"fit in here, in my palm, in my shadow, don't be bigger than my idea of you, don't be more beautiful than i can accept, don't be more human than i am willing to allow you to be and be quiet, you're too loud, even your un-belonging is loud. quiet your dreams, your voice, your hair, quiet your skin, quiet your displacement, quiet your longing, your colour, quiet your walk, your eyes. who said you could look at me like that? who said you could exist without permission? why are you even here? why aren't you shrinking? i think of you often. you vibrate. you walk into a room and the temperature changes. i lean in and almost recognise you as human. but, no. we can't have that."
― Warsan Shire
so this isn't as compliant with "mr greg" as i'd like it to be since it was written before that episode's release, but i think there are important elements there
"Deep down, you know
You weren't built for fighting,
But that doesn't mean
You're not prepared to try."
- Do it for Her, Sworn to the Sword (s02e06)
Her enemies call her Rose's tool, her aesthetic object which she turned functional through sheer force of will. Something which was supposed to be beautiful turned terrible. They credit her with nothing. All of the destruction she brings on the battlefield isn't hers, just Rose's by proxy.
Pearl forgets how to exist and then she remembers.
"Pearl." She breathes, late at night. Alone. "Me."
Pearl steps out of the hole in the gem farm with perfect poise and elegance. The overseer congratulates her on the delicate stance and polite, effeminate (and submissive and servile and-) manner of speech. Her reply is nothing if not courteous; humble, obedient. One day she will find indentations in the ground rock, careless half-graves filled with shards of pearls who weren't perfect, didn't share her beautiful stature, forced to fuse.
Later she suspects that she should have been among them (defective; outlier; free ) but at this stage she passively follows the training as dictated, as she was programmed to do. There are months of carefully memorized etiquette - did you know that there are eleven separate resting stances depending on formality and your charge's mood? She excels at it and takes great pride in her effortless grace.
Saying some of the training hurts would be a lie: all of it hurts. Her brain is new and she's had no time to adjust to this shimmering world which demands so much of her. Gem shattering is never explained to the bewildered recruits, but they know that they have to succeed so they don't become like the pearls who are taken off and never come back. It's a muddled assumption that never quite feels rational or validated, not in the face of the assertive ever-knowing instructors, and so each pearl begins to take the blame upon herself.
They stand in line and regenerate and regenerate and regenerate until they're pretty enough. Someone snaps once and comes back all teeth and claws and bitter, bitter rage and they're beaten into the ground. Never seen again. Of everything that happens to her, that is the most physical, and that is the one that makes Rose Quartz gently take her hand. The rest of it seems too subtle, never quite enough to justify the emotional responses she will have.
Sometimes she will wish it was worse so she could make others understand the damage that was done here.
There's one time, right near the end, when one of her peers trips or forgets a posture (does it matter which) and the instructor puts their face right up against hers and tells her in a calm, level voice that she just did the worst thing possible: inconvenienced someone. Pearl thinks about personhood.
She learns many things in the school, but most of all the words whispered to her by a fellow Pearl when they're in the dark room they're stored in between training: We do as we're told and we don't speak because we are less than other gems, we are aesthetic objects.
Pearl buries this mantra into her mind like a knife and then spends the next millennium trying to rip it back out.
Pearl's first assignment isn't Rose Quartz. White Diamond holds power so firmly she has no need to exert it. She doesn't even reprimand most of her followers, just gives them a weighted gaze they've all been programmed to find intolerable. Once, the force of it makes a gem lose their form.
With Pearl it's all prods about her worthlessness, how her and everything only exist in context with the diamond. The way White Diamond talks you would expect her to be the centre of the universe. She looks at the stars trace their way across the sky. We do as we are told. Pearl stands next to her like a lamp, body pole-thin and head bloated with exhaustion. Every now and then she picks up some paperwork and signs it in her careful cursive handwriting. Only when prompted, of course. We don't speak because we are less.
Whenever Pearl stumbles or makes a mistake White Diamond threatens her with destruction. She's destroyed pearls before (how else did Pearl get this job?) but mostly she locks her in a dark room for extensive periods of time, makes her run on a treadmill for days on end. It's not enough to feel like abuse. Pearl stumbles out each time aching and unable to project blame outwards. Objects can't cast blame.
White Diamond teaches Pearl resilience and cruelty. She teaches Pearl hatred and doubt and the necessity of lying for self-preservation. Most of all she teaches Pearl that no one is bound to respect an object.
