Steven Universe and the Court of Blue Diamond.

Chapter Seven

Steven didn't think that he had ever seen the ocean so blue before as he did when he was riding on Lapis's back with the sun shinning down on it. It was deep and so blue that it sorta reminded him of the color of Holly Blue's gem. And Steven could see his reflection in it, his own dark brown eyes staring back up at him and his long wavy hair moving in the breeze as they flew past.

This was so cool, he tightened his hold around Lapis's neck slightly and adjusted himself to make sure that he wouldn't slip off of her back and spoke with a wide grin. "This is so cool! Can we go a little faster though? Cause in one of my cartoons, Speedful Sally and the Slow Patrol, an excellent example of retropost mordenism in animation by the way."

"What's that mean?" Lapis asked and even though Steven couldn't see her face he was fairly sure that she was rolling her eyes, it was just something about the tone of her voice that reminded him of how she would always sound when she did roll them.

"Oh, I don't know. It was just what something someone else said about it on the internet." Steven said with a casual shrug of his shoulders. "But the important thing is that in this amazing piece of animation genius, it is often depicted that the titular Sally is running so fast that her cheeks and eyelids would peel back. Can we go faster and see if that actually happens?"

"Are you sure about that? It sounds like it would be pretty painful and it would probably make Holly Blue really upset." Lapis was quiet for a few moments then and then spoke again. "On the other hand it would probably really make her upset so let's do it. Hang on little man!" Lapis yelled and Steven let out a whoop of delight as Lapis stretched out her wings and soared up so high before she dived bomb towards the water.

Steven whooped and screamed and laughed all at once as they plummeted towards the water and for a moment he thought they might rush through the water but just as they were about to hit the water Lapis pulled up just enough for them to glide over the water and soon both of them were laughing as the day rushed around them, enjoying the fun of just being with one another.

After what seemed like hours of playing together, soaring high up into the air and diving back down, Lapis conjured a giant watery hand out of the ocean for her to sit on while Steven sat on her lap and ran her fingers through his hair while she hummed a song. Steven didn't know what the song was but he knew that he had heard both Pearl and Sapphire sing it before when they thought that no one was listening to them.

No one told him what the song was or what it was about, whenever he asked they just got this far away look on their face like they never understood the question and then they told him that they hadn't been singing any song and that he must have been imagining it. He didn't know why he wasn't telling them but he also knew that Lapis would just get that same faraway look in her eyes and say that she hadn't been singing anything.

Steven let out a sigh and he tilted his head back and he opened in his when Lapis pressed her lips to his forehead and blew a massive raspberry. "Hey! Gross!" Steven said with a laugh as he pulled his head away from her and rubbed at his forehead, rubbing away the splatter and wondered for a minute if the spit was was made of light just like the rest of Lapis. "What did you do that for?"

"Felt like it." Lapis said with a grin. "And you looked way, way too serious for a moment on what is meant to be a day of fun. So, come on then, what's going on in that weird head of yours, eh Universe?"

"My head is not weird!" Steven said with a grin of his own. "And it's nothing important, you're right. This is suppose to be a fun day with just us so let's focus up and do something fun! Come on, you've been around a lot, thousands and thousands of years right? You must've seen a ton of cool stuff that most people don't even know about! Show me something amazing! Show me something even the others don't know about!"

Lapis stared down at him for a long moment and for a moment Steven thought that he must have said something wrong and that Lapis would take him back tot Beach City but the moment passed before Steven could ask Lapis if she was alright and she was grinning down at him, her eyes as bright as stars. "You got it little man, I've got the perfect place I can show you! But, you have to promise not to tell Pearl or Sapphire and definitely not Holly Blue, she would flip and not in a good way. You can tell your Dad, I guess. It will be just another weird magical thing to him and Greg really does not like to talk about that, at all."

