So, I've managed to do something "controversial" apparently. It's like half of Ao3 was stark raving mad. That's practically an achievement. People don't get mad about crap they don't care about – myself included. Sigh.
But there were also a lot of ppl there who were sad… :(
Which kinda made me feel bad, given how much support I'd gotten from you guys until now.
Especially since this happened to me once, with Aeon Entelechy Evangelion, something over the top gross happened in one of the source materials and the author just peaced out. AEE and it's predecessor, Aeon Natum Engel, were my favorite of all time, not just of fanfiction, but any writing ever, old classics and childhood favorites included. It was greatness I could only hope to match like someone reaching out their hand to the stars and it's been my goal to maybe someday get half as good before I die; I loved that thing and will never find out how the author would've continued all their glorious ideas.
Which is to say, I feel like I owed you guys the rest of this bloody fanfic, so I forced myself to continue it and match it's previous style as best as I could, complete with the "PD apologist" PoV – anything else would be kind of low and besides feel rather tacked-on. I based this as much as I could on my preexisting ideas. I'll do my best to pretend I thawed-out my freeze-dried opinions from before "Volleyball" came out.
Whether it's remotely true to the show, I don't know. In a way it's almost a relief not to worry about cannon anymore. I'm kinda antsy to have this behind me ASAP, but I guess I'll see it as a way to challenge myself, like those school essays where they randomly assign you a position and make you argue for it.
At the same time my conscience compels me to do something about the Pink Pearl chapter hence there will probably be a revised version of Part III Act 2 at the very end to do the bare minimum of acknowledging who did it, insofar as that can be kept consistent with the rest of the fic while keeping the arc intact.
For honesty's sake, I will leave the old version online as well as the comment rants.
Anyway, have your fanfic:
I pay my dues
All for truth
Can't leave it here and leave it here
And leave it here forgotten
Silence rules
Spineless fools
You'll never learn, never learn
Never learn to break away
Oh, why can't we rise again?When all the days go by the firelight
We'll never fade out in the night
And we are estranged, but drawn to the flame
We are like fire to the rainIsn't it strange that love is in the way?
It never goes away
- Within Temptation, 'Firelight'
"Guard duty at the Human Zoo?!"Jasper did not fail to make sure that she physically towered over her so-called compatriots as she begrowled her displeasure, bent ever so slightly forward and holding her arms away from her trunk to as to project half a cage over the misshapen Carnelian who had dared to bring the word -
It was not as if she'd volunteered as the bearer of bad news, if anything, it's was the undue chippers in her tone that irked the massive quartz more than it otherwise would have, not that there was any other way that the order could have been brought to her notice without rousing her considerable temper.
"This is absolutely unacceptable!", she roared, incensed, as she swung her first toward the air, finding some very limited relief in her her motions could make the smaller creatures recoil without fail. "You're supposed to be quartzes. We're meant to fight, no gather dust in the middle of nowhere! How did you go along with this?! You might be puny, defective little rejects, but you're still warriors!"
It wasn't the first time she had let them all think what she really thought of them but at the present moment, with so many of them present, they were less afraid and rather annoyed – None of them wanted to deal with the general unpleasantness of engaging her, but at last, an uncommonly skinny Jasper, perhaps one of the most outspoken ones to begin with, decided to take one for the team.
"Hey, don't you think we've had enough fighting to last us a lifetime?"
That was putting it mildly. The gems that stood assembled here had been the lucky ones and many then-still familiar faces were missing from their ranks.
But that did little to deter the massive fighter: "What a disgrace! If nothing else, this should be the best proof of your inferiority!"
And with that, she was unsurprisingly of out the door, a habit that the others had grown quite accustomed to. Once, a long long time ago, they might have tried to stop her and get her to join in conversation, but they had come to learn that letting her go was usually the less unpleasant alternative.
Only very rarely would one of their softer natures find it in her to pity her for her solitude.