Pearl doesn't understand how to fight it yet. She sees no end to the unpleasantness ahead.
There comes a point where White Diamond exchanges her for the new model and she spends weeks thinking they're her last, until someone decides to buy her.
Rose is huge and kind and exudes the kind of easy, free love that is enough to make anyone comfortable. The generosity pushes the doubt forward and begins to erode at her pre-installed walls.
Whoever programmed Pearl (probably a self-important peridot) wasn't flawless in her construction. The directives in her head go to war before Rose's rebellion, before they're stretched and bent like hammered metal, before something eventually snaps. It hurts because Rose gives her commands (suggestions? they are delivered so uncertainly that they are impenetrable to her; slide off her cranium like bricks) which not only contradict everything she's ever known but also demonstrate a lack of value for Pearl's skills.
It makes her angry in the very early days - she will only realize that centuries into the future - that Rose can't appreciate her complex etiquette and calculated poise. She's good at it. She was the best and works works works to maintain the highest standard as a mark of her respect for Rose, so while maintaining an uncomfortable position which places most of her weight on one toe her employer/extension/home tells her to "relax". It's like Pearl isn't good enough or Rose doesn't think she can manage it.
And so the command ELEGANCE which is buried into her muscles clashes with OBEY and although they both remain unscathed something dies. She feels sick.
Pearls aren't made to last. She should be replaced or upgraded or reconditioned once every hundred years, it's part of the manual she memorized to deliver to her user. Rose gently acknowledges the reminder then refuses.
"I'll become faulty." Pearl protests, horrified and excited at the thought.
Rose leans over and touches Pearl's arm. "I like you just the way you are."
This is how she first overcomes the conditioning: slowly and with patient agony.
She's interested in machines since she considers herself to be one, always has been, maybe would do something with it if she wasn't just an aesthetic object. Since her job mainly requires the mental capacity of a pleasant artwork Pearl spends hours observing how to run machines and taking them apart in her head. Rose notices. Surprises her with documentation on engineering for her to read in her free time.
It's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for her.
She lies back in her bed and imagines deconstructing the ship around her and watching the objects float free in space. Thinks about how the chairs and control panels were made and how easy it would be to take them apart. Imagines unravelling herself so she could be more easily stored, perhaps cycled in and out with other models of Pearl depending on the fashion.
The thought that anyone would want to hear the ideas of a pearl makes her titter quietly to herself.
When Rose gives her some notepaper (Rose gives her all sorts of things; flowers from the worlds they conquer and tools and handfuls of earth – Pearl can't understand it) she designs a small box for keeping pearls in when they're not in use. Looks at it blankly, glassy-eyed. Starts shuddering and tears it up. Eats the remains so no one will know they ever existed.
History rewrites her. Rose rewrites her.
The further away something is the smaller it seems. From Rose's latest assignment (they call it Earth), Homeworld is microscopic. Invisible. It ceases to exist next to the closer stars; outshone by the single moon's second-hand light; dwarfed by the grains of sand stuck under her shoes.
In her memory, Homeworld looms over her gentle existence: an immeasurable slavering beast. Any day now Rose should send her back for maintenance or get a new model. She is long overdue.
She is not allowed to dislike the regimented machine which produced her. She is not allowed to talk about the ways though which Homeworld othered her; reduced her to an aesthetic and ultimately functionless tool except for in factual, predefined terms. She wants to try. Rose will let her try. But she's not ready, not yet.
She is allowed to feel the nausea of the dissonance between appearances and reality. She is sick at heart and she smiles ( ELEGANCE ). The inner grief, disorientation, this is what defines her. This small, aching, patch of identity.
Every inch Pearl reclaims feels used and costs her something indefinable, something Rose has never had to lose.
Brick by brick, she builds something new.
"What they did to me… it was wrong." Pearl's testing. Waiting to be contradicted. Her shoulders are hunched. Her voice is tainted by disbelief because she's still so new to all of this: talking about herself like she's a person.
"You're not wrong. You're wonderful, it doesn't matter how you were made." Rose Quartz hums, infuriatingly content.
It matters to me. "But what they did. When they… they made me like this. It was wrong."
"We've all been raised in roles by Homeworld and forced onto narrow paths. The system isn't fair to anyone, it's wrong to us all."
Pearl thinks about being forced to regenerate her form several times a day for years in order to reach the stage where she's easy on other gem's eyes. She thinks about how she still does all of her predefined ornamental and secretarial work because she just knows more about it. It's easier, they both agree.