Steven had noticed that, which was kinda odd when you stopped to think that he lived in a house that constantly had magic and a lot of other weird things going on in it but that wasn't entirely his choice. Holly Blue refused to let him move out, his Dad had offered to do so plenty of times in the past so the Gems could focus on giving him all the training he would need but Holly wouldn't hear of it. He had been married to Mom, or as Holly Blue liked to put it, he had been their beloved Blue Diamond's most worthy consort and that was a place of high honor and they would not allow him to live on his own, without their protection or the respect he was due.

Dad knew that it wasn't a fight that he was going to win so he stopped trying to fight it but he did insist that he wasn't guarded by one of them at all the time which Holly had tried to do, thankfully for Dad both Lapis and Sapphire had both refused to be his bodyguard and Pearl would've just gone away the first time that Dad asked her to.

The hand fell back into the ocean and for a moment Steven thought he was going to plunge back into the water but Lapis was still holding him tightly and he could hear the flapping noise that her wings made. "Well, come on little man, do you promise not to tell anyone about this place or do we need to head back to the city?"

"I promise I won't tell anyone at all! It'll be our secret! We will be the only two members of our secret club which will be dedicated to the secret that we share." Steven let out an excited gasped and put his hands on his cheeks. "We're going to be the secret team! No, a team has to be at least three people. The Secret Partners!"

"The Secret Partners." Lapis said with a smile as she carried him further up into the sky and then threw him higher into the air while she spun around so that when Steven landed on her he wound up back on her back with his arms around her neck and Lapis set off forward and Steven grinned as the world became a blue blur beneath him.

He didn't know for how long they had been flying but he was fairly certain that he must have fallen asleep at one point because the sky had been a bright blue the last time he had checked but when he looked up now it was a light peach in color. He wasn't sure where Lapis was taking him but wherever they were going had to be on the other side of the world with how far they'd been traveling.

There was something in the distance then, a little black dot with something shinning at the bottom. As Lapis flew closer and closer to it, the bigger it got. It was a tower, a massive black tower stretching out into the sky from the middle of a massive whirlpool. "Wow." It was all that Steven found himself capable of saying at such a sight.

"Hey, look who's finally awake?" Lapis spoke as they circled the tower, Steven looked down at the whirlpool and saw that it was glowing somehow, like it wasn't a whirlpool made of water but made of light and Steven felt something pulling at him, literally pulling at him like as though someone had grabbed him by the front of his shirt and was trying to pull him down, off of Lapis and into the water and soon Steven found he couldn't fight it and he was falling, down and down and down...

"Whoa!" Lapis grabbed Steven back the back of his shirt and strained as her wings began flap and Steven sweated as he tried to catch his breath, he could still feel something pulling at him but the higher they got the less the pull seemed to tug at them. Soon enough they had reached the top of the tower and the tug there had been had completely gone. "Sorry about that little man, I forgot about the gravity trap. It's meant to keep intruders out but it started to malfunction a while back, sucks anyone down now."

"Don't worry, I'm fine." Steven said as he leapt out of Lapis's arms and landed the floor of the tower, it was flat and there was a square hole on the floor which looked like it lead deeper inside of the tower and across the surface was a small podium that looked like it could hold something. "What is this place anyway?"

"This is the Lunar Sea Spire." Lapis said with a smile, her eyes getting a nostalgic look to them and a small smile formed on her face. "It was one of my favorite places to come, back in the day. Gems used to come here to relax, to have some fun, to study and to dance. It was a great place and it was one of your Mom's."

"Mom came here?" Steven asked, unable to stop himself from bouncing up and down. He was always ready to hear anything about his Mother, Holly Blue was always ready to tell him but it was mainly always the same stuff about how great Blue Diamond was and Steven was sure that what Holly told him was all true but he wanted to know about more than that, he wanted to know if she liked ice cream and watching the rain fall as much as he did and if she liked to sing like he did. He wanted to know his Mom.