But Solitary or otherwise, she would not be deterred, and might have marched all the way to the capital if there was ground to stand on in the open space.
She most certainly had to break a few articles of protocol to do so, staunchly as she would deny it as she had often taken minor violations as a pretext to pick on her least favorite members of whatever detail she'd been assigned to.
But lucky for her, her forceful stride and forceful silhouette spoke for themselves as she made her way to the nearest galaxy warp, and when she made her way to her destination, the Topazes at the door believed the boldness in her words when she claimed to be here on in urgent business.
Thus, in such and similar ways, it came to pass that she soon knelt before the sovereigns on their thrones – Lucky for her, the Zircon whose appointment was supposed to be sheduled at this moment hurried up her drawn-out speech and scampered out before long when she grew increasingly aware of the impatient giant waiting in line – Had there been any higher-ranked elites in attendance, the quartzes' paper-thin patience might have been tested beyond its bounds.
Instead, she got all the time she could have desired for her introductory display, suddenly mindful of etiquette now that it could only underline her point, so she placed herself there, one knee on the floor, the other bent so as to support her position from the front, arms held in a salute as she bowed her head forward, wild silver hair falling over her massive shoulders.
The throne hall was bereft of most the twinkling lights it once held, no one had bothered to flip them on save for a few strategic spotlights to single both the supplicants and whichever advisers lingered near the thrones of the rulers, who themselves provided their own light.
At their left stood a pair of Lapis Lazulis flanked by a floating Aquamarine, no doubt newly appointed to their positions due to the recent losses on the former war council. The Aquamarine seemed so secure in her newly-acquired good standing that she barely seemed bothered with reading the room and proudly grinned to herself as she looked down on any visiting subjects.
Some, however, had endured the war, some changed more than others: Jasper recognized the Peridot floating on the right, supported by a heavily modified metallic contraption, some of it assistive, some of it re-purposed to serve as instrument, and of course the mortar-filled cracks on the gem on the back of her head and the mask covering the resulting distortions on her face. Standing on solid ground not too far was that Citrine Commander with her short spiky hair and rectangular visor, looking no different than the last time Jasper had encountered her.
Above them all, the largest of the thrones was empty, and the smaller one that used to stand between the other two monolithic chairs appeared to have been carried out, as Jasper had to note with repeated heartbreak – but even so, only one was in use.
While the immense, towering form of Yellow Diamond lounged on her Crystal Throne, Blue Diamond was heavy in her arms, arranged next to her in a veiled veil but glancing now, just a little, past the edge of her cloak, silent and with cold eyes.
It was her whom Jasper first addressed, given that she currently bore her insignia much like the other surviving Beta Quartzes.
"Your Lustrousness! Your Luminosity! I have come to beseech you for a ressignment! Surely my services would be better spent on the frontlines!"
Rather than answer the smaller creature below, Yellow Diamond's gaze turned to her companion who leaned against her. "That's one of those Earth Jaspers. You kept them?"
"They were Pink's… They're all we have left of her… She liked them so much… and besides, what's the harm in it?"
With narrowed eyes, Yellow Diamond fixated the kneeling gem below.
In was one thing to use whatever tools available when direly pressed in war, inferior as they may be, but as far as she was concerned, this second-rate cannon fodder had very much served it's purpose. But she couldn't spot anything outwardly objectionable about her, and though she did not make a habit of recalling the faces and gems of particular underlings, she faintly recalled her from some of the sparse and scattered victories in the latter days of the war, and given the current resource shortages, any useful, experienced soldier would be a boon.
Even so, she still had her doubts:
"She's from the same lot as the one who destroyed her. How do we know we can trust her?"
"Because my firsts have been itching for the shards ever since I arrived here! I'm a quatz. I was made for fighting, not standing around! Let me do my duty to the empire! I want nothing more than to cleanse the universe of deviants and organics in the name of my Diamond, any any other despicable abominations such as Rose Quartz!"
