Part IV: Absorption (Act I: "Paradise Lost")
What's a devil to do
when those old delusions so tried and true
don't come through like they used to
Ugh, all my money's ran out
I blew it all on a cumulus cloud
that dissipated so fast, seems the good times never last
And I always land flat on by back
Like an upside down cat
But is bad luck really such a crime?
If you won't be my valentine,
won't you at least give me a little bit of sympathy?
I made a silly mistake
I've given up more than I can take
and left hollows in my wake
(I'm safe. I'm whole. I've got it under control)
My structure's compromised
(I'm safe. I'm whole. I've got it under control)
But you still batter at all my fault lines
(And I will protect you even if you won't protect me, too)
I can't run, I can't hide, but you can't say I didn't try
to retreat back into me
like a catabolic seed
I want to destroy everything that's mine
If you won't be my valentine,
won't you at least give me a little bit of sympathy?
I don't care if I'm losing myself in the garden of earthly delights
I could drop dead right where I stand and I wouldn't mind
-From The Scary Jokes' „Catabolic Seed"
...
So for years upon years, you grow accustomed to that person's presence, and you start planing out your life expecting that they will be there by your side.
You initial excitement may have waned long ago, your occasional frustration might be much closer to the forefront of your daily thoughts,but when they entered your life, they added some net benefit, a positive reinforcement, a safety net you could count on, or even just a minute background presence of warmth and familiarity – and with time, the internal processes and balances of your body, mind and soul adjusted to expect it, to include it, to rely on that person and their presence in your life as surely as you relied on the gravity that keeps you anchored to the floor.
Before long, all the minute chemical and electric equilibriums that comprised you as a being would have shifted to fit the mold of their presence, so much so that they would be disturbed even you wanted that person to leave, because the simplistic, archaic algorithms of your more primitive components had registered them as a packmate and understood little about reasons or dignity or the concept of finality.
Even in the circumstances of a largely meaningless loss, Homeostasis might break down across all arbitrary compartments of your fine-tuned clockworks, even if all you lost was some illusion of your own making – but what if you lost something that was not meaningless?
Real love is a promise beyond transient and error-prone flittering of chemicals; One does not have to fall prey to any sort of soppy romanticism in order to recognize that.
All that which we might consider the higher functions of movement, will, feeling, thought and spirit had their basis in physical processes, parts pushing on parts that looked nothing like the emergent whole.
Even if one were merely discussing a perturbation of the hardware they ran on, they could not be unaffected, so what if they had been integral parts of the process to begin with?
Do not delude yourself out of pride, because you'd like to keep your clean neat little thoughts safe from the very cold, mechanistic reality you might want to speak for:
That person you lost? By now, they had probably attained some place in your concept of yourself, or even played some vital role in your understanding of the world itself and the meaning you assigned to your choices and experiences, as proof that your life made sense.
There were circuits in your mind, a great many of minute little pattern-recognizing devices, that were devoted entirely to them: To recognize their shape from any possible angle, any perspective in three-dimensional space, to know them even in a garbled image, to pick out their voice in the clamor of an enormous crowd, to call up their image in an instant behind your closed eyelids, and tie it all together into a holistic, ineffable whole that would stand out to you more so than the component parts.
And if that was so, it would be because there was likely a great redundancy and abundance of such circuits, large areas of you in your rawest form dedicated only to them, to pick out their voice, their handwriting, their way of talking, describing and choosing words as it is mirrored in the speech centers of their own thinking implements.
With little others would you have made space to store the set of their characteristic moods and expressions, consecrated a part of your soul to hold a sophisticated little model of them so you might predict what they might do.
They become a part of you, idling around in the caverns of your mind, being incorporated in your most basic, general patterns of behavior, little reminders to take them into account – and now that they were gone, now that you would never see them again, all these little circuits – all those intimate little parts of yours – had all been rendered useless with one silent swoop of the scythe, like a chair or a room or a landing pad for someone who was not ever going to come back.
But don't count of all of you to understand this right away, or at the same time. You are, after all, a complex hierarchical network that changes largely through gradual reinforcement and backpropagation of signals. If it could alter so easily just from a single sentence being flung your way, you could never hold a stable pattern and nothing could take shape apart from fleeting, ever-changing impressions, reacting merely to what it immediately in front of you without filter or direction.
So in the days to come, you'll be going about your day, and out of habit, you would find yourself considering what they might think – that person. The one who was lost.
The one who is always on your mind though you no longer say her name.
You'd see something, and you'd find yourself considering that they might like it, you'd have a thought, and think of sharing it with them, or, you'd experience hardship, and look for the comfort of their presence, until you remembered that, oh, that's not really an option anymore, that's yet another thing that you cannot do now that you are here alone without them.
From your highest heart, you learned to bring forth love despite yourself, to squeeze and milk it from the infertile grounds of your soul through struggle and adversity, and now that it's recipient is nowhere to be found, its destination unavailable, there was nowhere for it to go, and you'd feel it building up within like the obscene swell of infection, clogging up the circuits of your mind, gluing your tangled thoughts into a sticky, unwieldy mess-
Yellow Diamond knew exactly what these rebels had done with Pink – she could never forget, not even for a moment, no matter how much she might have wanted to.
So there was no need to remind her, not with any sort of physical keepsakes, and certainly not with the pain that pierced through her chest in every waking moment.
There was just nothing she could do about it anymore.
