Chapter Fifty – Cold Case
"Where's Steven?"
Garnet had been expecting the question and was deliberately vague in her response. "He's had a long day. I told him to stay behind and go to bed."
"I see." Lapis smiled stiffly. She knew she'd been tricked. The question was, had they done it because they knew she wouldn't have come if she didn't think Steven would be there, or was there some other reason? She looked around the snowy landscape thoughtfully. No, they couldn't be planning something. They wouldn't have brought her here if they were.
"Come on!" Amethyst had shapeshifted into a bird and was flying just overhead. "Let's check the caves first!"
"If it was in the caves, wouldn't we have found it the last time we were here?" Lapis asked.
"Just because it wasn't there then, doesn't mean it won't be there now," Garnet said impassively. "Monsters move."
Once again, it didn't take them long to reach the caves. Amethyst and Lapis landed behind the other two gems, and the group walked in silence until they reached the first junction. "So, are we splitting up again?" Lapis asked. Perhaps when they hit another junction and had to split up further, she could double-back and check on Peridot.
Almost as if she'd guessed Lapis's intentions, Garnet shook her head. "Corrupted gems are drawn to other gems. Peridot suggested to me in our last mission that perhaps the reason it took us so long to find the creature was because there were too many of us, overwhelming it. This time, we stick together."
"Then we'd better get moving, hadn't we?" Lapis said, and strode off down the left-hand branch before anyone could stop her.
"Welp, guess we're going that way," Amethyst said with a shrug, and set off after her at a slightly more leisurely pace.
Pearl hung back until their gem glows were almost out of sight, and then turned to Garnet. "So Steven's with Peridot?"
Garnet nodded. "If she's going to tell anyone what's bothering her, it'll be him."
"I don't understand though," Pearl continued in a low tone. "If you think Lapis might be harming Peridot in some way, why don't we just poof her now?"
"Well for starters, she'd defeat us first," Garnet said ruefully, gesturing around at all the icicles. "But mostly because I don't know. Everything is circumstantial. What have I seen, Pearl? A broken phone, some ice and a few other vague visions I can't even remember clearly. But every single one of those visions had at least three alternative pathways that lead to those outcomes. Look," she added as Pearl opened her mouth to protest. "We attacked Peridot once without knowing her true intentions, and we were wrong. We would've poofed her and locked her away forever, and she knows that. So even though she has since forgiven us, there's a little bit of her that's always going to be afraid of making us angry again and it's going to take a lot of work to fix that. Lapis, though…" She sighed and gazed after the blue gem. "She doesn't like us, and she doesn't trust us. Maybe she will one day, but certainly not if we poof her unjustly. We'd only succeed in turning her into a very powerful enemy."
"I suppose you have a point there," Pearl conceded, a little reluctantly. "But," she added brightly, "if you change your mind, I'm sure I could make it look like an accident."
Garnet couldn't help chuckling at that. "It's a generous offer, but I'm going to have to turn you down."
"Hey, slowpokes!" Amethyst shouted down the tunnel. "Hurry it up a little! We've reached another junction and Lapis isn't- OK, so, we're taking the left-hand one again!"
"She certainly is eager," Pearl commented as they sped up. "At this rate, she'll have checked the entire cave network in less than an hour."
Garnet shrugged. "You can't really check something thoroughly if you're rushing. We may have to sweep the area a second time. Maybe even a third time."
xXxXx
"Really? Again?" Lapis fixed Garnet with a look of disbelief. "We've checked twice, obviously it isn't here."
"It's easy to get confused in these tunnels," Garnet said, completely unmoved by the other gem's obvious annoyance. "We may have accidentally missed a turning."
"Oh, would you like me to map the area as we go?" Pearl offered cheerfully. "If we make another sweep, I can record the locations of the branches and caves and then we can be sure we've covered everything."
"Or," Amethyst added, "we could just smash up every tunnel as we go. Then we'd know where we've been and if it is moving, it won't be able to escape."
Lapis held up a hand and water began to form behind her, drawn from the snowy landscape outside. "Why don't I just flush the tunnels out? It'll take a minute, at most."
"No," Garnet said at once. "And we're not smashing up the tunnels either," she added to Amethyst. "We don't want to cause any more damage here."
"Seriously?" Lapis raised an eyebrow and looked pointedly at Garnet's gauntlets. "I thought you guys were all about smashing stuff up."
Pearl looked deeply offended by that remark, but Garnet just shrugged. "True. But I prefer to do so in places where it's a little easier to move. We don't want to get trapped in here."
Pearl stepped forward and began projecting from her gem. "Let's begin. We already know this entrance splits into two a little further on, with the left-hand tunnel then splitting into three while the right one splits into two…"
She set off down the tunnel and the other three gems followed behind, with Lapis fighting down the urge to scream with frustration at every step. Pearl insisted upon mapping the tunnels thoroughly, which meant backtracking every time they reached a new junction and exploring previous tunnels before progressing any further, and it was at least five hours before she declared the project complete. And there was still no sign of the corrupted gem.
"Well, I think we've finally established that it's not in these caves," Pearl said cheerfully as they began to head back towards the entrance.
"Are you sure you don't want to check again?" Lapis mumbled under her breath. "Joke," she hastily added as Garnet appeared to seriously consider the suggestion.
"We'll move on now," Garnet decided after a moment. "It's definitely somewhere nearby."
"Great," Lapis said with relief. "Want me to fly up and see if I can see any sign of it from the air?"
