Aqua sat on the beach, the water that she once loved as a fusion now seeming to taunt her. Tears stained her cheeks, and if she needed to breathe, she would be dead by this point, as she'd been holding her breath ever since it happened.
Pearl slowly came up behind her, kneeling on the dry sand beside the defective fellow Pearl. "They wouldn't have wanted this." She said quietly, placing a hand on Aqua's shoulder. The shorter gem tensed, closing her eyes and letting more tears fall.
"Let me see," Pearl said quietly, reaching out for her clenched fist. "Maybe if Steven--" She stopped talking once she pried back Aqua's fingers to reveal the remaining fragments of honey-golden gemstone. "Oh..."
Aqua let out a sob, one that she had been holding in for far too long. She clutched the remains of her shattered soulmate close to her heart shaped gem. "Why couldn't it have been me? Why them...?"
Pearl had no answers for her friend, but knew all too well how she felt. "Aqua, look at me. Please."
She did as Pearl instructed, eyes flowing with tears that could have come from Blue Diamond herself.
"I know how you feel... Probably more than anyone. You live for someone, you think they're the beginning and end of the universe, and you'd risk everything for them... Only to blink and find them just... Gone..." She closed her own eyes, tears of her own building up at the thought of her Rose.
"They make you feel like you're everything..."
"And then they're gone, and you remember what it's like to be nothing." Aqua finished, hugging herself as she trembled. "It's been so long since I've been me a-and not we..." Her heart ached saying this, so deeply that her chest felt pained. "Oh, Pearl... I don't know what I'm going to do without them..."
The former servant gave her friend wide, sympathetic eyes. "I don't know either... But... You're still a crystal gem. You're not alone. You'll never be alone." She offered this as condolence, wrapping her in a tight hug.
She was almost surprised when Aqua clung to her in return, burying her tears into the shoulder of someone like her, unsure of how to live a life without the one she served, the one she loved.