Yours and Mine
I can't sleep, and everyone's freaking out about the latest episode, so I'll jump on this crazy train for a bit too. Someone on Tumblr requested fic about how the other Diamonds treat their pearls and who am I to deny them?
….
"Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."
-Jesus Christ, Gospel of Matthew 25: 40
Blue Diamond
Beyond aesthetics, the pearl really has no purpose.
She chose it with a specific idea in mind. An all-blue palette, austere but calm. She had Almandine choose the outfit, she couldn't be bothered with the ins and outs and expensive as she is Almandine knows what the people want to see. Blue knows she'll never be as popular as Pink, but that doesn't mean she can't have any common appeal.
The one task she does set it is to scan the area and upload digital copies for later. Blue can't trust her eyes anymore, not with the crack widening and the patches proving ineffective. The pearl's eyes are covered to match but she doesn't need them, her gem does the work for her.
She doesn't want anyone to see her eyes the way they are now. The other Diamonds are used to it, they all took their bumps during the war and none of them came away from it unscathed. Yellow likes to think it was Blue's 'bump' that makes her act irrationally, but she's a fool and a hundred times more irrational than Blue ever was.
Still...
She hates depending on the pearl, so she ignores it for the most part. It is useful for maintaining her image and for the scans, and beyond that she doesn't interact with it at all. She would be very irritated if anything happened to it, though, and so it never leaves her sight.
…..
White Diamond
White Diamond got a pearl, once, but has no idea where it is now. She supposed she left it in a tracer somewhere and it's been processed.
In actual fact, she put it in a storage pod before she went away for a few cycles and promptly forgot that she had a pearl at all. The pearl was not given any tasks to complete and no protocols to follow beyond "Wait for me to come back" and so she waited in the dark.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
She could hear White Diamond from time to time, moving around her apartment, and thought maybe she would come to collect her, but she didn't. If she'd been another gem, she might have called out to her, but she wasn't and therefore couldn't.
Time ticked on, agonizingly slow, and it got to the point where even the nothing, rare as it was, was a welcome change from the endless stretch of waiting. A curious thing that turned the nothing into something.
Eventually dust collected under her gem setting and sank into the gem itself, rendering her thoughts cloudy and unfocused. In this state she entered a sort of sleep, aware but far away from herself. At this time, she had been in storage for seven orbits and two hundred and fourteen cycles.
…..
Yellow Diamond
Yellow spends much of her existence in a cold rage. Everything seems set against her, she's always at odds with her fellow Diamonds, and the unrest has clear solutions that she's held back from initiating. It's frustrating.
She's quite fond of her pearl, for this reason. It's an uncomplicated creature. It doesn't talk back, (she knows it can't, she's not a halfwit) it just does as its told and does it efficiently. That said, she doesn't have much for it to do, so she mostly has it do small household tasks.
She doesn't flaunt it the way other pearl owners do, she considers that to be horribly vulgar. She has it dressed plainly, indeed she doesn't see why it needs to be clothed at all. It's like dressing a luger or a symphonaria, it might look impressive but it's ultimately pointless.
She has to admit she enjoys watching it go about its work, it has an easy grace that she finds fun to watch. Occasionally a little mischief will take over her composure and she'll trip it to watch it recover, or creep up behind it to surprise it and make it jump. More than once she's prompted it to run into a clear barrier. She doesn't do anything that would damage its gem, and it's very immature, but nobody's around to judge so...
Why shouldn't she drop her stern facade and have a little fun?
…..
Pink Diamond
The pearl was an impulse buy. Emerald, her old friend from the war, had gotten one and she'd admired it. The very next cycle she went out and ordered one. She had it built to her specifics, not really knowing what to choose. That's why she ended up with such a colourful palette.
For the first few cycles, she mostly just showed it off to her friends and the other Diamonds.
"It has all these functions," she cooed, rifling through the brochure. "It can keep your schedule for you, it can run holo-casts, it can record..."
"What are you going to use it for?" White asked her, sounding bored.
"I dunno, stuff," Pink shrugged with a grin.
Mostly she had it for company. It was nice to have someone to talk to that couldn't get bored, or argue, or change the subject. She watched holo-casts with it in the later quadrants. She had fun dressing it up, she must have changed its apparel twenty times in the first orbit before she was satisfied.
She even entertained thoughts of getting together with other pearl owners to see how the pearls would interact, but when she mentioned this to Emerald she got a derisive snort in return.
"What are you, a Chalcedony? They won't do anything," Emerald scoffed, taking a compound mix from her own pearl.
"Who knows what they might do?" Pink pondered, then she was distracted. "Is that a new pearl you have?"
"Yes," Emerald sighed. "Thank goodness for insurance. The last one shattered."
"Again?"
But they talked no more about it, because just then Rose was sent an urgent message. A pearl had mysteriously appeared at a barracks and was acting erratically.