"Don't speak of it aloud! Don't say that accursed name!" Blue Diamond's voice cut in, high and eerie.
Several gems in the Room had to blink away a tear, which Citrine merely endured, though Aquamarine rubbed them away in annoyance whilst Peridot Y73 struggled to do the same with her cybernetics which could quite not hug the wet curves of her cheek like actual fingers.
Jasper grit her teeth, moved more than most, but stubbornly maintained her position and pretended it wasn't happened
Yellow Diamond, however… well it would have been objectively false to say that her expression softened, but there was some subtle change in it, a passing thought perhaps, separate from the effects of her companion's power at the corners of her eyes.
For a moment, she thoughtfully brought her right hand to her chin, and then turned to her designated advisers. "Citrine. What do you say to this?"
Citrine preceded her answer with a small bow and a salute. "I can vouch for her, my Diamond. She conducted herself with considerable valor during the war. There are many among our forces who could assure you of that. She served right under me."
"Peridot?"
"Well," the small gem mused, peering at the bulky quartz like a particularly finicky cook might have considered a prospective choice of fish before buying it, zooming in on an image she had called up in one of her finger screens. "Beta or not, she seems like a remarkably well-made specimen..."
"Very well then. You will receive accommodations in the capital and will be called upon to serve in my next campaign."
…
It fell to Citrine then to show Jasper to her lodgings, incidentally, none too far from her own, an actual proper room at the edge of one of the capital's great Colosseums.
Once they'd stepped off the warp pad and began climbing the pale, citrus-hued steps, sure that any awkward moments would soon be dispelled by their arrival, Citrine choose this moment to address her former lieutenant.
"I expect that we'll be placed under Hessonite for the next campaign. If you have any problem with your accomodations, tell my Pearl. She should be somewhere about the complex. I won her as a prize some thousand years ago – It's a honor that was almost above our station, to be honest, nor do I have that much use for her, Pearls are not really fit for the battlefield, so I mostly have her here tending to my subordinates in the complex. "
"I'm no longer your subordinate." Jasper asserted, not doing much to hide her aggression now that they were out of earshot of their betters. But given her long experience, Citrine simply noted the provocation and did not respond to it beside that.
"Quite right." she stated calmly. "We'll be colleagues from now on. So if you ever want to leave me a message while I'm away, simply seek her out."
"I'm not here to make friends."
Citrine knew better than to press the issue. "Very well then. So be it then. You'll find that at the Yellow Court, we care chiefly about results. I was going to warn you that you might find the discipline a bit harsher than you did in Pink or Blue Diamond's service, but I'm beginning to think that you'll fit right in."
"Whatever. Weren't you supposed to show me my quarters?"
"They're right over there – Right behind those blue curtains."
The 'quarters' were in fact little more than two wide rows of columns on the topmost wall of the Colosseum's uppermost floor, each so aligned that they spanned an area of about nine square meters between them, which each square demarcated by curtains on all sides. On a world without precipitation, roofs were unneeded. They were designed to be uniform and when they first came to be filled they had all been identical, and so they would have been depicted in any artistic rendition meant to represent the ideal of order according to which they were fashioned, but the bustling reality of daily use had left some of them closed and others pulled open, some tied to the side and others ripped, while others had various items tacked onto or leaning against the columns that flanked them, displays of trophies or weapons, or simply piles of equipment.
The one Citrine had pointed out was pulled close, but there was enough room under the rich velvet curtains that one could make out the bases of several objects inside.
Unimpressed by this, Jasper inquired after it: "Why are there things in it?"
"My Pardon. I didn't have the time to tell Pearl to clear it out. Had you announced your coming, it could have been arranged sooner."
That was only half the truth. The room had been Chalcedony's.
Citrine had not sat in there for hours or spend cycles thumbing through the things time and time again; She had simply left them were they were, undisturbed by anything but the dim purple light shining from above, until a new use for the place was decided.
