And here's chapter one :D

Thanks again to rana2001 for beta reading!

The ground was hard under him. Hard and cold, and his whole body was stiff.

Where was he? He could have sworn he'd been on his feet when he'd followed Garnet through the door, but now it felt like he was sitting. What had happened? Had he hit his head and passed out?

Woozily, he lifted his hand and pressed it to his forehead, then ran it through his hair, feeling for bumps or bruises. There were none.

He was noticing, though, that the blackness was not absolute. It was more of a dull reddish pink color, uneven and dulled.

He'd forgotten to open his eyes. Mostly because he hadn't thought they were closed, but still.

He blinked them open, which was more difficult than he thought it would be. His eyes felt caked shut with sleep gunk, like that one time he'd slept until noon but a hundred times worse.

Even after rubbing at his eyes a few times to rid them of the gunk, he still couldn't make sense of what he was seeing.

It wasn't pitch black, for starters, and it didn't look like anywhere in the temple, or even any of the Gem places on Earth he'd seen. If he had to compare it to something, it was closest to Peridot's ship, the one they'd been briefly imprisoned in.

These walls weren't green, though; they were grey, dark and uniform and depressing. They weren't shiny, either, but gritty in a fine way, like the linoleum floor in the Big Donut when Lars forgot to sweep it.

Steven looked over his shoulder and saw a smooth, seamless wall that neatly bent into corners on either side of him. No sign of the door he'd walked through. No sign of Garnet, either.

Was he here all alone?

Before the thought could start to truly terrify him, he heard voices, and familiar ones at that. Amethyst's voice, angry, and Pearl's voice, defeated, and Garnet's voice, sounding so totally sad that Steven wondered for an instant if someone had died, because what else besides being forced to unfuse could make Garnet sound so lost, so helpless?

"Guys?" he tried to ask, but his voice was weak and croaky for some reason. He swallowed a couple times, trying to get moisture into his throat, and tried again.

"Guys?"

That time, his voice came out more or less normal, and the Gems fell silent. It only lasted a moment, and then Steven could make out their panicked, frantic whispering.

The longer he listened to them, the more certain he grew of where they were: somewhere to his right, past the short wall defining the nook he was sitting in, close.

Shaky for some reason he wasn't really sure of, Steven pushed himself to his feet and walked around the corner.

He found the Gems right where he expected them, but was still shocked.

The Gems sitting on the floor in front of him were the same ones he'd grown up with, he was pretty sure. Still, there was something different about them, something more than the way they looked (and when had Amethyst's hair been that short, or Pearl been wearing something without even one flowing or decorative element to it?). It was in their faces, in their haunted eyes and slumped shoulders.

And when they saw Steven, they might as well have seen him dead judging by the way their faces grew even sadder, even more hopeless.

"Steven," Pearl said, her voice tiny and small. Garnet wiped a tear out from under her visor with a balled fist and cold fury.

"I told you we should have waited," she said to the other Gems. "None of us were ready for this, Steven least of all."

"Guys, what's going on?" Steven asked. "Where are we? What happened?"

Pearl buried her face in her hands, and from the muffled noises she was making, Steven knew she was crying.

Amethyst tilted her head up to look directly into Steven's eyes, and her own looked utterly exhausted as she patted the ground, indicating he should sit.

Steven sunk to the ground, wincing against the hard, cold surface but glad to be off his feet. His whole body felt oddly sore, like he'd slept wrong on his everything. It was starting to wear off, but it did feel a bit better to be sitting.

Steven stretched his legs out in front of him instead of curling them in and felt his oddly pristine flip-flops squelch against the floor. The pose felt too casual for the situation, but he didn't know what the right one was when his legs felt like they'd fall off before curling in close to his body.

With Pearl sobbing into her hands and Garnet as distraught as she could get, the burden of explaining fell to Amethyst, and Steven could tell she was struggling to string the right words together.

"Steven, we, uh, we've kind of been hiding something from you. Something very big, for a very long time . . ."