"That might be tricky," Amethyst drawled, and waved a hand towards the cave entrance. "Looks like that blizzard's hit."
Sure enough, the wind was howling and snow swirled violently through the air. Lapis held up a hand and froze some of it in place, but even then, she could tell that it was still too thick to really see through. "I could move it all out of the way," she offered, but Garnet was already shaking her head.
"Hold it in place, but don't move it away. You could cause serious damage to the local ecosystem," she said firmly.
Lapis rolled her eyes but did as she was told, extending her power over a wider radius until everything was still. "Now what?"
"Hmm." Garnet adjusted her visor, looking for the most likely location of the snow monster. "That way," she said, pointing in completely the opposite direction.
They began walking. Every now and then, Amethyst would open her mouth and eat a snowflake out of the air, but other than that, absolutely nothing happened except that the blizzard got worse.
"OK, I know I'm new here," Lapis said eventually. "And I haven't had a lot of experience catching monster gems. But are we really making any progress here?"
"These things can take some time," Pearl said placidly. "Remember, it took us two days to find and capture the Sanddragon."
"Yeah, this is nothing," Amethyst butted in. "Remember that one we were looking for underwater? Not Malachite," she added hastily as Lapis glared at her. "It was like, three hundred years ago-"
"Oh yes, I remember the one!" Pearl exclaimed. "It was some kind of jewelled octopus, so of course, it wasn't all that easy to identify among the other marine life."
"It took us a month of solid searching to find it," Garnet added.
Lapis looked aghast. "We're not spending a whole month looking for this thing! What about Steven!?
"Eh, don't worry about him, he's a big boy," Amethyst said dismissively. "We've left him alone tons of times and he's been fine. Mostly," she corrected, remembering the cat fingers.
"But…" Lapis tried to think. She knew there had been some reason why Steven wasn't supposed to be left alone, but at that moment, she couldn't remember what it was. "He's still a juvenile human," she said instead. "You might be able to leave him alone for a couple of hours, maybe even overnight, but you can't leave him alone for a month!"
"We're not going to leave him alone for a month," Garnet said calmly. "This mission shouldn't take longer than twelve hours." She shifted her visor. "Thirteen if Amethyst falls down the ravine."
Amethyst grinned. "Duly noted."
Finally, Lapis remembered. "What about Jasper though? All those other times you left him alone, there wasn't an angry, powerful Quartz soldier on the loose, was there?"
"I don't see Jasper approaching Steven in the next twelve- thirteen hours," Garnet said with a small shake of her head. "Besides, I have a cell phone. If Steven needs help, he'll let us know."
"Plus, he could just shelter in the Temple anyway," Amethyst added. "No way could Jasper get in there."
"But-" Pearl snapped her mouth shut quickly. "Ah, never mind."
Lapis pounced at once. "Never mind what?"
"Well…" Pearl smiled nervously. "I must admit, I was a little concerned as to whether he'd be able to get into the Temple quickly enough. But of course," she continued, "it's right down the stairs! Ha ha! Why, no distance at all! It's not like he'd have to run from-"
"This way," Garnet interrupted, and strode off through the snow before anyone could stop her. Pearl and Amethyst exchanged glances, and then ran after her, leaving Lapis to bring up the rear, which she did in silence.
Did they think she was stupid? Actually, she was rather annoyed with herself for taking as long as she had done to realise that Steven wasn't at the beach house, tucked up in bed, but alone with Peridot at the barn. She stared at the backs of the three gems ahead of her and briefly contemplated impaling them with giant icicles so she could skip out on this stupid mission, which was now obviously a distraction, and go check up on them. But they definitely wouldn't trust her any better if she did that, and if she just bubbled them instead, it would be a little difficult to explain to Steven why all of his guardians had mysteriously disappeared.
Peridot, though… it was time for her to go. It was a bit of a shame, she'd hoped to keep her around a little longer, but Peridot was no good at acting natural, and Steven was definitely going to be asking her questions. And the fact that the Crystal Gems didn't seem to want her to know where Steven really was was… troubling. Clearly they didn't know exactly what was going on, or they wouldn't have brought her here, but they seemed to suspect something.
So. Poof Peridot, hide her gem. Maybe on the moon? She could put Jasper's gem there too, just to be safe. It wasn't too far to travel and she knew there was no easy way for the Crystal Gems to get there. Then she would hand over the diary and claim the other gem had run away.
Then while they were busy hunting for Peridot and Jasper, she would begin working out how to deal with them. After all, it was because of the Crystal Gems that she had been imprisoned in the first place, and they'd never been made to pay for that. It would take a lot of planning to make sure Steven didn't get too hurt, and might take a lot of time to carry out, but five thousand years had taught her how to be patient.
xXx
Hands up everyone who thought the CGs were gonna lure Lapis out to the desert and kick her butt? Unfortunately, as Garnet keeps pointing out, she has no concrete proof that anything's wrong, just visions with other explanations, and the last time they jumped to violence, they were horribly wrong. And Lapis would be a lot less forgiving of such a mistake after her previous treatment at the hands of the CGs. Plus there really WAS a second snow monster in the North! So yeah, their plan right now is just to act as a distraction for as long as possible.
And would you look at that, finally Garnet's future vision got something right. Still, it's pretty difficult for free will to change the weather. Maybe that's why she knew Winter Forecast needed a little extra future vision magic.
Also! Yes, I have watched the leaked bomb, but please, I beg of you, don't post spoilers in reviews! I'd hate for a new reader to go merrily clicking through the reviews to see if this fic is any good and then get completely spoiled!