"Came here? No, she built here." Lapis gestured with her arms in a wide arc, clearly trying to gesture to the whole tower. "This place was one of the first places whose construction she oversaw when she came to Earth and it was always one of her favorites, whenever she needed to get away from everything or when she needed to think something over this was the first place she would always come to. It was her sanctuary, she used to say."

"Wow." Steven whispered in awe as he considered everything Lapis had said. "So, why can't I tell the others about us coming here? Do they not know that this place exists or something? Were you and Mom the only ones who knew about this place? Oh my gosh, were you guys the OG Secret Partners!?"

"No." Lapis said with a laugh. "No, the others knew that this place existed and they've all been here before it's just that-" Before Lapis could explain a sound like a thunder clap echoed out around them, only it didn't seem to be coming from the sky. It seemed to be come from below them. Steven frowned and wandered over to the edge of the platform and looked down.

For a moment he didn't see anything, only the side of the spire and some shafts of light coming out of the water walls that the gravity trap had made and landing on the side of the tower. But then, the cracking noise started again and Steven gasped when he saw a crack form in the side of the tower and a chunk of wall coming loose before it fell out and fell down towards the void below.

But it never reached it. It could only have been falling for half a second when a massive watery arm shot out of the water wall and caught the piece of wall in it's hand. The watery arm stretched upwards till it reached the place where it had broken away from and placed it back in, the arm holding it in place. Steven glanced over his shoulder to look at Lapis to see that she had had her arm raised and stretched out.

Steven turned his glance back down to see that the arm hadn't pulled back into the water, Lapis was using it to hold the broken part of the tower in place and Steven gasped when he took a closer look at the other shafts of light that were coming out of the wall of water near the base of the tower. They weren't shafts of light at all, they were more watery hands. All pressing against the surface of the tower to clearly try and stop it from coming apart any further.

The sound of soft footsteps made him turn around and he saw Lapis smiling at him, her arm had fallen and had now joined her other one on resting against her chest. "Not bad, huh?"

"Are you keeping this entire place together?" Steven asked he glanced back down over the edge. "Doesn't that tire you out at all? I mean, you have to be always keeping those arms in place, right?"

"Ah, don't worry about me." Lapis said with a grin and a dismissive wave of her hand, as if Steven said that she was worried because she had tripped over and not because she was trying to keep an entire building from falling down all by herself. "Sure, it's a little extra effort but I could move all the Earth's water and make something out of that and hold it for weeks without it causing me any strain, this is nothing?"

"Then why don't you want the others to know about it?" Steven asked and Lapis frowned. "This is why, isn't it? You don't want the others to know about this place cause you don't want them to know that you're the one holding it up. That is it? Isn't it?"

Lapis stared at him for a moment, and for the first time that Steven could remember Lapis almost looked mad at him. But the look passed as soon as it appeared and she let out a chuckle, thought it was more bitter than some of her other laugh's. "I always knew that you were way too smart for your own good, you know that? Come here, sit down." Lapis said and lead him over to the edge where they both sat down, their legs dangling down.

"Holly...overreacts and Sapphire worries too much, I'm not doing anything wrong by keeping this place up or anything but if they knew I was still using my power to keep this place up then they would just make me stop because they are worried I'd cracked under the pressure or something like that. I just don't want to worry them, okay?"

"Okay?" Steven said, not entirely sure if it was okay at all. He didn't like the idea that his family was keeping secrets from one another, sure Lapis said that there was nothing to worry about but if that was true then why would she need to keep it a secret in the first place? "So, what should we do now that were here?"

Lapis grinned and jumped to her feet and offered Steven out her hand to hold which Steven quickly took and Lapis lead him over to the hole in the roof and helped him down the stairs. "I am going to show you something so amazing, your tiny little head is going to blow."

It was a short jog down the stairs, which Steven was fairly certain that no civilized society would ever consider exercise to be fun, until they arrived at chamber with a river of water cutting it in half, it flowed over to the side of the room where a massive whole over took much of the wall, he had to guess Lapis hadn't been able to find the stone for that. Steven was about to ask how they were going to get past that when Lapis scooped him up and flew him over to the other side.