She trailed off and decided to restart from a different point.

"Homeworld collected the fallen Gems from the battlefield, Steven. The whole ones, the ones shattered beyond repair, rebels and Homeworld soldiers alike. The rebels were enemies and their soldiers had failed them, so for the most part they were treated the same."

"Pearl told me," Steven offered, his voice soft to match Amethyst's. "Well, most of it, anyway." Pearl hadn't told him about the Homeworld soldiers being collected, too, though it kind of made sense now that Amethyst explained losing the battle as failure.

"Well, they thought the Gems could still be useful, even though they'd rebelled or failed to carry out orders." Amethyst swallowed hard.

"They used the shards in experiments, like the cluster experiment, and for . . . well, other things, too. And the whole ones . . ."

Amethyst didn't seem to know where to go, so Steven tried to get her back on track.

"They tried to get them working for Homeworld again?" he offered.

Garnet barked out a laugh that was tinged with sadness.

"Not exactly," Amethyst said. "There's a lot of things we never told you, Steven, because we were waiting for you to be old enough to understand. And one of them is, well . . ."

"Gem tech is powered by Gems," Pearl said. She sounded drained. Sometime while Amethyst had been talking, she'd stopped crying, and now she looked exhausted in every sense of the word. "Once their physical bodies have been, well, 'poofed', Homeworld embeds them in technology and makes them power it."

"Gems like—like you guys?" Steven asked, his voice frantic. The old Gem ship, and the traps and everything, Peridot's ship, all powered by Gems? Gems trapped inside objects, helpless and mindless, like Lapis was supposed to be? "Is that what happened to Lapis?"

"Kind of," Amethyst answered. "That's the closest thing you've ever experienced, anyway.

"Homeworld uses defective or resistant Gems for their energy alone, to power everything on Homeworld, every machine there. They brainwashed all the Gems on the planet to make them think it was okay, to make them think that those who weren't efficient and obedient deserved their punishment," she continued.

"That's what they did to the Gems from the battlefield," Garnet said, her voice cold, attempting to hide her sadness behind her usual calm demeanor.

"Your mother and the others managed to avoid being picked up by Homeworld," Amethyst said. "They made a decoy of Rose's gem so that Homeworld wouldn't go looking for her and they ran.

"They came through the Kindergarten at one point, after I was made, and they took me with them. They'd managed to fool Homeworld well enough, for long enough, that they didn't think anyone from Homeworld would try to find them again."

"And then there was Greg," Pearl said.

"Your mother fell in love with him, Steven," Garnet said. "She loved everything on Earth, but she loved him in a way she'd never seemed to love anything else before."

"And then you came along, and Rose had to give up her physical form," Amethyst almost whispered.

"Her energy couldn't be entirely contained in an organic form, even though you were half-Gem. Some of it had to be released when her physical form dissolved, or you would have been destroyed by it as soon as you came into existence," Garnet said.

"Some of it went back into Rose's gem to stay dormant until you could control it," Pearl said. "Some of it made up you. The rest was dispersed. A handful of Gem places on Earth absorbed some of it, but the rest of it made its way off the planet, and kept traveling out through space until it reached the sensors of a Homeworld ship patrolling the same general area as your solar system."

"After that, they knew there were still Gems on Earth, or at least that there had been. Something had to have happened for Rose's gem to let off that much energy. So they brought the ship to Earth," Amethyst said.

"And . . . and you guys fought them off, right? Like we did with Peridot and Jasper?" Steven's voice sounded so weak, danced and cracked with uncertainty.

"No," Pearl said. "We tried, but it was no use."

"Without your mother's shield, it was hopeless," Garnet said. "We did our best to at least protect you, but they were tracking the energy from your gem."

"Jasper was with them, and a Peridot," Amethyst said. "A couple others, too. We were outmatched."

Outmatched? But . . . they were the Crystal Gems! They'd saved the Earth, fought off Homeworld, how could they be outmatched?