Nothing at all -
Besides, she couldn't afford to let herself break in pieces. Not now. The empire needed her. Blue and White needed her – and besides, there was still the matter of this little uprising to deal with, which was quite enough of a distraction in and of itself.
She pushed herself press onward, but she would have been lying if she said that her concentration and judgment were unaffected. She could hear White's inevitable objurgations in the back of her mind even knowing that she was all the way back on homeworld, most likely going about her days as if nothing had happened at all.
Soon after the news reached them, Yellow warped to Earth, determined to end this debacle in person.
She waltzed in with her arms behind her back and her face set in a heavy frown, so that she might make do with a world where everything was torn and smashed and broken and, quite simply, nothing would ever be alright again.
It was a simple fact of life, and there was no use in lamenting or resisting it.
This was simply her world now, and it called for her attention.
Earth, at least insofar as one considered the homeworld-aligned side of things, was in complete disarray. The chain of command had collapsed completely, subsumed by agonized wails, aimless wanderings and fearful whispers.
They knew not what to do, until the sound of Yellow's titanic footfalls cut through the chaos – and the more dazed the lost sheep had been before her arrival, the quicker their instincts would force them to move once she started barking out orders, wasting no time in rerouting the decapitated court and its disorganized army toward some semblance of purposeful action.
And she was not alone –
Pink's former subordinates had all but proven their incompetence – what more, given the mysterious circumstances of her death, even their loyalty was in doubt.
Thus, Yellow brought some of her own most trustworthy staff along with some of Blue's foremost elites.
Blue herself was in the crook of her right arm when they materialized on the terrestrial galaxy warp – She was hardly fit to be seen, let alone for travel, but she had insisted on coming along, in a cold, trembling, dangerous voice reminiscent of a wrathful spirit, and though she'd made a show of arguing against it, Yellow could not bring herself to be too insistent – for as much as she wanted Blue out of harm's way, the idea of leaving her on homeworld by herself discomfited her immensely; Besides, the prospect of revenge seemed to be the only thing that could get her to focus for extended periods of time these days.
Upon her arrival, Yellow summoned all the top brass and took personal control of everything related to the war, looking through all troop movements and the background of every single gem that had served in Pink's entourage on that fateful day – all were accounted for, apart from her pearl, who was presumed to have perished in the raid as well (a conclusion no one doubted – after all, she was only a pearl.) But since she would have been the one to keep track of Pink's appointments, it was a lot harder to reconstruct a timeline of her last days than it might otherwise have been.
Whatever schedules and records Yellow was able to reconstruct were still riddled with large gaps, and the elder Diamond had some suspicious why, though she did not quite want to believe it, but it's not like Pink's staff would have dared to question the comings and goings of their Diamond. Surely, even Pink couldn't be so insane as to sneak out to play hooky on a planet crawling with traitorous rebels!
But the mysteries abounded, and what Yellow Diamond found in the moon bases' data-cores only seemed to tell half the story, a story that confounded her more the more she tried to piece it together.
The various earthborn gems told tales of a very different Pink Diamond, one who was certainly gentle and eccentric, but also gracious, wise, inspiring and maternal, and even somewhat contemplative, as did the files – the earlier ones, though somewhat spotty, showed that she was actually pretty engaged in getting the various facilities set up, particularly the kindergartens.
Sure, she was unaccounted for here and there, or frequenting the entertainment facilities, but for a while, it almost seemed like she had turned a corner.
Yellow faintly recalled an instance where Blue had visited her on earth and remarked something like this, that she had seemed, perhaps a tad bored, but also coping with it, looking forward to the emergence of her new gems and enjoying the freedom s that her new position afforded her. At the time, that had been her impression, too, but the thought was lost among various trivial recollections (Much unwarranted fawning about her newly-minted Amethysts and something about how she was trying to grow out her hair but frustrated when it mostly went upwards) and discounted once her complaints had started and quickly been taken as proof that she had not matured at all. It was about that time when progress began... stalling, but it might not have been more than a temporary fluke if this was not just around the time when this "Rose Quartz" first started causing a stir.
And while all three of them had loaned her various specialized gems to help out with tasks such as building and terraforming until Pink would have had the time to produce her own staff, most of the gems on Earth – and thus most of the defectors – had been Pink's own, from the ranks of the very creations she was ever so fond of.
Perhaps, that broke her spirit – and played its part in her dissatisfaction.
Still, though she and Blue had intervened before and often scolded her for her sloppy work, Yellow couldn't believe these old missives – Apparently, Pink had given the order that the rebels were not to be shattered unless it was unavoidable, and, if possible, to be detained, but of course, that often resulted in their escape.
"She must've hoped that they would see reason and come back to us..." one of her former soldiers explained, "She really was too good for this sinful Earth." - this was told to Yellow by a short, defective Jasper whom Pink had insisted to keep, prompting her to wonder if she would still be alive if she didn't have her bases staffed with barely-functional guards.
The part of Yellow Diamond that had once dwelt with her on the palace grounds could not help but agree with the puny quartz, while the general in her could only shake her head.
She learned far more than she would have needed to confirm her conclusions, too little to reach another answer, but just enough to reveal all their pains again.
Even if she couldn't understand every single detail of this picture, the upshot of it was the same every time, and the final scene outcome changed.
