Her world was flying away in an alien saucer and the universe was abandoning her.
He's gone.
She wasn't strong enough to do anything. She was powerless. He wasn't.
He left you.
He went with the most Steven solution ever without even thinking about himself that...that...jerk…
Who saved the world.
Like he always does because he puts all the weight of it on his shoulders when if he would just...if he had just talked to her, if she had just…
You weren't worth enough to make him stay.
She had lost him. Homeworld had taken him. She would never get to go to their first dance together, or see him grow up, or hold hands next to a campfire, or -
Tell him you love him.
Connie's eyes darted away from the waters below her, its surface darkening under the fading light of the sunset. She needed some solace, anything, anyone to distract her from her own destructive thoughts, to hold her, she wanted her mom, she needed-
They all looked as broken as she was.
All of them were frozen in place, their bodies slack and helpless against the gentle push and pull of the water. The humans were baffled, confused, unable to fully comprehend what had just happened. They had never seen the real scope of the war.
Suddenly, there was a flash of light before her. She laid her eyes on who she knew to be Ruby and Sapphire for the first time.
"HOW COULD HE JUST-" the water steamed and boiled around Ruby, arms crossed and shaking with unbridled fury.
Sapphire came upon her, holding Ruby close, a flowing ring of ice around the blue gem as they collided, balancing one another but too lost to fuse.
Like he had been.
Amethyst moved her lips rapidly, muttering something Connie couldn't hope to hear. Her face stared down into the water and she started to sink lower until she was fully submerged, beyond Connie's vision.
Pearl was breaking apart. Her master was quivering, hands never leaving her face as her eyes stared wide out into the sky, as if hoping the ship might re-appear on the horizon. Connie had hoped she might find comfort in the motherly figure but could see there was none.
With nothing else to turn too, she acknowledged the weight in her hand. His mother's…his sword, heavy beneath the water, grasped firmly in her fingertips. She had not been able to cut down the enemy before her. She wasn't good enough. She had failed the legacy the blade represented.
She lifted it up, holding it as the water poured down the rose metal. She saw her own despair reflected in the blade, eyes washed out and red with tears and salt water. The reflection of a failure. A meek, human girl who thought she could fight aliens and protect the Earth. That she could be like the heroes of her storybooks, fighting bravely against the forces of tyrannical evil until reaching a happy ending.
But war wasn't a sensible narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. War was unrelenting, chaotic, sudden, and brutal. This pain...
She thought she was ready. She had no idea. She couldn't protect him. She was a failure.
Connie closed her eyes on her reflection — on the dead-eyed, naive human girl who was gone forever.
She wanted to crawl into a ball and weep. A part of her wished she could just go back to being that human girl, with no friends, sad because she wasn't understood.
That had hurt. But this was unbearable.
But she had signed up for this. Signed away her life knowing she might die trying to protect the people she loved. Steven had shown her the error of her unrelenting devotion to the idea, but it was a step she was still prepared to make.
It was supposed to be a step we could make together.
With that, she knew there was only one path before her now. That little girl in the reflection was dead. She could not turn back the clock. There was only one thing, one cause she could make that would allow her to keep moving forward.
"How are we going to get him back?"
That was quite the bomb. I couldn't not write this. Immediately.
Of course, I went down this road with the Seven Trials of Connie Maheshwaran. I didn't think the premise of that fic (Steven gets captured by Homeworld and how the rest of our heroes deal with it) would actually happen. Something we're probably not seeing much of in the show since it's all from Steven's perspective unless something crazy happens with the format.
Feel free to give that a read if you need something to tide you over and want to explore more of how the gems would feel in such a situation. Consider this a quasi-spinoff of that.
I have something lighter planned to make up for this coming soon after all the slack-jacked gasps and collective fandom angst is over. I promise it will be less miserable.
As well, please leave a review if you enjoyed this fic. They mean more to me than you can imagine. =)