"They took us, like they'd taken the others," Pearl said. "Used destabilizers on us and just carried you off."

"And then?" Steven asked. There was no way that was the end of it! They had to have broken free, fought off Homeworld again. Otherwise, how had Steven grown up in Beach City, with all the Gems there?

"Homeworld has interstellar prison ships where they keep the Gems they're done with until they can find another use for them," Amethyst said. "Usually they take them to power Gem tech, but especially after the rebellion, they built up more 'defective' Gems than they could use all at once.

"That's where we are now," Amethyst finished.

Steven tried to wrap his head around what they were telling him, what they wanted him to believe. The Gems, defeated? While he was still a baby? All of them brought to a prison ship? Where they were now?

It didn't make sense. None of it added up! How had he grown up with his dad, if they had supposedly been on this ship the whole time? How had he met Connie, or Sadie and Lars, or even Onion? How had he somehow not noticed, not known?

He pressed a hand against his forehead, trying to reconcile his decade or so of life with what the Gems were telling him, but it was impossible. If he had been here since he was a baby, then what was Beach City and his time in it? A dream?

"But how . . . what . . ."

The words tangled in his mouth, faltered and failed before he could ask anything coherent. Garnet stepped in and answered him anyway.

"Steven, all we have ever wanted for you is your safety and your happiness. We created a simulated version of Beach City for you to grow up in so that you could have a normal childhood."

"But . . . but how?" Steven asked.

"Almost all Gems have a special power, Steven," Pearl explained. "Your mother had healing abilities, Garnet has future vision, and I have the ability to project holograms. Amethyst has the ability to create simulations, similar to your mother's room but allowing for infinitely more detail and control."

"You mean . . . this whole time, everything that's happened, it was all in Amethyst's head?" Steven asked.

"Kind of," Amethyst said, her voice a bit sheepish. "More like a shared mindspace I created and kept on track; a bit like when you went into Malachite's mindscape, maybe. It's hard to explain it, really."

"That's why Amethyst never really had a specialty power in the time you knew her," Pearl explained. "We didn't want you to ask if she was using it on you at any point, and we didn't want to have to lie to you if you did."

"You guys . . . you were lying to me? That whole time!" Steven angrily wiped tears from his face. His whole life, he'd trusted the Gems, thought they trusted him, but they hadn't! They hadn't even trusted him enough to let him know what was really happening to them!

"Steven, we never meant to hurt you," Garnet said, her voice soft and gentle, and she reached a hand out to rest it on his shoulder. He jerked away without thinking, and she pulled her hand back halfway.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "We didn't want it to happen like this, either."

"Steven, we were only trying to protect you!" Pearl said. "This place, it's no place for you! It was no place for you to grow up!"

"We just wanted you to have a chance to live on Earth," Amethyst said. "A chance to be a kid."

"Gems," Garnet said, suddenly serious. "There's a guard on the way."

Pearl and Amethyst went pale and froze, and Steven spoke up in their place.

"What does that mean?" he asked. "What do we do? Do we fight them?"

"No," Garnet said, grim. She reached out to take Steven's hand, and he let her this time. "Steven, I know we've been keeping something very big from you, but you need to trust me right now. We cannot fight the guards here and win, not yet anyway. We have to wait for the right opportunity. I need you to close your eyes and lean back against the wall, and not move, no matter what happens, okay?"

Steven didn't answer her. He was sick of being left out of the loop, and he felt like spiting someone right now. He scowled and looked down at the floor.

"Steven."

Garnet's voice was softer, and she had removed her visor so he could see her eyes. They were pleading with him.

"Just for a minute, Steven. I promise we'll explain everything else after."

Reluctantly, Steven nodded. He scooted himself backwards with his feet until he was pressed against the wall and then closed his eyes.

He could hear footsteps coming closer, clicking against the floor of the ship.

Click-clack-click-clack.