Whether the records told of her once promising early successes or her hopeless inadequacy in the face of the challenged leading up to her demise, there was no part of it that didn't come to her as a torturous devastation, and the same blade would visit her body once again when she was forced to watch it inflict itself on Blue, who took it as badly as mere words could be taken, yet still insisted on reading everything down to the most inanely irrelevant piece of casual correspondence despite Yellow's assurances that it wasn't necessary, replaying each message or video file over and over again as if it would somehow get longer from that, dissecting every account of the incident looking for something, anything they might have missed, drinking in each poisonous line with wild, frantic eyes, until her frayed constitution could no longer take their withering blows – and she might stop then, but only to throw herself on the floor and spill her tears and wretched sounds until her voice was too hoarse to go on and the wells of her soul ran dry.
- and for what?
What if there were a couple more obscure tidbits of Pink's life to be found between the pages? It did not change that there would be no new memories to be added.
What does it matter if there truly were some details of their last moments that they hadn't full understood? What if they were to reconstruct the events of that day down to the finest detail, when all possible scenarios could only lead to the exact same result?
What if there was some obscure way that she could have been saved?
She wasn't, and it was far too late to change that.
They might twist and turn it to their gems' content for as long as they pleased, but the outcome remained the same:
Pink Diamond had been a complete an utter fool who might as well have handed her gem to her enemies on a polished anvil. She couldn't have made the rebels' work easier if she had been in cahoots with them, and they had taken advantage of her weakness at every step of the way. She had been soft, and foolish, and... distracted...
And for that, she had paid the ultimate price - Been eaten alive, if Yellow Diamond had been familiar with that idiom.
But how could she explain that to Blue? How could she convince her to cease in her folly when it would mean making her understand that there was no absolution to be found? Oh how she wished that it were in her power to tear her from those files, but only White could forbid her anything, and she was far back home.
With every passing day, Yellow felt the once solid pillars of her world slip through her fingers like sand.
So she had the warp pad to the moon base smashed and erased the files pertaining to the colony's previous administration from all her personal terminals. The records could tell her nothing that she did not already know, so there was no point in sparing them another glance ever again.
Besides, none of them were needed anymore - This was no longer a question of restoring order to the pink court or completing the colony – for whom?
From the moment that the rebels dared to raise their hands against one of the authority, there was only one result that they could have accepted, personally or politically: Naught but the complete and utter annihilation of the crystal gems and the miserable planet they so cherished.
To that end, the Great Destroyer set to work.
As soon as she took over, she dispensed with all restraints and reservations and launched a merciless offensive against all known rebel strongholds.
….
Yes of course it was going to hurt; the very nature of it was violence.
After all she is cutting away at her own being, severing ties with her own kin.
She envies those lucky sun-children, cognates of paradise who can afford to be at peace with all of themselves.
So she sheds her old skin like a deceiving reptile, the humble worm hoping that she might finally spread her wings, that she would not suffocate inside her cocoon without ever succeeding to break the eggshell that had been her previous world, left to fall out of her skies like a meteor, cursed to crawl upon her belly like the worm she always was, biting her tail to devour her own life.
But Bismuth's sword holds its promises, even though its mistress could not keep her own, and the blade that hits her in her center does not strike her down, nor does it inconvenience her for long.
With her kind of power, she finds the strength to reform almost right away, and if she holds out, it's only to give Pearl enough time to make her getaway.
But once she believes herself sure that she must have made it, there is no more hesitation, no deliberation, not even the tiniest sliver of doubt.
- She knows exactly what kind of form she wants this time.
She pictures it before her, imagining how it will finally feel completely natural and comfortable, without even the slight little tug that even she would feel from holding such a divergent form for so many days on end. She imagines no more lies, no more going behind people's backs, no more staling away in the night to take a breather, no more dithering on the threshold; She could finally commit for good, and the past that was thrust upon her would cease to matter forever.
She knows, finally, what kind of life she hopes for – her new life, her actual life as chosen by herself.
She just didn't expect it to start in the pouring rain, to the tune of Peal's frantic sobs and shivers as she hugs herself with her thin arms, clutching the hilt of her sword.
Immediately, she rushes to comfort her: "Hey, it's okay, I'm fine, I'm here, it's only me now."
But she misunderstands.
(Even if you fail to be born, it's only natural that you should die. )
It is not with drums and fanfares that they are welcomed home when they reach the rebel stronghold – amid the desperate onslaught, no one even wastes a thought on notions victory.
"ROSE!"
Sometimes, it still took her just a few seconds too long to respond to that name.
"Rose! Pearl! Where have you been? All hell has broken loose!"
"W-well, you see, she took a hit while we were fleeing and we had to wait for her to reform...-"
"Never mind now... Our positions are being overrun as we speak... And I'm afraid there have been casualties..."
Their comrades have their heels dug into the mud, forced to parry one blow with their left hands before their right was done with deflecting the last. The two of them are greeted with broken barricades and splintered combatants.
Left and right, there is leaking cracking glitching breaking crumbling like never before, closing the curtain on the days when they were a wave of star children of just daring to dream new dreams, discovering their bodies and souls in the forests far from the restrictions they had known.
The bad blood had seeped in, and the halcyon days were most definitely over – and they, too, could never relent, not after they'd had a taste of freedom, not after they'd learned to value themselves, to dare think they deserved better.
They could never go back, not without everything they were revolting at the thought. They'd left behind the established paths and made it out to the great unknown where there are no roads but the ones they carve out for themselves – even if they had to do so with tooth and nail.
