great thing she was destined to be? Fine. That's just fine.
Their latest interrogation subject is a fluorite, of all things. It's been six hours now, and the insolent 4 Mohs creature has weathered every indignity, bribe and pain imaginable with only whimpers. In a fit of frustration over Rose-freaking-Quartz and all of the gems that loved her so much, for no logically discernable reason, Yellow Diamond actually electrocutes the little gem so thoroughly her physical projection ceases to exist. The chair the gem had been strapped in is still sparking and hissing, trails of smoke tracing hazy lines towards the ceiling of the bunker.
This is a waste of her time, isn't it? They've interrogated five different prisoners of war now, from all different strata in the rebels' command structure, and even though Yellow Diamond herself has been here for the last three not a single one of them has broken. At this rate, every asymmetrical waste-of-space gem on this side of the galaxy is going to—
Wait.
"Don' t send this one off just yet," says Yellow Diamond.
The pink-hued topaz pauses, bubbled gem in her hands. "Why?"
"Because there is something I want to try." Yellow barks to a pearl she knows is waiting nearby for her instruction, "Get Blue Diamond on the coms! I need to speak with her about an experiment."
If Rose Quartz can get asymmetrical gems to fuse into powerful soldiers and fight for her, then why shouldn't the Diamond Authority? Of course, there is the issue of loyalty, so it may have to be done involuntarily, but these defective gems should be proud they can serve Homeworld's empire in any capacity, really. It's better than being shattered and recycled, isn't it? Maybe, if Blue does her job and designs the experiment properly, they can find a way to make even stubbornly defective gems more symmetrical. It wouldn't be perfect, of course— nothing can be, when using inherently substandard source material—but it might just offset the overhead costs of making them in the first place, and it could also work as a temporary solution to their glaring lack of new Kindergartens.
And oh, just imagine the look on Rose Quartz' traitorous face when she realizes her very own troops are being used against her.
Yes, Yellow Diamond smiles to herself. Yes, this could work out quite nicely.
Homeworld always makes the best of a bad situation. Always.