Whether Jasper grasped this or not, her response was to let out a frustrated growl. "I'll go find her myself then!"
And at this she would have waltzed off, had her former superior not stopped her in her tracks with the same firm, authoritative voice that had kept her in place for all of her years: "Halt!" She'd dealt with enough ruffian quartzes to remain calm, but she did think that a display of firmness was needed: "Do watch your step. She was a reward from Yellow Diamond. An insult against my property is an insult against me."
"I get it. You're real proud of yourself. Congratulations. I'll go find someone to clear out my room now."
And with that, she was off.
To be honest, Citrine wasn't certain if that one was going to last her first five thousand years. Then, her lemon-hued little Pearl would likely have to clear it once again, just as she would soon be purging it of Chalcedony's things, taking them into her gem and then straight to the garbage disposal, where they would crumble, just like living memory of conflicts like the Tannhäuser Gate or the Pentagorian War.
But even after everything was gotten out and the only thing sitting on that floor was Jasper herself, the curtains around her swapped for yellow ones (a simple, functional design of plain plastic) she could not be at ease in it. It was a plain square of room alright, but she had no possessions to fill it with.
In the harsh ruins of the earth, she had seldom even had the luxury of a proper cubby.
Having come from lowly dirt, she found herself an interloping impostor in the decorated halls.
...
Haunted by faint memories of song and laughter, the old extraction chamber was awash in silence though Blue Diamond still sat in one of its corners, with little to do but to contemplate the quiet and contemplate the seconds before she would inevitably have to drag herself to her next Appointment.
She'd made a point of keeping up appropriate relations with all the courtiers and high aristocracy, but as it turns out they could prattle and gossip just fine without her.
Even when she'd come, her presence would be little more than that of a distant ice sculpture, and only occasionally were there even etiquette breaches to admonish or harrumph at.
Even court duty had become a rather cold comfort, through it still held a grim kind of catharsis.
Only her presence was needed – in the end, she came to find that even smiling and nodding could be largely dispensed with. There was no very much smiling that she did anymore.
Though the days when she could motivate herself with ritual and propriety were the good ones. She'd have to make them happen at least once in a while, lest Yellow come around and make her do whatever supposedly needed doing.
But for all her grousing, she wasn't here. If she had her way, this whole place would have been demolished. She had declared it high time for a more modern efficient design, but though that excuse might have fooled some, Blue was not among them.
But new designs did get designed, and White got one too, after presumably nitpicking her way across the blueprints, but for further efficiency, she had it installed right on her ship, eliminating yet another possible reason to step foot outside of it… or levitate out, for that matter.
She'd sworn to herself that this would never possibly become her new normal, that she would reject any notion of business as usual going on after what had happened. But one day, it did. Poorly.
But hat parts of her would respond to the feeble pull of what little willpower she could muster had little interest whatever was next on her schedule; What stubbornness and defiance she had was aimed in the opposite directions, both hands stuck deep in the hole in her soul to pull at its edges lest it slam shut, for she held it to be a gulf torn by love, and the last proof of existence for someone she had failed once before, for all that she also failed to grasp how.
She didn't want the world to go on. She would that time would stop and that daybreak never came, so that she might remain here curled up in the heavy waters if all other comforts be denied to her -
(Instead, she asked her trusty comb pebble to supply the room with some non-silence)
…
If an outside observer had compared the technology in the later years preceding the onset of Era III to the one that existed at the beginning of the war they would have been rightfully awed, but as ever so often, it was dire necessity that had been the mother of invention, much in the manner of an engineer working ever more crafty tricks in futile bids to patch the leak of a sinking ship.
Given their long lives, it might have passed many of them right by that they had become a people in decline, for those with luxuries to revel in were distracted by the delights of their palaces, and the unfortunate toilers at the bottom of the pile were all too busy with their toils to afford the leisure of much thoughts.
