Song: It's Over, Isn't It

She is alone.

Not that Pearl has been particularly present for the past few weeks. Garnet and Amethyst have chosen to leave her in peace, though that hasn't proved to be particularly peaceful, either. Like a phantom, she flits around the temple to organize the bubbles for the umpteenth time, or go on the occasional mission to capture corrupted gems, or prepare slimy organic mush for the… baby.

The baby.

She appreciates the distractions; she would fall apart without them. Absolutely unravel. The moments of solitude in her room are the worst, with nothing but the running water and her holograms for company. She hates how she now knows the words to hundreds of their conversations, and not even the happy ones. Even the ones that she herself had let slip through the flow of millennia into the remote recesses of her mind, she now dredges them up, so she can savor them and all the pain they bring.

Amethyst's attempts at cheerfulness ring hollow, as does Garnet's somber composedness in her effort to keep the group together. Thankfully, Greg manages to restrain his pathetic sniffling around her. But pain, and hurt… those are the emotions that feel real to Pearl, to the point where they obliterate all else.

Unfortunately, nothing can distract her from the wailing child across the room.

With an unreadable expression, Pearl remains seated on the steps of the warp pad and observes it thrashing in its crib. She remembers how she cried out like she'd been zapped by a destabilizer and pleaded for Garnet or Amethyst to trade places with her. They didn't need Sugilite to cave in sections of the Kindergarten infested with corrupted gems, she reasoned. But nobody listened. And of course, Greg just had to go into to town for some "charity" concert, as though he achieved anything close to music when he played that that battered excuse for a musical instrument to begin with. The more charitable thing to do would be to pry the guitar from his hands and hurl it into the ocean, Pearl reasoned. Still, as a favor to Greg, she was the one who ended up stuck – burdened – punished – with the baby.

Pearl knows she is scared. She doesn't trust herself with this baby, this thing that is both the gem she loves and the result of her indefinite departure. An insult to her, really, when Pearl thinks about it. Rose Quartz was beautiful, poised, insightful, an inspiration. She didn't deserve to be reduced to this filthy, irritating, disgraceful thing that was now even emitting a terrible odor.

Pearl has already resolved to not venture near the crib, so without even thinking, she takes out her spear and idly practices spinning it in one hand. Her shoulders imperceptibly ease up as her body relaxes. She likes having a weapon, how it feels in her slender hands. Pearls aren't typically given weapons at all, and as she runs her fingers along its blade, she proudly remembers how many times she had been given the opportunity to put it to good use. She can close her eyes and remember the whirlwind of flashing lights and glinting metal, the ever-present tension coiling in her lithe yet powerful frame, the spike of adrenaline that allowed her to overcome the resistance of a gem's facets that yielded to her blade….

A particularly high-pitched wail breaks Pearl's concentration, and the spear clatters to the ground. Greg's smelly dufflebag filled with baby products cushions its fall, at least until Pearl kicks the bag away from her. As if she would ever take delight in feeding it organic mush or cleaning its putrid waste.

The chill autumn breeze that snakes its way through the wooden frame of the add-on house doesn't faze Pearl, but Steven cries out with renewed energy as he squirms to nestle himself in the blankets. Pearl shakes her head, puts down the spear, and in a few quick, fluid strides, she stands over the crib, adorned with a stupid mobile of stars and planets that Pearl will never travel to, not now, not ever again.

Pearl stares unflinchingly at the nearest wall as her thin hands fumble with picking up Steven. She remembers seeing Garnet swoop in and scoop him up in one motion, but instead, her awkward and gangly arms wrap around him gingerly, scared to touch him more than what is necessary to prevent him from tumbling to the ground and… poofing? Is he capable of it, of changing his form? Perhaps it's the only way for him to grow, by coming back not in the form of a slobbering child but in the form of a human adult, a woman maybe, with curly pink hair and eyes that could destroy her with a single look….

And just like that, the whole world falls away, leaving Pearl with nothing but the ringing in her ears from some long-gone battle, an all-consuming sense of coldness, and a baby in her weak arms.