If they could not crack the world's shell, they would die without ever being born, robbed of the chance to ever truly live yet haunted by the distant mirages of possibility and lost potential.
There never was a "Rose Quartz", but there was a rebel leader, and she had decided to stand and fight a long, long time ago – but she had hoped it wouldn't be like this, that it wouldn't be her half-sunken in the mud, with Pearl desperately struggling at her side, hacking away with her sword despite the terror that was plain on her face. At her back, Garnet and Biggs hammering away at their enemies, forced back to the battlefield after they had filled their lives with so much beautiful meaning outside of it. It struck her that Biggs had taken it upon herself to fill Bismuth's empty spot in their usual formation.
All around them, their comrades were fighting for their lives. Crazy Lace was wrestling an enormous Amethyst. Snowflake was holding her own not one, not two, but three Ruby fusions, entire platoons' worth of gemstones glittering on the surface of their bodies.
Pink recognized some of their opponents as well; She had known some of them since they emerged... or since she emerged, in case of the ones from the blue and yellow courts. Most of them weren't bad gems – but here they were, mowing down her beloved friends for the sole crime of having dared to think that they should be happy.
She had tried to resolve things peacefully where she could and abstain from lethal force where possible, and that had put her at odds with one of her own closest comrades – and for what?
When she decided to leave her old life behind for good, she had thought that it would finally set her on a clear course where she could fully stand behind her every choice without having to weigh conflicting goals, but instead, the relentless onslaught forced her hands more often than ever... but what was she supposed to do?
Stand by as they killed her friends and despoiled this beautiful planet?
Her bare feet were cut up from the shards of friend and foe alike – and that was only right, cursed would be the day where she could shed their dust without feeling anything at all just as the authority did. Again and again she reached out her arms, trying to cover as many as she could under the arc of her shield, to become the wall between them and their doom as if that could somehow make up for the billions that her fellow diamonds must have slaughtered.
But she couldn't be everywhere at once, there was only so far she could reach, and only so much that her healing powers could fix.
She often thought of Pink Pearl in moments like these. How many more of her friends and comrades would she have failed before this bitter fight was over?
When she beheld the senseless waste of life around her, she found much cause to weep, and she would have cried no less if her tears did not come with such useful applications.
When she first discovered that ability, more by accident than for any other reason, she thought that things were finally different. That she was no longer so helpless as she had been when Pink Pearl was torn from her grasp, that she would be able to protect them now, that she could maybe get close to them without pulling them all down the blackhole abyss of her own cursed existence.
Truth be told, she had been terrified in that moment, much more so than she had been relieved, thinking for a moment that she must have blown her cover, but instead, her comrades had been far too impressed and too little surprised. Instead of turning on her with torches and pitchforks, they had sung her praises and gone on to rave about how it was only proof of her extraordinary unique nature, and how inspiring it was that a gem made to be an engine of war could make herself a preserver of life.
Bismuth and Garnet had given her 'achievement' outright philosophical weight, and even Pearl, who should have known better, had attributed it to her greatness and loving nature, and it was so tempting to let them keep believing that, if that would inspire them to believe in their own abilities – after all, it was not long after that Pearl worked out how to summon her spear. Sometimes, she could even make herself believe it – after all, they were all discovering new things about themselves in those days, and it's not like Blue, Yellow or White would ever have thought to use their life-giving powers for healing. How would they ever find out? When had they ever cared enough about any of their fallen soldiers to be moved to tears?
She liked to think that she was saving them, that she was just making herself into the vehicle for their escape, but how did she know that she wasn't leading them into a fool's paradise?
In a private moment, Sapphire had confided in her that she couldn't see them winning the war, no matter how many times she looked. (Ruby was out cold at the time, her gem cradled in Sapphire's hands after "Rose" had healed the crack she'd sustained earlier)
Of course, she ended up being reassured that they would make it anyways, be it by the Crystal gem's "wise, courageous leader", or a naive young diamond misled by her own wishful thinking, and once Ruby reformed and rejoined her in their union, Garnet found it easier to stand tall and work to grasp that better future with her own two hands.
That was perhaps the one moment where she came the closest to disclosing the truth. As her second-in-command, Garnet would have understood the burden of being responsible for all these people more than anyone, of finding herself in that position when all she had wanted was to live free – The fusion was always fairly open about her doubts and limitations, and never minced words.
In that sense, she was almost Pink's exact opposite, but perhaps that's precisely why they had complemented each other as the spearheads of the rebellion.
She always considered Garnet one of her most special friends –
If you'd asked the "great Rose Quartz", she might have told you that Garnet was always the true visionary behind the crystal gems, though this was not something that ever reached Garnet's ears, or, if it did, she might have taken it as an outgrowth of their leader's inspiring, encouraging nature.
At the time, she was not nearly as certain in herself and her nature as she would one day come to be, and that very same bluntness sometimes made it hard to her to deal with or reassure the others where "Rose's" optimistic words and charming personality easily succeeded.
But though Pearl was in charge of things like safety precautions and routine drills, it was always Garnet who maintained the discipline among their ranks and interceded when it became necessary for someone to put their foot down, at times without Pink Diamond necessarily knowing, but always in the assumption that this was what she would want, to save her further work as, it were.
If she hadn't, it might have been a lot more apparent that "Rose" was actually quite reluctant and uncomfortable with the act of dispensing disciple.