The different rungs of the latter didn't mix much, and the bloated blight-stain of the empire had spread itself wide and thin upon the star maps, so it was possible that many never grasped how their already restricted lives had come to be much worse for the newer additions to their society. Corners had been cut in the hours to their creation, mended at most superficially with uncaring workarounds intended more to serve the cult of the mandated ideal silhouettes than themselves, but this was only the tip of the impoverishment – the semblance of high culture that had wrought the dainty palaces and mighty artifacts peppering the galaxy had increasingly become the province of an increasingly smaller, more restrictive domain.
Built on crooked foundations to begin with, the grand churning machine that was the empire was slowly but surely in the process of devouring itself, sacrificing what remained of its few redeeming features on the altar of stone cold utilitarianism, one by one with every passing century.
From the lowliest outcasts at the roots of the cities to the rulers enthroned at the top of their towers, none could escape the miserable truth that their world was rotten, down from the head and up from the core, fragments barely holding together, ready to come apart at a gust of solar wind.
...
When an unmanned Red Eye was shot down on a routine patrol mission, the Diamonds knew nothing about it. In fact, no one took note of it at all save for the operator who came in to check in on the readings several hours later.
This unwitting gem filled out a form in which the incident was flagged as unresolved and put on an automated waiting list which sometime later resulted in a thus far unremarkable gem technician receiving a ticket about the issue.
Once she began experiencing repeated equipment failures of mysterious origin, the news only got as far as her direct supervisor who paid her just enough mind to blow her off with a reprimand.
Even when her stubborn efforts managed to get the warp working for just about ten minutes, the clear evidence that the site had been tampered with was not seen as alarming – after all, the planet in question was notoriously crawling with organics.
When the previously purely hypothetical saboteurs declared themselves in open light, however, it was an entirely different matter.
Labeled with the highest possible priority ranking, a message containing a report made its way straight to Yellow Diamond's command room, with all video evidence and other available data included as attachments.
But the tale told of a small, disorganized remnant force, headless, feckless and of negligible size, which could be taken to mean: 'A cinder'. Naught but insects to be crushed under one's heel.
When wind of each reached Yellow Diamond, she neither trashed her office nor did she zap some nearby unfortunate or somesuch dramatic thing – She simply acknowledged this fact in grim disillusion, and then set out to do something about it, a few short, commanding sentences typed up in a whirlwind.
She read it over once more briefly, just to check the spelling of the glyphs and then, done. Out of sight, out of mind. She opened up the next report and considered the matter dealt with, even duly smashed with appropriate prejudice, as she had very much made sure to send one of her armies' most celebrated champions.
Thus, she was caught unawares when once upon an ugly, busy, stressful day, she would perceive a characteristic chime which she had not heard in many, many centuries.
White never called her. Usually, it was her who called Blue, and she'd been avoiding even that as of late. And Pink would never call again.
She almost assumed some impertinent mishap right out of the gate, and while somewhere pushed far down to the edges of her consequences, her feelings probably wished she hadn't been reminded, most of her carried on with business as usual, listlessly typing away in mild annoyance, that is, until she read the word 'Earth'
She spotted the word on the screen, the corresponding signal registered at the back of her vision spheres, triggering an impulse that then traveled swiftly down a light circuit all along her neck and at last, down her chest all the way to her gem, where it induced various particles in the massive crystal to change their quantum states, the parts-pushing-on-parts of bitter recognition, and the cascade of related thoughts, feelings and regulatory adjustments.
At long last, some signal made it back and her lips moved:
"...How is the Earth?"
She didn't know what that ostensibly incompetent little Peridot could possibly mean by her nonsensical response, but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered but that that miserable hunk of rock was finally gotten rid of in some halfway useful fashion, but apparently, some part of that proved pretty hard to understand. The puny wretch was intent on being awfully difficult in ways that chipped at scabbed-over places, and much like in whatever mercilessly suppressed echo of the past was now irreverently bubbling its way to the surface, Yellow resorted to pulling rank.