The Battle of Facet Five. The Great Ruby Siege. The Topaz Counterstrike, the Fight for the Prime Kindergarten, the Assault on Great Oceans, the Battle for the Ziggurat, the Amethysts' Awakening, the March of Ten Thousand Agates, the Rose's Last Stand, the Day of the Diamonds' Fury. The Renegade Pearl had been present for them all, and more. Some of those fights had taken months. Years, even.

In the end, it was all for this.

The wild, insane urge to hurl the baby to the crystalline ground and put an end to it all flares in Pearl's heart for a fraction of a second, only to depart just as swiftly, with only a crushing melancholy to take its place.

It can't be over, not like this. This is not how it was supposed to end! I'm still here, I can prove myself to you, I can let us be together, I—!

Pearl opens her mouth, and a loud wail issues forth, reverberating off the antechamber of the temple. Her cheeks are the first to feel the flow of dampness that runs down her chin and neck. Pearl hasn't cried since losing Rose, but now that's she's begun, there's no stopping it. Minutes pass, and Pearl's voice continues to cry out, raw and pained and utterly alone.

Wait…

At some point, Steven's wailing had subsided without Pearl realizing, and he looks up at Pearl with big brown eyes, teardrops clinging to his eyelashes. There's nothing but bewilderment – or is it concern? Real, loving concern? – written on his face, but a maelstrom of rage and resentment consumes Pearl, contorting her features. Soon enough, tears start pouring out his eyes again, and Pearl wonders what right he has to cry, when he's the one who gained life at the expense of the most glorious, spellbinding, divine being this universe had to offer.

The two can't begin to compare, Pearl insists, overcome by the injustice of it all. A resemblance of facial features, a similar glint of wonder in their eyes, an oh-so-familiar laughter that bubbles to the surface, but it's not enough to replace what she's lost. How could she be content with this?

Pearl bows her head. "She's gone," she whispers. "She's gone, she's gone, she's gone…."

A flock of seagulls soars above the last few peaks of melting snow dotted across the otherwise deserted beach below the cliff face. Besides their calls, the beach is silent as Pearl and Steven cry. Pearl can't imagine how gross she must look as she sniffles, but she continues anyway. And as she cries, the tension in arms — so familiar after thousands of years wielding swords and spears — falls away. She breathes — a sharp, shuddering gasp for air that hurts her chest — then breathes again.

A weight is lifted.

She looks down at Steven, still crying with all the strength his tiny lungs can muster, to the point of being too exhausted to flail around in Pearl's arms. They cried together, she realizes.

Greg cried. Amethyst and Garnet cried. But none of them had cried with her, in the uncontrollable, gut-wrenching, real way that gives voice to all the pain and all the hurt she carries with her. Except for Steven. Steven had let her cry in the way she needed to cry after losing her Rose, her Diamond.

He's lost someone, too, you know, a gentle voice reminds Pearl. He's lost his mother.

Even with the mucus clogging her nose as her tears subside, she can smell the odor coming from Steven. She takes a moment to collect herself before she stands and walks towards the dufflebag. Kneeling down, she opens it to find it filled to the brim with formula bottles, blankets, extra clothes, toys, diapers, and a folded piece of paper.

Pearl holds Steven close to her chest so that she can reach in and take out the paper. Her puffy blue eyes dart across the list of Greg's handwritten instructions, which even include a few crudely drawn diagrams. She wrinkles her nose at his parting wish for good luck, though as she furrows her brow and rereads the page once, then twice, then three times, she realizes that she'll need it.

Rose should be here, not me, Pearl thinks. I'm not cut out for this.

But she's not here. You are. You've got to be.

Pearl wonders what an amazing mother Rose would have been. Rose would have been enraptured by the whole affair, treasuring every part of Greg's list as a new revelation into the nature of human beings. But Pearl wasn't Rose, with her nurturing, gracious spirit. Pearl was a pearl. A clever one, admittedly, but a pearl nevertheless. She didn't know how to be a mother.

Nevertheless, Pearl realizes as she clutches the paper in her hand, she did know how to take orders.

"Take care of him, Pearl."

Hopefully, someday, Pearl would learn to like them.