As they descended deeper into the spire, a question popped into Steven's mind. "So, you don't want to tell the others cause you don't want to worry about them putting too much strain on you but maybe they could help you to fix this place up? It could be like a project for all of us to do together, Peedee told me that he and his dad made a tree house in their old place before they moved to Beach City, maybe this could be my tree house? My giant in the middle of a whirlpool house?"

"There's really nothing we can, the materials that the tower needs...some of them aren't native to Earth and the rest are really rare and the others are really busy at the moment, it's no big deal. I can hold it up." Lapis sighed as she stepped over a broken statue that laid scattered on the floor, it's features had been worn away and one of it's arms had broken off and Steven could see no sign of it. "It sucks we don't have that statue anymore, that would fix it."

Lapis caught him staring blankly at her, she smiled and shook her head. "Sorry, you're such a smart kid sometimes I forget that you haven't been around as long as the rest of us." Something that might have been sadness flashed in her eyes for a moment, but as soon as Steven thought he saw it, it was gone. "You saw that podium thing on the roof when we landed? Well, it's for a statue. It only looks like a statue, it's actually this data storage device thing that only looks like a statue."

Another set of stairs waited for them as Lapis continued to speak. "It's got a program inside of it that would communicate with the spire's main computer and would have it run a repair program, the spire would take minerals from the ocean and use it to generate materials to fix all of the damage, this place would look as good as new in seconds."

"Cool! So, what happened to the statue? Could we find it?" Maybe they could ask Pearl to help them find it, Pearl was great at finding things. To be fair, she kinda had to be since Steven kept losing everything. He remembered one time when all of the gems had gone out on a mission and Dad had gone out for a walk and Steven had lost MC Bear Bear.

He had turned the entirety of his room upside down and he hadn't been able to find the master of ceremonies, Pearl had found him in a matter of seconds once she had gotten. She would be able to find this statue thing, someone had probably left it in the cupboard under the stairs in his room like he had left his bear in there, it was where most lost things seemed to end up.

"No, we wouldn't be able to find it." Lapis said as she picked him up and carried him over a missing step, a frown on her face as she saw more damage on the inside of the tower. "It was lost a few thousand years back, there was a...a disagreement. And the statue got taken from us. We don't know where they would have put it."

Steven wanted to ask who "they" were but before he could even open his mouth Lapis hurried down the steps and Steven had to hurry in order to keep up with her, a wide open area with columns stretching up into the air was waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs but Lapis didn't seem like she wanted take any of it in and instead hurried over to where another set of stairs, Steven couldn't help but let out a groan when he saw that, leading further down.

He hurried after and thankfully the stairs were not that long and they soon arrived at what Steven had to assume was the ground floor of the Spire, he saw that there were some holes on the wall on this level as well but these seemed like they were meant to be here as they looked cleanly carved into the stone instead of being from the result of damage, this must have been how people would get in here normally.

Lapis hummed and then turned away from the holes and walked deeper into the tower and then knelt on to the floor and rested her hands on the floor. Lapis's gem shone with a soft blue light which spread from her back to her hands and thin blue lines ran across the surface and a small hatch opened in the floor and Steven was caught between feeling so excited about a secret hatch in a secret tower and despair once he noticed that it meant once again more stairs.

It was dark going beneath the surface but Lapis's gem glowed much brighter this time and Steven was able to see where he was going well enough. Something cold and wet fell on Steven's head and he nearly jumped out of his skin but when it happened again and again he realized what it was, they must have gone underneath the surface of the water.

He had kinda wished that he had brought a coat with him now, it was never normally that cold in Beach City and so normally he didn't wear them but this wasn't Beach City and he had been kinda chilly since they had gotten here. Once they were home maybe Sapphire would make him some hot chocolate, he knew that Pearl would do it for him if he asked her to but Sapphire made the best hot chocolate in the whole wide world.