She really didn't want to be dealing with this, but that feeble creature was too young to remember that planet, and that planet's woe.
"What do you know about the earth?!"
"Apparently more than you, YOU CLOD!"
How very, very irritating.
Her vaunted composure might just have gone out the airlock for a minute.
But once the next minute arrived, she sat back down, briefly massaged her temples with a sigh, and then calmly ordered her Pearl to have the communicator's self-destruct triggered posthaste and typed up a missive to have someone else go looking for the missing Jasper.
In this situation, it might have been helpful if she had been familiar with concepts such as weeding a garden or playing whack-a-mole, but as of now, she only had this vague grating sense of new traitors springing up sooner than she could curb the old ones.
Even so, she was not overly concerned for that turncoat's destruction, figuring that the Cluster should eventually take care of her. Just a few hours later, she had forgotten all about her, if she had even come close to retaining anything about the look of her gem or the facets of her serial number.
But she must have mentioned to Blue Diamond that the project was nearing its completion, though she would remain unaware that she had snuck down to the planet's surface without telling her, not to speak of the tiny interlopers that had eavesdropped on their conversation unbeknownst to her.
Likewise, she surely had Blue's foremost Aquamarine provided with the most up-to date information of the state of the planet before sending her off alongside Topaz, but it was probably Yellow Pearl who had compiled the actual report, likely just by rummaging for relevant entries in the imperial mainframe.
No one would have suspected any live-changing events right around the corner. Even White Diamond would have of the current status quo going on and on and on. The whole undertaking had been nothing other than a fanciful vanity project to carter to Blue Diamond's moods and whims, and none of the reports had so much as mentioned the possibility of Rose Quartz being sighted among the survivor.
Up until this point, she had been more or less successful at filing this all away as a temporary trifle that was by necessity bound to resolve itself with the emergence of the cluster – Nothing prepared either of them for the news that the Great Terran Butcher herself had turned herself in of her own accord.
Blue had been inconsolable for quite some time, horrified that this twisted creature could have survived all along… yet the time that wasn't spent making themselves at least nominally presentable for the trial or preparing the organizational side of the proceedings brought them to the only part of White Diamond's disused palace that was important anymore: The airlock leading to her ship.
"We've finally got her at our mercy!", Yellow told the faceless door, knowing, but not quite believing, that her maker must be listening. "We've caught her, and now we shall finally destroy her for all that she's done."
Blue, for her part, was rather more direct about her anguish, speaking with a strained, pained voice rather than with eager, clenched fists. "She's the one who shattered Pink, White… Don't you hate her? Don't you want to know what happened? Don't you want to find out how she did it?"
But the heavy gates did not move.
Only at their very bottom was there any sign of motion as a rigid, doll-like figure slid right through the arms, plastered with a smile that did not quite belong on that particular face.
"Don't be silly. Can't you two handle a little trifle like this on your own? It's embarrassing that you let it drag on for as long as it did. You three can finish your little games by yourselves."
The poor puppet disappeared back into the walls, and all the lights went out around them.
Yellow was the first to concede a sigh. "It's pointless. We should get going, there's a trail we need to get to."
The trial itself soon turned into a profoundly graceless debacle, and the suspect escaped into the dead chasms beneath the city.
Yellow and Blue, however, (after some measure of yelling at each other) firmly gripped the other's hands and looked each other in the eyes, swearing to depart at once, and not to come back without the traitor's sharp, splintered shards.
They did not even deign to wait until an army or even an entourage could be prepared, content to take just their ships which, to their advantage, were ready to move with but a single gesture of their hands.
It was the sort of impassioned move that White Diamond would most surely have scolded them for, but she sat up in her tower with her back turned like she might as well not be here.
It's the next one that will have the speech/point/conclusion that I no longer... you know what? Just decide for yourselves. But it's the conclusion that all this thing has been planned out towards so it's not like I could change it except in a "gratuitous cheap plot twist" kinda way