Savage
Apologies for the long wait for this instalment, I'll try not to let it happen again.
Heavy body horror/gore content warning, and upsetting themes. Read at your own risk.
…..
"Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things."
-Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
Rose had once been a formidable force on the battlefield, famed for keeping a calm clear head in all situations.
For all the good it did her now, she might as well have been the lowliest Jade or Jasper grunt. Surveying the ruins of her apartment, knowing she had no-one to call on for assistance, the urge to just sink to the floor and weep was overwhelming.
Emerald. Emerald is behind this.
That wasn't a certainty, but it was a good place to start.
But after taking the luger there, after sitting on her hands and quelling her fury and terror until she reached her old friend's apartment, she was immediately aware that something was amiss there too.
"Emerald?!" she called, pounding on the door. "I need to speak with you now, open the door!"
A low scraping sound could be heard from inside, and so Rose wasted no more time. She manifested her shield, cracked open the lock on the door and forced her way in.
Emerald was there.
She was still recognizable as Emerald, if you knew her well. Something around her eyes, and the gait of her furled limbs. Though they were clawed now, bent at unnatural painful angles, those were her arms, her legs. Her back, split as it was to allow the spine to curl out, and the remnants of her dark green hair in one long prehensile rope.
And at the centre of it all, her gem, splintered and black and oozing.
Corrupted.
The word flickered once through her mind before she raised her shield to ward off the wall of teeth that charged at her. She caught the creature and tossed her hard at the wall, hoping to stun her. But the creature was on its feet again in a single breath and charged her again.
There was no choice she could make; she'd get no answers from Emerald now.
She knocked the beast over its misshapen head to the ground, flipped it over, and in a move that was still well-known to her limbs even long after the zoatox war, she brought down the brim of her shield on its gem, shattering it beyond repair.
There would be time to mourn Emerald later, for all that she was a monster, inside and in her final moments outside too, she had been Rose's friend and ally at one point.
She glanced around the apartment, looking for Emerald's pearl, but she was nowhere to be seen. Emerald had shattered her, or perhaps even eaten her as some corrupted gems had been known to do. But Emerald's holo-forms were still intact, and she had a squadron of Amethysts under her direct orders. The damage done to Rose's apartment matched the kind of damage Amethysts were known for.
Seventh district the holo-form told her. Precinct fourteen.
That's where she'd find Pearl.
…..
The Amethyst stationed at the front smirked insolently at her as she marched in, and she knew she was at the right place.
"You have something of mine," she said, in her most imperious tone. "I want it back immediately."
"I can't allow that, your grace," the Amethyst replied, stretching lazily. "I have orders."
"Emerald is indisposed," Rose told her, because technically that was true. "Her orders are irrelevant, and in any case I outrank her. You know that."
"Emerald didn't give these orders," the Amethyst shrugged. "A Diamond did."
Blue.
"Which Diamond?" Rose hissed, though she already knew.
"I'm not at liberty to say," the Amethyst replied with a crooked smirk. She was enjoying this all too much.
It had been decreed, early on, that orders from a Diamond could be contradicted by another Diamond in cases of concern for National Security. Supposedly it was to stop any one of them from going mad with power and dictating against the needs of the common gem, but in practice it had brought nothing but headaches.
Fine then. If that was how Blue wanted to play it...
"Have you gotten any information from the pearl you seized?" Rose asked, straightening to emphasize how large she was.
"No," the Amethyst replied sullenly, slumping back a little.
"Then by the end of this quadrant you have to release it to the processing plant, and I am within my rights to seize it before transit. So you'll have to release it back to me."
"That's not for another 300 fulsecs," the Amethyst retorted. "Until that time, your grace, it remains property of the interrogating state."
"I can wait," Rose growled.
"Fine," the Amethyst shrugged. "Follow me."
Rose was taken to a small room with a long glass pane overlooking another room. In the room below was where they were holding Pearl. Sitting on an enormous chair that swallowed her up, surrounded by Amethysts on every side, staring blankly at the wall ahead.
It took every little scrap of composure, innate and learned, not to cry out when she saw what they had done to her. The little blue dress they'd chosen together was a shredded, sodden rag. The smooth skin Rose had loved to trace and stroke gently with her fingers and mouth was split and oozing raw nacre. One eye was gone, the socket closed over, and a chunk of her shoulder looked as though it had been ripped out by the teeth of some beast.
But the state of her gem was the most distressing. There was a deep gouge in the centre and long spindly cracks fanned out around it. Little pieces of the gem were already crumbling and falling away as she was just sitting there.
Amethyst was watching her closely, to gauge her reaction. Rose pushed all of her horror and distress down as far as she could and addressed her as imperiously as though the sight of Pearl so destroyed didn't affect her at all.
"For goodness' sake," she grumbled, though she wanted to scream. "What reason could you possibly have had to ruin it like that?"
"Pearls have been acting up recently," the Amethyst replied breezily. "We were given orders to put it under stress conditions."
"And you couldn't have been a little gentler?" Rose shot back.
"We got bored," the Amethyst shrugged with an infuriating smirk. "It's technically public property right now, anything we do is legal."