To begin with, she might not have been well-equipped to realize when it was necessary, given her own disposition – Responsibility was thrust upon her by necessity and she strove to live up to its requirements, but it was not something that came to her naturally, nor a thought that would pop up in her mind if she didn't make the conscious effort to remind herself.
Besides, she knew very well what it was like to feel restricted, and she would not inflict this on anyone else for the world, to the point of erring on the side of permissiveness where safety or discipline ought to have taken precedence.
And who was she to tell anything to anybody?
She had no right, least of everyone.
And though this was not a connection that Pink Diamond herself would have made, a more distanced observer like perhaps a later historian might have come to the conclusion that this trait of hers was not necessarily a bad thing, or perhaps best understood as a neutral characteristic with both helpful and counterproductive repercussions depending on the context.
She was what she was, and that's allowed her to do the things she did where others had not, warts and all -
After all, Blue Diamond could be said to be sensitive and tactful, and Yellow Diamond might be thought of as responsible and considerate – and by those very hooks and scruples that might have otherwise become their greatest virtues, White Diamond had roped them into doing her bidding as her loyal enforcers, tied in place not just by their own shortcomings, but the voices of their better angels, all the sentiment and loyalty that would balk at the notion of betraying their creator.
In a sense, all three had mercilessly crushed and buried every inconvenient part of them on the altar of their zealotry;
For where one consumed and driven by selfish greed alone might have relented to save their own measly life once things got inconvenient for them, but one who believed their acts to be necessary for all that is right and good would not cease in their efforts until they had destroyed themselves completely – and quite possibly, everything around them.
Pink Diamond was not like that, perhaps out of some mechanic of the universe that ensured that the overabundance of any thing must eventually bring forth its opposite.
She was all about telling people to follow their desires, to do what they want and what makes them happy, a message that sounded revolutionary to those who had spent lifetimes being told that their dreams and feelings weren't important, as wasted as that idea may have been on her fellow diamonds.
On Earth or on Homeworld, this was what she had added, what would be missing if she were to disappear, nothing more, nothing less.
Not what had always come from Pearl's resourcefulness or Garnet's determination or Bismuth's resolve, but something regardless, something that sparked change where for the longest time, there had been none.
All of that would have been news to Pink Diamond, however. She did not understand why others flocked to her, nor the radical notion that they might want to return the adoration and dedication she so readily expressed to them.
– when she looked at the others, at how far they'd come sice their first encounters, she couldn't help the impression that she was falling behind. Still stagnant. Still limited.
Each time Pearl described anything she did as "the mark of a great leader", she would feel nauseous, shaky and just a little bit tempted to fantasize about bashing herself to pieces with one of Bismuth's old tools, but of course, she could never, ever let it show, not when the others were looking to her, not when they were reaching out to her from the pits of their desperation...
But what should she do?
What could she do?
How did things end up like this?
She'd never wanted this, but somehow, someway, it had come to pass.
All she'd ever wanted was to be free, to have some friends and to save this world from destruction.
But here she was, as trapped as she had ever been, while all around her was slaughter.
(If we cannot crack the world's shell, we will die without ever being born.)
She thought that things would be different -
But that was before she'd seen so many innocents crushed so thoroughly that her crying was as useless as it had ever been.
….
Some of the Rose Quartzes protested their innocence up until the moment their forms were dispelled, some decried the injustice, confessing not what they did, but what they wished they had done; Others professed their undying loyalty to the authority as they wept, begging on their knees for mercy – but most penitently accepted their fate or begged forgiveness for the actions of their wayward 'sister', even going so far as to handle the restraining and poofing of their beloved comrades, bubbling them themselves until only one of them was left.
That one expressed the desire that the moon goddess might take her to where Pink Diamond was now, which one of Pink's jaspers perceived as such an insolence that she destroyed her that instant, repeatedly stomping her shards into the dirt.
(This is why you wouldn't find one single orange bubble among the sea of cherry-blossom tint)
The others were scheduled to be disposed of, too, but while she was seeing to the progress of her offensive, Yellow Diamond was informed that her order had been canceled, by none other than Blue Diamond herself.
This resulted in an argument between the two, of which the former eventually tired and decreed that they should simply be shipped off planet for now until they could decide what to do with them at a later point.
She insisted on keeping the off-colored soldiers, too, citing that Pink had been so fond of them, just as she'd so been fond of the Rose Quartzes.
"Yes, and then one of them destroyed her!"
"They're all we have left of her...They were hers..."
"And yet, one of them betrayed her! That's exactly why they deserve no mercy! Besides, what could you possibly want with them? What use could they have? They're all suspect."
"But she was so happy when she made them... we were so proud of her that day... we all were... all four of us..."
She crumbled into a pile of sobs at this point, holding on tightly to the folds of her cloak as she wrapped them around her, sinking deeper and deeper under their cover, as if she wanted to disappear beneath the fabric.
"So why... why did it end up like this..."
Because she was weak.
But Yellow knew that Blue was not going to like that answer.
"What does it matter? It did. One of these aberrations betrayed her and put a sword through her gem. What would you have us do with them? Wait for them to destroy you, too?"
(That was a purely rhetorical question, snappy, sarcastic and much harsher than it needed to be, but the worst was that Blue didn't answer.)
But poofed gems tell no tales, and the one salient piece testimony that Yellow and Blue couldn't find was the one that got lost in the shuffle, placed beyond their reach by their own actions:
None of the Rose Quartzes had seen the rebel leader emerge, and if you had bothered to ask them, none of them would recall being part of her batch.
