Alright guys. I know I tend to throw curve balls at you a lot (though this isn't that big of one all things considered) and I know that you've liked them in the past so... trust me on this.
thanks to squish for putting up with my waffling on the planning for this chapter.
enjoy
It was quiet here, far from the inner city and on the outskirts of the areas where into the night the sandstones carved away at the quarries that had been assigned to them.
"Diamond," The olivine addressed Domina. Silicate a corner of her sleeping mind prompted. "What time do you need to return."
"Not for several hours. What's the word from Amber?" Domina's words spilled out of her without prompting. She didn't even know which amber. She peered around the half-collapsed warehouse and saw signs of other gems, a large grey gem -Iron- manipulated tiny parts to a small machine, she was about quartz sized. And there was another similarly size pale gem with multicolored bands crossing her body -Sandstone- who was standing guard. Silicate was inspecting what looked like some kind of half cobbled together ship. And on the far side of the room, sitting amongst piles of paper plans was... a Goshenite? -Beryl-
"Amber says our best window is a month from now."
"Will the ship be ready then?"
"Ideally," Iron said, "If Silicate can get away for more than an hour at a time."
"Which would be a lot easier if my master would stop testing her new sequencer on the main power grid." Silicate smiled chagrined.
"What?" Domina asked, but her voice didn't respond. Apparently, it wasn't part of the script.
"Sorry about that, he's getting impatient, the disease is spreading." Diamond's voice, her mother's voice, said.
"We've got company." Sandstone turned towards them, revealing that she had no eyes, just a featureless void where her face would be. There was a sudden banging and ringing that yanked Domina out of her dream.
She fell out of the bed she had constructed in her room in her and Pearl's apartment. Thankfully she had lowered the sensitivity after the first one of these dreams she'd had so she didn't wake up in a ruined warehouse on a simulacrum of an alien planet.
Her communicator was flashing and playing a song that Domina had set for Steven years ago.
"Hello?" Domina mumbled, activating her communicator. Steven was in his room, with Connie looking over his shoulder. It had been about a month since Domina had been to Earth. Pearl was supposed to be back in the next few days and she had asked Steven if they could put off the next healing session so that Domina could be there when Pearl got back and help deal with the fallout of the mission.
"Hey, Domina uh..." Steven looked at Connie nervously then back through the camera. "Are you busy?"
"Always." Domina sighed. "But I've got..." She spared a glance at the clock and groaned. "Stars, twenty minutes until I have to be at a meeting with an Onyx from the Beta Quadrant."
"Oh," Steven said, suddenly at a loss for words. Connie stepped in though.
"What about after that?"
"I'm supposed to talk with Yellow Pearl about the new test site on 23-T72," Domina said dryly.
"...Are you going to be free anytime soon?"
"Steven, what's going on?" Domina asked, getting to her feet, the communicator bobbed to follow her.
"Well, I have an idea? For a thing, Stevima could try?" Steven sounded probably the most unsure Domina had ever heard him. She stopped in the doorway of her room and let the door close behind her.
"Ok... should I be worried?" She asked. He and Connie stared at each other as if having a silent conversation. Domina watched the time tick towards her deadline and began to say she had to go.
She was interrupted by Steven finally blurting out what was on his mind. "Pink Diamond's shards are corrupted!"
"Wha- how?" Domina wasn't entirely sure what she was asking 'how' to, but Steven and Connie were more than willing to answer every 'how' she had.
"I don't think Stevima can heal her." Steven finished after barrelling past the point where she was supposed to be halfway across Homeworld finally, sagging from relief as Domina rubbed the set of her gem. "But they could probably at least uncorrupt her and then you could take the shards back to Homeworld, for like... a funeral or something." He paused and frowned "Do gems have funerals?"
"Not like humans do," Domina said staring, eyes unfocused at a place between Connie and Steven's heads trying to process all of this.
"So, what do you think?" Connie asked eagerly. Domina glanced up at the time and hesitated. It
would be one more of her mother's mistakes to rectify, and it would bring Yellow some peace she knew, not to mention Blue...
"I'll be there in an hour or so."
Stevima really considered putting Connie on their shoulders to make this trek faster. But instead, they stopped at the edge of the quarry, where fragments of yellow police tape hung from two stakes at the entrance.