You will pay for this. I will make you pay.
"I'll be sending the bill to your department if it's not in full working order when I take it away," Rose growled. "I'd grown fond of that pearl."
It was painful to speak of her in this way, but it had to be done. Amethyst would no doubt report back every little twitch and hesitation that betrayed her.
"We're not done yet."
The Amethyst flicked a switch and gestured to her subordinate down in the room. The subordinate waved back, and before Rose's horrified eyes produced a long, heavy blade. She picked up Pearl's arm, it had never looked so small to Rose, and laid it across the blade's edge.
"If you have any information we could use, we could stop this," Amethyst suggested, holding her hand aloft.
I can't. I can't! Please forgive me!
"I don't know what you're referring to," Rose hissed.
Amethyst brought her hand down, and her subordinate in the room below yanked Pearl's arm over the blade. It came away easily, releasing a spray of nacre to coat the floor. Pearl didn't even flinch.
"Why are you doing this? You've damaged it enough!" Rose ground out, holding back the hysteria in her just barely.
"It'll still work with a few parts missing," Amethyst shrugged. "Or maybe you could tell me why you'd like me to stop?"
Rose kept her mouth shut, for Amethyst was scanning her expression looking for a single sign of weakness. She couldn't let her see it.
With an amused sigh, Amethyst brought her hand down again and in the room below Pearl's other arm was taken off, close to the shoulder.
"It's holding on because we ordered it to," Amethyst told her flippantly. "It won't go into its gem to heal until we say it can. How long do you think it can keep this up?"
"I don't know," Rose muttered as her fury boiled ever closer to the surface.
One of the Amethysts below took hold of Pearl's left foot between its forefinger and thumb, swinging it teasingly over the edge of the blade.
"Do you have anything you want to say, my Diamond?"
"I have nothing to say to you," Rose told her, angry and regal. "Just that if this pearl cannot be fixed, a new one will be the very least of what I expect from your commander."
Though the blade took Pearl's foot, Rose did not see it, for her eye was suddenly caught by a little flicker of motion on Pearl's face. She had been still and stoic throughout this wretched excuse for an interrogation, until now. It was minute, just a tiny twitch below her remaining eye, but it magnified Rose's horror a thousandfold.
Pearl had heard her.
Pearl had heard the gem that professed to love her above all others refer to her as 'it.' She had heard Rose dismiss her suffering as an inconvenience to her. She had listened to Rose keep her secrets to save herself.
And she had borne it all with a face as blank as any new pearl on the market. She would never betray Rose, no matter what happened.
"Stop this at once," Rose said breathlessly as the awfulness of what she had done flooded her senses.
"We've still got 150 fulsecs," Amethyst told her with a grin she wanted to punch off of her smug face.
"Release her now or I'll do it myself," Rose growled, manifesting her shield in one smooth motion.
Amethyst looked less sure of herself, but she still shrugged and made no move to release Pearl.
"I have my orders, your grace."
She'd been fairly warned. Amethyst made a token effort to manifest her weapon but she wasn't fast enough. Rose split her mass with a single blow and hammered down on her gem, snapping it in half.
She didn't waste time looking for the door. She broke through the window and landed with an earth-shaking thud in front of the confused squadron. They attempted to fend her off but within a few parsecs they were just gems scattered around the floor.
She tried to meet Pearl's remaining eye, there was so much that needed to be said.
I was trying to protect you,to protect all of us!
I should have been here sooner...
I love you, I would never have said those things if I didn't have to...
But the most important thing to say was the only thing she got to say.
"You can let go now."
Pearl's mass vanished and the disintegrating gem fell into the palm of Rose's hand.
…..
She hurried home, kept a blank facade and spoke to no-one. The door had been fixed while she was away, the broken furniture had been removed. The apartment maintenance personnel were efficient.
In the empty apartment, she sank down in front of the window that Pearl loved to look out of, to gaze out at the stars and find some of that peace that Pearl managed to find out there. But no matter how she tried, the things she had done and the words she had spoken echoed in her head.
She had shattered two gems without trial. She had taken out a squadron of Amethysts that were not a threat to her. And for what?
Pearl's gem crumbled in her hands at the slightest touch. By the dawn of the next cycle, there would be nothing left but a handful of dust. Her stalwart companion, lover, the only solace she had found in the turmoil, would be gone forever.
The tears flooded her vision and she let them fall, made no effort to wipe them away or stop them. She deserved them. She deserved to suffer. If she cried out her entire mass, it would be no less than she deserved.
But as they fell on Pearl's gem, she at last worked to clear her vision, to survey what further harm she had done to Pearl.
The gouge was gone.
The gem had filled in the centre, smoothed over and as lustrous as it had ever been. The cracks were disappearing. Even sections that had broken off and crumbled were restored. In a single fulsec, Rose was holding what might have been a newly-emerged gem.
Foolish as it was to hope, she felt hope bloom inside her mass. Healing tears was a myth from long ago that only very old gems still remembered, but Diamond Core herself had believed it to be possible.
And if Pearl could be restored, there was hope.