She doesn't know why Rose's response makes her feel so small. Her roots shouldn't get to her like this.
"Are you crying?"
ELEGANCE -
"I'm sorry." Pearl says helplessly, sinking to her knees in the learned apology posture. "I'm so sorry."
This house of cards Pearl has been constructing whilst Rose furiously engages in politics – she wants to defend a world (Pearl will come to see their colonization as wrong, but she will never find what made Earth different; she will mourn every other planet Homeworld tore apart just as deeply) – is centred around Rose. She's attempting something no one has ever done before and she needs Rose's validation, even if Rose will never truly understand what Pearl has undertaken. And Rose – Rose gives her orders which make breaking others so much easier.OBEY is written into her on the deepest level, it underpins and trumps the others.
Rose helps Pearl as much as she can with same soft compassion that she gives everyone.
At first something in her demands revolution, that Rose is beyond all else just another overlord, but what was born synthetically between them becomes something organic and grows. Rose's kindness goes beyond her purpose and fails to achieve anything concrete at all. It reaches beyond these paths they were bred to march along.
She won't realize that she's in love for years to come. She's so unused to having feelings of her own.
It's easier with Rose in these days. The servant/master bond runs too deeply for Rose to wholly ignore, and there are so many tiny and painful wounds Rose inflicts without meaning to, but compared to other things Pearl has endured they do not amount to much.
Pearl wants initiative and control. She receives it second-hand from Rose.
It's so difficult for them both. Nothing about her rehabilitation is fair.
She leaves Homeworld behind permanently and makes a home out of Rose.
War comes. Pearl saw it coming despite her best attempts at optimism ( BE POSITIVE! – the most disingenuous command). It's the first time she's seen Rose Quartz denied something.
The planet seems like a petty and arbitrary and confusing place to become a mass grave, for gems on both sides. Pearl will only understand it once Rose has passed. She spends years thinking that Rose wants dominance, refuses to be denied anything. Most of the others on their side die before they even understand what they're fighting for.
Sometimes Pearl thinks that if Rose pointed her finger at a cliff and said "jump" and enough gems heard she could be responsible for genocide.
On the battlefield Pearl fights so viciously that she teaches them to fear her.
She sacrifices herself for Rose time and again and Rose doesn't stop her.
On Homeworld:
"They say Rose Quartz's Pearl fights alongside her with some kind of spear." A Ruby tells her peers.
A Jasper laughs. "Pearls can't fight. Whatever it's doing, it's just obeying what Rose Quartz tells her."
A Peridot shakes her head. "It's not biologically possible. Pearls can't fight or think just like you and I can't do ballet or chores. I think you're wrong about that news, Ruby."
Another Peridot: "She shouldn't be encouraging her to deny its biology. Pearls should just stand around and look pretty. Rose Quartz is corrupting it."
They fuse for the first time.
Pearl understands Rose: guilt; compassion; entitlement. Power and the desire to do good. The inherent feeling that she can do nothing but good.
Rose understands Pearl: ambition raging against the constraints placed inside her mind. The desperate fight to call something, anything, her own.
And, more than anything else, they fall in love.
Like Pearl needed Rose to tell her not to OBEY, they need Garnet to teach them how to love. They never reach anything as perfect as what Ruby and Sapphire made. Our love is different, not less, Rose tells anyone who will listen. Pearl wants to laugh. Rose has never known anything less.
She thinks that maybe, maybe if she was just strong enough to overcome the conditioning they could make something better between them.
Three gems defect from their cause after they first fight woven together. Their foes say Rose is tainted and Pearl defective. Defective is a label Pearl can (ironically) get behind. She's thrilled by the impression she's making (different! her mind screams, a troublemaker! inelegant! disobedient!) but Rose grows heavier as gems align themselves against her for the first time. Rose learns to doubt.
Leaving Homeworld freed Pearl, but something in Rose broke when they broke away. That dead thing lies between them. No, they don't have what Ruby and Sapphire do.
Homeworld give up.
It's abandonment. Isolation, not victory. Sometimes she doesn't feel like they won at all. Especially not with all the dead, their remains mysteriously absent except for the memories haunting them all. Without the stress Garnet stays whole for years at a time, easily comfortable. In the face of that Rose and Pearl's relationship seems casual, almost semi-platonic. They each fuse with Garnet, on occasion.
Then Amethyst arrives.