Sure, there was a file in the moon base's computer systems, a ridiculously unremarkable entry supposedly made right when she first reported for duty, but reality was not so easily tampered with as a register on a hard drive - in truth, the recorded values and measurements were so average because the file was a fake, put there by a certain renegade pearl back when she was first teaching herself to work with computers, in case they were ever asked for a serial number.
So if you searched the data bases, you would be led to believe that 'Rose Quartz, Facet 4, Cut 13M' was unremarkable in every way.
But she had no exit hole, no assigned dwelling to her name.
When Pink Diamond's former Agates were forced to admit that they didn't know which of them the traitor had been serving under, they weren't speaking lies, and neither were they at fault.
No one had seen or heard of this curious individual until stories of her just started popping up like mushrooms, and the earliest ones couldn't even agree on what sort of quartz she was supposed to be.
In most of them, she just showed up, usually unannounced, with some flimsy explanation as to what she was doing here, though she usually claimed that she had been ordered to help out whatever unit of gems had crossed her path.
When pressed for details, she might have claimed to have received her orders from Pink Diamond herself – a clumsy fib more than a power move, but it was often enough taken for the latter, particularly since that peculiar quartz was often accompanied by a Pearl, suggesting that she must have done something to earn her.
Once or twice some higher-ranked gem might have thought to report her for loitering about the landscape, but when asked whether she had actually sent those orders, Pink Diamond certainly did not deny it, and her orders were not questioned, which rather created the impression that the oddball quartz must have somehow managed to rise through the ranks and win the favor of her liege despite her apparent penchant for slacking off.
Later, that impression would make her a worse traitor in the eyes of the loyalists and a more justified executioner in the view of the rebels, but an impression was all it ever was.
Had one captious detective thought to line up the sightings with what was known of Pink Diamond's shedule, or interviewed the various lowly worker gems that encountered her while they labored away at the early foundations of the colony, the truth might not have been that difficult to deduce – if anyone complained about their working conditions within earshot of her, if would not be long before Pink Diamond 'just happened' to pass some sort of edict to remedy that.
And once things finally came to a head? The infamous proclamation at the Prime Kindergarten, where she spelled out her manifesto, smashed up an injector, publicly rebuked the ways of the authority, cast off her uniform for all to see, and thus made herself a wanted fugitive, or the grand declaration of war?
Not only had both incidents 'coincidentally' happened after some particularly heated arguments between Pink Diamond and the remainder of the authority, one might also be tempted to cut the agates of the pink court some slack considering that the rebellious instigator they were supposed to be chasing not only had access to all plans and hidden backdoors anywhere on Earth but factually did not exist for half of the time – they would lose her trace in the woods, and stand at attention without batting an eyelash when their ruler came through the gates, never remotely considering that they might be saluting the very criminal they had been chasing before.
And sure they might have noted something vaguely familiar about their foe, but as her novel, exclusive creations, the Rose Quartzes would be expected to resemble their maker in some ways, and Pink Diamond always did have a reputation for being the eccentric of the Diamond authority. Leave it to her to think of making her warriors all soft and fluffy and prime them to defend rather than destroy -
And once the one Rose Quartz had earned herself a reputation, well, no one even expected her to be ordinary anymore. Her followers knew her as a worker of miracles, and her enemies chalked it all up to her being a traitorous abomination.
But whatever else she could be said to have been, what remains without question is that she had now become public enemy number one.
"High honors and promotion to whoever aids in the capture of Rose Quartz in any way whatsoever.", Yellow Diamond would promise to her gathered legions as they stood at attention before her, arranged in rectangular formations while their sovereign addressed them from the platform around her elevated throne – rather than sitting on it, she was pacing around in its vincinity, gesturing with her arms as she explained how the loyalist onslaught was to proceed. "Bring me her shards in a bubble, and you can take whatever you please from the royal vaults for all that I care. I want that traitor dead, and I do not care at all how you make her dead, as long as you put out her light forever. Just make that happen. "
Not far from her, Blue Diamond was slouching in her throne, leaning against one of its corners, shrouded in the folds of her cloak, revealing scarcely more than her gemstone and the drawn, careworn line of her mouth. Where her companion could not seem to stop moving, she was completely inert. But even so, she was a terrifying sight to behold, perhaps more so than ever; The air was thick with the suffocating pressure of her power. "Yes, if you can, bring us her shards. Bring us word of her dying screams. Let us hear what a garbled, distorted mess she was right before she came to pieces. Tell us how she suffered... But know that if you manage bring her back alive and deliver her into our hands, I myself shall reward you beyond the bounds of your wildest imagination."
….
This colony had been going well once – or so Jasper had been told.
Many of its citizens recalled when things had still been going as they were supposed to – some of them had been brought along from the homeworld, some of them were sent from the other courts the aid in the construction until the earth had yielded others to take their place, and others still, like herself, had been made here, once meant to be the first in a long line.
But the spires, temples, arenas and complexes they were once meant to populate had come to be riddled with holes before the new citizens were ready to move in.
By the time Jasper was made, as a product of the war thrust right into the fighting from the moment she broke free of the ground, what little had been completed of the great work was already broken to pieces before it could ever be finished -
Jasper only ever knew them as ruins.