It was smooth and rich and always had just the right amount of whip cream and marshmallows and it always came to him the perfect temperature, ready to drink as soon as he got it. Sapphire was normally too busy doing...whatever she did in her room all day, to make it for him but maybe she would make it to day. He hoped so.

The stairs seemed longer than all of the others put together and Steven felt an ache growing in his legs and his eyes felt heavier and heavier as they went further and further down. The stairs soon came to an end but Steven let out a whine when he felt water flood into his shoes, there must be a leak somewhere. As Steven felt his socks growing wet inside of his shoes, he found himself wishing that he had brought brought some thicker boots and extra pair of socks with him.

Lapis hurried down the passageway and Steven followed after her, thankfully the passageway wasn't so long but the water did rise the further they got down the hall, from just coming up over his feet to just below his knees. The passageway widened out as they carried on and finally they reached the end of it where it opened into what seemed like a large arena.

There were round circles of stone pressing against the walls which reminded Steven a lot of the coliseum that he had seen once when he had been watching a show about history, it must have been for people to sit down. In the middle of the room there was a massive pool of water that took up the entire floor, stopping only where the stone seats began.

Lapis picked him up and flew him to the highest ring of stone and set him down upon it. He was still kind of chilly, but he had to say that he was glad to be out of the water. "You stay up here, we don't want you falling down into the ocean and you've got the best seat in the house." Lapis said with a smile as she hopped down to the water pool.

She stretched her hands up over her head and her gem glowed with light once again, she crossed her arms over her chest and stepped on to the water and then walked into the exact middle of the room. The world grew still and Steven held his breath while he kept his eyes on Lapis, waiting to see what it was that she would do.

Lapis made a gentle motion with her hand, so small and so subtle that Steven barely noticed it, and something began to rise out of the water. It was just a blank imprint of a person, made out of water. It had a head, arms and legs but no other features other than that. Lapis waved her other arm and over a dozen other of the same blank imprints rose out of the water.

Another wave of her arms and then all of the water dolls gained their features, eyes and hair and a teardrop shaped gemstone on their backs. They all looked like Lapis. It was cool, but Steven was about to ask what the point of it was when Lapis could have done this at any point when she was around any source of water when the music started.

It was soft and sweet and sad and Lapis gently began to move with it, spinning in circles with her arms raised over her her head and her hands locked together. About half of the water dolls bent their heads and lowered their arms before they backed up to the stone circles. The rest of Lapis's clones moved closer to the real Lapis, their arms opening as if to hug her.

Lapis pushed her arms out from her sides in an almost violent motion and the watery clones hurried backward in a circle, the clones moving right while the other half a dozen clones were moving in a circle in the other direction. One inner circle, one outer circle with Lapis spinning in the middle of it all, like the center of a giant eye or a giant mechanism.

One of the water dolls from the inner circle broke out from following her duplicates and offered her hand to Lapis, who moved backward and the clone followed her. The clone offered her hand once again and Lapis took it this time and both began to dance to together, their hands and fingers intertwined. They moved back and forward and back.

They spun around the room together, covering the entirety of it and then the watery clone returned to her place while Lapis took the hands of another clone and began to dance with them. She did the same with every single clone, dancing across the entirety of the room and once the last clone had taken back her place, Lapis waved her arm and the clones lost all feature and form and became merely blobs of water which floated upward and joined together to become a massive blob of water hovering over the arena.

Lapis bowed and the massive blob burst and all of the water fell around her like a soft rain fall as the music finally came to a soft end. The silence that was finally broken was done so when Steven jumped up and down, whooping and cheering all of the while. "That was so totally awesome!"

Lapis grinned and summoned her wings up and flew to where Steven was, but before she could sit down or do anything else Steven rushed forward and threw his arms around her legs and grinned up at her, stars in his eyes once again. "That was the coolest thing that I ever seen! Did you used to dance here a lot!? Is this what you used to do before you meet Mom?!"