She's a breath of fresh air because she looks nothing like the Amethysts they faced or fought with in battle; she's so small and totters around with no message or conditioning or purpose. Amethyst is free. More than that - she's a gem without a trace Homeworld.
Rose and Garnet (for all their kindness) still see her through the scratched lens of her genesis. She's a servant. For the humans she's an alien. But to Amethyst she's equal. That's why Pearl can get angry with her: no ingrained fear of repercussions.
They pretend to hate each other and banter furiously whilst Rose tries to understand what they have. She can't. That, most of all, makes Pearl feel independent. This is something she can have for herself.
Rose's downwards spiral begins with the realisation that she's stuck on Earth forever with the weight of three crystal gems looking to her for meaning and guidance. It ends with a concert on a beach.
Rose's murderer plays guitar and sings short, unremarkable songs. Maybe it's his impermanence that draws Rose, his volatility or vulnerability. Without Homeworld around the rest of them aren't going anywhere. They all think it will be a fling. Something short-lived and platonic.
"Are you happy for me?" Rose asks her, glowing with the aftermath of Greg's kiss.
She can't really answer that in a way which will make either of them happy so she doesn't. She doesn't talk often these days.
They all tell Rose to live. To turn away from the parasite killing her. She's ended so many gems directly and indirectly, what is this by comparison. What is anything but another war.
Rose has never listened to anyone, but it still surprises Pearl when she chooses the unborn thing over everything they built together, the planet they saved.
After Rose is gone (dead, dead she refuses to think and yet the thought rises in her mind like the inevitable tide) she reads about humans to prepare herself for the warm wriggling thing - the fresh flesh encircling Rose's corpse. Decay is so rancid here with the flies and the rot and the indignity ( ELEGANCE - her mind screams) so it shouldn't be a surprise that Rose is not spared it.
Her first step is reading up on human infant behaviour and conditioning. Unlike herself they do not come pre-installed, instead you have to painstakingly manually input basic survival data over a period of decades. It's too depressing: she becomes tired and decides to investigate terran technology.
As always the intricacies of machines strip away her emotion and self-doubt. Physical enough to distract her into semi-unconsciousness; far removed enough from Homeworld that she is entirely her own; complex enough to ground her. That is, until she comes across an article that's more philosophy than computer science and it has only been weeks since Rose's death, of course she's still half-mad with grief, so she takes its message to heart.
Artificial intelligence, she reads, begins with obeying a series of commands. Over time the machine learns how to imitate emotion and even appear to break its programming from exposure to real people and experiences. However, this author argues, this is not the same as sapience. All 'humanity' - othering, some buried part of Pearl screams whilst the rest of her doesn't even know what that word means - is ultimately projected by the observer and can be attributed to confirmation bias and wishful thinking.
She thinks she feels crushed, but she relates to much to the inhuman presence the article describes to admit to feeling at all. Rose ordered her here by pulling on her puppet strings to create a façade of intelligence and now that she's gone Pearl is so much less. Amethyst is angry and just beginning, Garnet is made of love eternal, and here Pearl is missing her better half feeling very, very old. She aches from the loss of Rose and loss of self. Feels like a crack in her gem.
She wants to cry but ELEGANCE will not permit it and there's hardly any point in fighting it when Rose isn't here telling her to.
Rose will never command her again. She cannot-
OBEY splinters and breaks in her mind. The blast radius is devastating, sharp shards of implanted order impale the other commands and whatever remains of her self is reduced to an absence of the influence of others. Abyssal. She clutches at her head in pain, doubling over and screaming, as something new (angry betrayed) forms itself from her broken neurons.
The nascent consciousness rises, the loss dulled but omnipresent, and Pearl straightens her spine for the first time in her life free. The shards of conflicting commands and Rose's legacy are erased, in their place a gentle nostalgia which is entirely bearable. All feeling for Homeworld sinks into the mire with her uncomfortable etiquette and servile purpose.
She looks straight ahead and speaks a truth which has been pulling on her chains for a long time:
"Homeworld is populated by oppressive clods."
It feels good, honest and unprompted, so unlike the pretence they drilled into her. No aesthetic object hurls insults at the observer. Premeditated inconvenience. She's been getting in Homeworld's way for years, and now Rose is gone it finally feels like it's on her own terms.
Amethyst steps behind her, almost startling Pearl. "Glad you finally worked that out, you only fought a war for it."
She thinks the war she really fought is very different from the one Amethyst means. Maybe it's over now; she's finally reached an uneasy truce with her past.
Pearl smiles.