- and the others, those citrines and aventurines and the capricious blue agates who weren't even Pink Diamond's gems, to whom this world was nothing more than a black stain on the history of the empire, they had seen it. Or at least, they had come to know what a proper gem colony was supposed to be like, ordered and rigorous and resplendent.
She liked to imagine what it would have been like to live at the colony in its prime, what it was like to have what that accursed traitor must have had before she decided that it was not enough to her, and set it all ablaze, what her life might have been like if she had lived in a whole, untainted world -
But she knew full well that her life wouldn't have been like anything at all, because a disgrace like the Beta kindergarden would never have been allowed if it weren't for the treasonous doom that had ravaged her home.
…
The precipitation would not cease.
Without end, the blue planet's waters poured down as if there were a second ocean layer in its skies. They were even colored like an ocean, when they were not covered in a thick layer of clouds, and the downpour softened up the ground and nourished the many writhing, slithering creatures that lived in its turbid mud, heating it up with the chemical chaos of their life, constantly growing on and into each other, constantly devouring each other, just as they had devoured Pink.
Yellow Diamond didn't think she had ever seen anything as revolting as their dizzying, quick, macabre dances, the fungi sprouting up in mere days and the vines that crept toward the skies, and all these were still slow compared to the creeping, slithering things in the thickets, the stewing warm piles of flesh, the overpowering smells of everything -
There was no part of this world that wasn't one single film of slippery slime, and she was up to her ankles in the dissolving grime, kicking down trees and layers and unearthing rotten leaves with each step.
If she'd had the time, she would have ordered this whole mess burnt to the ground and let her armies march in over the ashes, but this would have cut down their visibility, and the rebels would have been scattered into all directions by the time the flames died down.
The rebels knew the terrain, some of them had even taught themselves to shapeshift into local creatures that were suited to moving in this terrain.
Deserts could not have stopped them, no icy plains, no rugged mountains, no pockmarked volcanic crater-scapes, but these mats of green growth resisted them as tenaciously as the crystal gems themselves.
It was one thing to press onward when there was a real chance of catching the rebels, to act where action was demanded;
Though her own entourage had all but begged her to remain behind for her own safety, Yellow Diamond had insisted to lead the assault in person.
It was a political consideration, too; The rebels must have done this to prove that they were not untouchable, so the worst thing for the authority to do at a time like this would be to show themselves daunted and hide behind the lines as if they feared the blade of Rose Quartz – but mostly, Yellow Diamond wanted this mess to end and the assault done right, so there she had been, barking out orders left and right and coordinating with her hessonites as not to allow the slightest opening in the cohesion of their lines.
Hundreds of rebels lost their forms to her lightning, and she even thought that she caught a glimpse of rose quartz in the shuffle, getting a good shot a smiting her – but one lithe little follower of hers jumped in the way and took the blast for her, and before she knew it, the accursed traitor was out of her sight.
The rebels were not so foolish as she would have hoped; They knew better to concentrate their fire on her and give her the chance to wipe them out at once; Instead, they sent a few seasoned fighters to keep her engaged; They had no illusions of actually beating her, but their true goal was to buy time for their comrades to escape, and Yellow refused to play their game, focusing on making quick work of the heaviest hitters in the enemy lines.
The loyalist forces had the numerical advantage, but the rebels fought with everything they had, in all ways imaginable or not, with an insane tenacity that made one wonder just what it was about their deviant beliefs that pushed them to such heights -
The loyalists would rout the rebels in the end, but a great number of them would escape, among them their leaders, so it was not clear who scored the tactical victory, but even so, there had been progress.
It was quite another matter to be trudging back to base afterwards, thoroughly soaked and left with little to do but to decide what to do with any stragglers the quartzes might pick up along the way.
The hessonites could handle the cleanup on their own – even just the agates might have been enough. There was nothing to do but wade through the vegetation until they could rendezvous with the fleet, really, nothing to do but wait and get rained on and finally let reality sink in.
The water kept pouring and poring – there was so much of it here that it regularly eroded away at the face of the planet, reshaping its geological features, carving its paths into the dirt.
It was hard to believe how anything could exist here at all when there was such an abundance of strong solvents, and yet, the creatures that crawled on its surface were practically plump, taut waterbags – Granted, she'd once heard from Blue that some species out there like wondered how anything could withstand something as caustic as an oxygen atmosphere and how many of them might have considered the gem homeworld every bit as inhospitable as the Earth... at the time Yellow had actually found that more interesting than Blue herself, who had explained it with a sort of curious derision and not shown much interest when Yellow took this as an occasion to converse about chemistry, but now, she cared nothing for it.
The sight of these creatures evoked nothing but revulsion, and all knowledge she might have had of their composition merely gave rise to various ideas about how they might go about weeding them out, not as an inevitable side effect to the purposes of the empire, but to poison the rebels' wells.
With every tree she had to crush beneath her boots, she was reminded anew how much she loathed everything about this miserable planet.
She longed for the homeworld.
More than she ever had on any of her many travels, more than she had in tens of thousands of years, she wished she was back at the palace, with White, with all three of them -
For a moment.
And then, she crammed that thought right back where it came from, with all the violence it deserved, lest it overcome her right here in the rain.
The storm was still raging when they made it back to base.
The structure that served as their base camp was not one of Pink's old facilities, but a building complex that had been lowered from orbit in one piece, a mass-produced, pre-fabricated sort of structure she had used as a temporary camp on many of her conquests.