"It's hopeless!" Pearl wailed out of nowhere. "There's no getting out of here, ever!"

Steven's blood froze, and he fought the urge to open his eyes. What was Pearl doing?

"So you understand the situation."

It was an unfamiliar voice, sharp and cold, but with a dangerous smile to it, and Steven shivered involuntarily.

"Guard Spinel," Garnet said in recognition, the way she'd say Steven's name when he walked in sometimes, but quieter, softer.

"Prisoners," Spinel sneered. "I can understand your hopelessness; it's only rational, after all! But I'm afraid you're going to have to keep your whining and wailing in your heads from now on. If you get too loud again, I might just send you out in the next shipment out of spite."

"Understood," Garnet said. Spinel made a noise of disdain, and then Steven could feel her eyes on him. There was no way to explain it, but he could feel her gaze sweeping his form. He struggled not to squirm under her scrutiny.

"Still dragging that sorry excuse for a Gem around?" Spinel asked. "I knew the rebels' loyalty to Rose was extreme, but this is taking it a bit far, don't you think?" Her tone turned patronizing, as if the Gems were children who had grown overly attached to a rotting stick instead of Steven.

Steven could hear her chuckling as she turned around and walked away again.

Click-clack-click-clack-fading-fading-silence.

"It's okay now, Steven," Pearl said. "You can open your eyes."

He did, easing his eyes open slowly.

"That was Spinel," Garnet said. "She's one of the guards on the ship."

"You know her?" Steven asked.

"Yeah," Amethyst said. "There aren't a lot of guards on the ship, and they don't rotate them off the ship too much, so you get to know them."

"Spinel is one of the more powerful guards, but she tends to give those who respect her authority an easier time," Pearl explained. "She was coming to see what the noise was about, so I told her what she wanted to hear."

"If there's not many guards, then why haven't you guys broken out of here yet?" Steven asked.

Amethyst sighed.

"It's not that simple," Pearl said. "There aren't many guards compared to the size of the ship or the number of Gems being kept on it, but those who are here are powerful and ruthless. They don't hesitate to crack Gems for even tiny infractions, and they'll swarm any Gems giving serious trouble. If all the prisoners fought back together, they might be able to defeat the guards, but most aren't willing or able to, and the three of us against even half of the guards would have little to no chance of survival, let alone escape."

"Not to mention that the ship's in the middle of nowhere," Amethyst said. "We're not near anything, really, not even a dead planet, much less a planet like Earth. Even if we could get out of the ship, we'd have no place to go and no way to get there either."

Steven's eyes were starting to well up with tears, and Garnet reached over and gently wiped them away.

"I'm so sorry, Steven," she said. "When you asked about the gem shard, my future vision would hardly show any possible future except this one, and I panicked. We all should have been more honest with you, and I never should have tried to shut you out, even to protect you."

"S'okay," Steven said. He wasn't nearly as mad at them anymore. They had just been trying to protect him again, trying to keep him safe. And as reluctant as he was to admit it, he might have actually needed it this time.

"If you want," Amethyst said. "I could put you back in the simulation. I could even make it so this was all a dream, so you wouldn't remember what's going on."

There was nothing Steven wanted more than to go back to Beach City, to go back to the life he'd had before, and here Amethyst was, offering it to him.

But he thought of Spinel, and a chill raced down his spine. The Gems had been facing the guards and getting to know the prison for years now, while he'd been useless, more useless than he'd felt even when he failed missions. He was older now, and could use the powers in his Gem (he thought, anyway). He didn't want to run away like a scared little kid. If he could help them, he was going to.

"No," he said. "I want to remember this. I want to be able to help you guys find a way out of here."

"Oh, Steven," Pearl said, clutching her hands to her chest.

Before he knew what was happening, Amethyst was wrapping him in a hug. Then Pearl's arms locked vice-like around the two of them, and finally Garnet's arms wrapped around them all.

"We'll get out of here and back to Earth," Steven said. "And we'll do it together."