"No." Lapis laughed as she patted Steven's curls down. "I was part of a late arrival terraforming unit but some other Lapis's were part of your mom's court but they were off-uh, they were of a different cut than us, their powers weren't as strong so your Mom built this arena for them. So they could dance and entertain instead doing what we could do. I always thought they were so graceful, always wished that I could do what they did but then I realized that the whole point of what we were doing with your Mom was that we could all do what we wanted, so we started to practice."

Wow, that was so nice of his mom. Steven was going to ask another question when suddenly he felt a tingling at the back of his throat. Instead of words, all that came out was a fit of coughing. When he stopped and pulled his hand away from his mouth, Pearl always reminded him to cover his mouth when he coughed, he saw that it was covered in plghm. "Ugh." He groaned, and his voice sounded whine, like his nose was blocked.

"Oh, that doesn't sound good." Lapis said as she rested her palm on his forehead, holding it there for a few moments before she scooped him up like he was a baby and held him close. "Come on little man, let's get you home."

But he didn't want to go home, he wanted to stay here for a bit longer and talk to Lapis some more about his Mom and ask her more questions about the spire and what had happened to the statue but when he opened his mouth all that came out was another cough. Lapis smiled, conjured up her wings and carried him out of the chamber.

He had only blinked for a moment but soon they were outside, the sky that had been peach colored when they arrived here but now it was dark blue with a hundred little pinpricks of light scattered about it. Steven twisted himself around in Lapis's arms as she carried him away and he caught sight of the sea spire, shrinking back down to the dot it had been when they had first appeared, a few shaft of lights the only thing stopping from falling apart entirely.

Steven had closed his eyes again and he drifted in and out of sleep so he could not have said for how long they had been flying but soon enough it seemed that they were back at the Beach House, the warm light of his room shinning on them through the screen door was almost comforting and nearly lulled him back to sleep.

Holly Blue saw that did not happen, she pushed open the screen door so forcefully that Lapis needed to step back even as she met her enraged gaze. Holly Blue stared at her, then down to Steven than up at Lapis again and exploded. "WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN!? WE HAVEN'T HEARD ANYTHING FROM YOU IN ALMOST TWELVE HOURS! GREG HAS HAD SEVERAL PANIC ATTACKS AND I NEEDED TO PUT HIM TO SLEEP!"

As an aside Steven really hoped that didn't mean what it sounded like and all she meant was that she let him freak out, gave him some aspirin, made him some tea and sent him to bed but to be honest he was too tired and his head was too achy for him to really ask. He tried to speak, but all that came out was a cough which was then followed up by a sneeze.

"...He's sick!" Holly screamed and Pearl took that moment to step out from behind Holly and took Steven from Lapis's arms, carrying him into his room and up the stairs to his bedroom. Pearl took off his clothes, dressed him in his banana yellow pajamas and put some socks on his feet before she tucked him into bed and pressed a kiss to his forehead.

A few moments later there was another kiss to his forehead and when he opened his eyes, he saw that a mug of hot chocolate, complete with the perfect amount of whip cream and marshmallows was waiting for him. He was too tired to take more than a sip of it, but the warmth that sip and the gesture left in his chest, was more than enough to lull him into sleep.

Chapter Seven

Whoop, another chapter done.

I hope you enjoyed this one, the point of these early chapters really is to sort of establish Steven's relationships with the other gems as well as to see up some early intrigue. I really did enjoy writing Lapis in this, considering Blue Pearl is a different character than CG Pearl, consider Lapis really a fusion of Pearl and Amethyst, in terms of roles if not personality.

Anywho, please consider leaving a review, a follow and a favorite if you enjoyed. Constructive Criticism is always welcome.

And of course, don't worry. We will back to the Lunar Sea Spire.

With a ton of love and respect and affection,

DiscordantSymphony