"So like, are there any other corrupted gem shards we should worry about?" Stevima asked.
"Maybe," Connie said, picking her way along a few rocks, she stopped next to them at the pool. "I personally think that's what happened to the gem shards at the strawberry battlefield." Stevima felt green.
"Ugh... They've both eaten bits of those."
"Well there probably weren't any gem shards in the strawberries, more likely it's in the plants themselves."
"I don't think that makes it better, Connie."
When Stevima summoned their bagpipes and began to play they instantly felt like this time something was different.
Usually, Quartz-boy-wonder had to work his magic on any corrupted gems they dealt with. They had to remember what they were before Stevima could iron out the specifics.
But you couldn't really do much with a plant, and gem shards weren't particularly sentient, cluster notwithstanding. So their first thought upon entering the swirl of the shards' consciousness was loud.
So they blew over it.
Bagpipes were loud. Connie knew this from ten years of first-hand experience. She also knew that they were intended to be played outside, on rolling hills. But the canyon seemed to be doing a good job of focusing the acoustics. Stevima was also playing louder than Connie ever remembered hearing them play, and the song was different.
She had watched Stevima uncorrupt hundreds of gems and every time was roughly the same from the outside, though she knew from talking with Stevima and Steven and Domina that it wasn't like that from their perspective.
This was entirely different though. The song was disjointed, longing and regret poured into every note. The wind picked up and the moss began to rise and then so did Stevima. And what looked like a pink cloud began to hover overhead, until there was a particularly high note and countless flowers began to descend on the quarry like snowflakes.
Stevima could feel a whirl of emotions within them. Power and strength and joy. Pure joy. This was something far beyond what they should be able to do. Far beyond what anyone expected them to be capable of. Even 'Team Mommy Issues' had only planned on uncorrupting the shards when they fused. But the moment everything had settled, Stevima could see the potential in front of them.
They saw the threads between the gem shards, they could see how they would fit together like puzzle pieces. Shards, if 'Kiss of Pink' could heal a diamond then why couldn't they? They were more powerful, there was more of them than there had been all those years ago in the nephrite's dropship.
So they pulled and drew in the pieces of Pink Diamond from all around the planet where the winds had taken them. They felt determination and relief from somewhere not within either of their gems. They could fix this.
They pushed aside Domina's panic at that feeling from somewhere they couldn't identify, now was not the time.
They pushed aside Steven's worry that they were strong enough to do this. They were half diamond, they could do anything.
They pushed aside the fact that they could feel a sharp pain in their forehead, their gem growing hotter, and the stab of their gem in their stomach, and the blood dripping from their nose, they were so close.
The last shard finally slid into place and Stevima laughed as they felt the gem began to hum with energy. The darkness of the mindscape faded as they drifted back to the ground. They saw Connie staring at them with wide eyes and opened their mouth to say something as the world continued to lighten from the pain in their head and stomach. At one point they felt the gem leave their hand. Shortly afterward they hit the ground, and then as the world went white, they stopped existing.
Five thousand six hundred and forty-three years ago, Pink Diamond had planned with Rose Quartz to finally end the war. To finally get the other diamonds to listen to her and actually respect her ideas for once.
She had expected to reform on White's ship, or maybe Blue's, and to be so relieved when they told her that they had given up the planet for her. And she was excited to check in with Rose, and see what help she could provide in maybe breathing some more life into the planet.
She did not expect to land in a quarry, on Earth, with an older human male at her feet and... something else. Pink Diamond looked around surprised, and saw another human, staring at her open-mouthed, like many humans tended to.
"Uh, well hello there!" Pink Diamond said softly with a smile, lowering herself slightly to seem less threatening. "Don't be scared, have you seen another gem around, lots of curls, in a big white dress?"
Her words seemed to snap the human female out of her stupor and Pink Diamond watched as she dashed over to the other two.
"Steven, Domina?" She asked, frantically touching their necks and bending down to their mouths. "Oh no, this was not supposed to happen." Then she lifted the human's star shirt and cleared the other beings hair from their face, revealing a pink gem like Rose's and a white...
And that was when Pink Diamond decided that something in her and Rose's plan, had gone very, very wrong.