The layout was familiar as such, Yellow Diamond had stayed in places like this complex and its many predecessor models too many times to count, but since it had been designed as a disposable short-term operations hub, the accommodations might have been considered a bit spartan by aristocratic standards.
Under any other circumstances, Blue would certainly have complained, and Yellow would just as certainly have rolled her eyes at that, but now, it would be a definite relief to hear her complain.
Instead, Yellow found her at the windows, with a palm pressed to the hardened clear-steel pane, looking out that the jungle that surrounded their stronghold, at those very same winding green creatures that Pink had been so fond of before that became her undoing.
The three large windows almost ran the full height of the room, ending in simple arches near the ceiling, perhaps one of the room's few true flourishes.
Blue was sitting on the floor, another thing she would never have done before, when she rarely deigned to walk on anything that wasn't the palace floors - and she kept doing it even though Yellow had ever so subtly ordered that an appropriately sized chair be placed near the window; Eventually, she had just settled on having a carpet procured.
Yellow Diamond had her own lodgings at the other end of the complex, identical except for the color scheme and the fact that the windows were always drawn shut, but eventually, her pragmatism would win out over her pride and she would order that additional floors be put through that other room so that it could be put to some other use, as both diamonds would usually be staying at the western end of the complex when not otherwise occupied with the war effort.
Particularly around the desk, this was evidenced by the presence of various objects that clashed with the overall coloration of the room, largely computer terminals and subspace communicators, since Yellow would generally come here to take care of her subspace correspondence, and she had good reason to stay on top of it, since the rest of the empire wasn't going to stop demanding their attention just because they were embroiled in this little uprising, and for that same reason, it would only be appropriate to discuss related matters of policy with Blue -
But Blue's own things were arranged in a neat stack in one of the corners, having barely been touched at all.
It was a fortunate thing too, that this lodge was at the end of the complex, since that limited the number of rooms where their various minions might feel her aura through the walls.
She was more and more like a busted-up, leaky pipe these days, where her feelings were concerned, and she couldn't find the nerve or the will or the energy to hold back much.
Their coexistence here was often a strained, raw thing, half frustrated pushing, half desperate tip-toeing, just barely keeping up with the constant unraveling of everything and anything around.
Sometimes Yellow came in here and Blue wouldn't speak to her at all, or do anything else than look through some old filed she had laid out on the floor or strare out the window as she was doing right now, and on other occasions, not always overlapping with the former, Yellow would not speak much either, at least not of things unrelated to business.
But she could not stand the thought of letting Blue out of her sight, nor, on some days, the concept of being alone with the dim silence of the other room.
Outside, the storm raged on. Though she could force herself onward, Yellow's concentration wasn't what it could have been, so she weighed her options, considering if it might be more productive to conclude this later. It certainly needed doing, regardless of whether 'later' could truly be expected to be any better.
How pathetic. She hated this, the whole damn pointlessness of it.
None of this miserable dithering was going to make Pink any less shattered, or any more avenged. The only result this could possibly have was to slow the rest of them down when they were needed the most.
She knew that, and yet she could feel herself slipping, just as she could see everything around her crumbling in her grasp.
And Blue was barely even putting up a fight.
Her body might have been here, forgotten by the window, but her heart was unreachable, sunken somewhere in the distant past, and that was the only place she had any interest in as of late. All she wanted was only to be found there, while Yellow stayed behind in the present, struggling to shake off the irrational notion that she had been abandoned by everyone, that all three of them had gone where she couldn't follow.
"Do you remember, Yellow?" She would sometimes say, without looking away from the window.
And remember she did, but all any rational being could wish for at this point was that they could both be rid of the memory.
"The first time I took Pink with me, to... what was it?", Blue continued, her eyes distant. "Omicron five? Omicron Five used to have weather much like this planet, you know, at least before the terraforming was completed... I think she was quite taken with it first, the way she would be excited by just about anything, but later, once I had to get to work, a storm much like this one started brewing..."
"..."
"This was one of the very first times she had ever left the homeworld, so she had never seen anything like that before. I remember at first, she was very curious about the precipitation and I had to stop her from going outside and making a mess of herself.
But then, it got quite loud, and I believe she must have gotten a little bit scared, because she came into my audience hall while I was holding court, and asked to stay with me. She wouldn't leave my side for hours..."
"..."
"Until I had to call you, I don't know about what, some matter of troop movements I think... and you asked what she was doing on my lap in the middle of a meeting.
You told her not to make a fuss about such a little thing, and at first she didn't like that at all, but... Then you explained to her what a storm is and how it works, and that got her much too excited for her to be scared anymore..."
"..."
"When that traitor came to break her, at the very end... she must have been very, very scared. Perhaps, she called out for us, but we weren't there. There was nothing we could do for her..."
"..."
"And now, there won't be anything we can do for her ever again.
We can't ever hold her. We can't ever tell her that everything will be alright, we can't ever make her suffering go away...
It's too late... for everything..."
"Yes, yes it is."
There was nothing else to say.
A/N: If I had to cite only one quote or musical inspiration behind the overall tone of Part IV, or indeed the fic as a whole, it would be that one.
And while, again, it goes well with the overall place that the characters wind up at, the "got it under control/fault lines/can't say I didn't try/even if you won't protect me too" verse in particular kinda perfectly describes the central tragedy of YD's character in particular.
I guess just love that song, period. ^^°