"I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air for I am sorry that I have made them. I will send rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground. And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the earth. On that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights. The ark floated on the face of the waters, and all flesh died that moved upon the earth. Birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. Then he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground. Then he waited another seven days, and sent forth the dove, and she did not return to him any more."
Where did the bird land? Or maybe it weakened and was swallowed by the waters, no one could know. So the people waited for her return, and waited and grew tired of waiting. They forgot they had released the bird, even forgot there was a bird and a world sunken under water. They forgot where they had come from, how long they had been there, and where they were going so long ago that the animals have turned to stone. The bird I saw, I can't even remember where or when, it was so long ago. Perhaps it was a dream. Maybe you and I and the fish exist only in the memory of a person who is gone. Maybe no one really exists and it is only raining outside. Maybe the bird never existed at all."
-From Mamoru Oshii's 'Angel's egg'. (Itself quoting some pretty famous book, or so I'm told)
...
She who hath made them could also unmake them.
And though she smiled and minded all the expected pleasantries as she greeted her offshoots, as if she were merely paying them a routine visit to survey the war effort, they could not forget that for an instant; She was only here because their thousand-year efforts had been deemed a failure.
But here she was: The August Star of Heaven, the brightest and fairest of them all, terrifying, sublime and blindingly scintillant.
For ages, the gems that crossed her path would claim that they had seen her, and for the remainder of what would come to be known as Era II, they would scarcely be believed.
This would be one of her last public appearances, and never again would she leave the homeworld, or even the confines of her own palace.
That alone ensured that this moment would pass into legend. Tales would be spun of the incomparable might with which she would smite her prodigal children, and of the unparalleled splendor that had been lost to the world when she turned her back on them in disgust, whispered prophecies that she might perhaps return if only they could prove themselves worthy once again by fulfilling their roles to perfection -
Thousands of years later, loyal veteran gems would had only seen her this one time would speak of her in tones of ecstatic rapture, the crescendo of their voices spurned on by equal parts of terror and adulation, expounding upon her perfection as they lamented her continued absence from their midst until their passionate exaltations faded into cantankerous gripes about how the younger gems would never understand – And to beings such as simple Rubies, one supposed that she could only have looked lordly and august...
But there was something else to be said there, something that only Yellow and Blue could have noticed, simply because they had known her longer and better than anyone else present, though even they would not have known how to parse it, or even how to put it into words.
They only knew that something seemed different about her, just enough to put them on edge more than she usually did – At first, Blue and Yellow had each privately wondered if that impression was merely a trick of their own frayed circuits, considering that perhaps, she was exactly the same, it was only they who had gone to pieces.
While they had only just so managed to render themselves presentable before their arrival, knowing that she might see through them anyways, her acrid perfection seemed, if anything, more glaring than ever, as if her hairdo and attire had never been so carefully arranged and her words never so prepared.
Her voice was unchanged in its uncomfortably warm, honeyed tone, her face so much more blithe and expressive than either of their own, her gestures vivid and animated in a way that reminded them rather painfully of Pink, but none of it reached her eyes.
All that one could discern from those silver irises was a profound sense of apathy, as if the whole wide universe along with this disastrous war that had claimed one of their own and come at a devastating cost to their empire were nothing more than a stage play she had lost interest in halfway through once things did not keep going the way she had expected them to.
The war, their subjects, even their own plights or the planet below – none of it truly seemed to hold her attention.
They began to suspect that she must be harboring an exceedingly foul mood beneath her pleasant exterior, disgruntled and bored without compare, though it had been said that boredom was nothing more than the lightest form of disgust and other cold, contemptuous kinds of reactions that one might find surprisingly divorced for the more involved, heated nature of anger.
They'd never seen her like this, not once in all of their years – and with every passing second, they began to dread the moment when they would be left alone with her – but for all the same reasons, they knew better than to try and delay it.
It never occurred to them to worry about her, or to outright come out and ask her what was on her mind – not anymore, not when they stood right before her, submerged in their fear of her arctic glow.
At last, the three of them would find themselves alone on one of the orbital observation decks – Blue's and Yellow's Pearls had gone to fetch something, or someone; In the aftermath, none of them would really remember.
The large window behind them revealed the curvature of the planet below.
The portals closed behind them, and it did not take much longer for White Diamond to drop all pretense of pleasantness. The warmth drained from her petite, symmetrical features, leaving behind what had been lurking in the background the whole time.
Her cloud-gray irises did not change a bit; She was left with an expression that was almost aggressively blasé, so much as to appear fastidious, but there was also a subtle hectic quality to her somehow, in a way that there hadn't been before, or, at the very least, nor in such an apparent manner.
She had her arms crossed, tapping one clawed finger against her arm as she waited for the Pearls' steps to fade into the distance, looking down at Yellow and Blue between her narrowed sable lashes in the expectation that they would take their allotted places to her satisfaction.
Then, when she figured that things would not get much better, she began speaking, glancing past them to eye the planet below with disdain, or perhaps, to fixate some particular point on its surface.
"So, how much longer shall we allow this little nonsense to continue?"
'This little nonsense' had been their life for the last thousand years, and it had been Pink's for a good while before that – it had left her shattered and two of them devastated – and here stood White, regarding it like a minuscule blip in her incomprehensibly long lifespan, which they supposed it was, but that did not keep her words from stinging, especially when the implication of their insufficiency was clear.
They had both despaired over the truculence and resourcefulness of the rebels whom they hated like the plague and could not suffer to live, but how dare they 'allow' the 'little nonsense' to 'continue'.
But Yellow supposed that they had no right to defend themselves, not when they had clearly failed at every step of the way, not when they stood here, silhouetted by that miserable planets' enduring cyan glow as the ultimate proof of their inability to carry out her orders.
All they could have felt was shame, but that should have been an old familiar sting by now. Better to get it over with.
"Perhaps now that you're here, we can launch a new offensive..." Yellow began, already in the process of switching to planning mode and expounding upon the current situation while pacing around with her arms behind her back, when White both stopped and silenced her with a gesture of her right arm.
"What for? There's no reason for either of us to crawling around down there to chase them all into their hiding-holes. Let's just blast them from orbit."
White seemed rather listless about the whole thing; A detached, impersonal choice, or at most a lackadaisical whim – unlike her offspring, she had no interest in drawing out the rebel's suffering or crushing them with the excessive force of her own two hands - She cared nothing for the rebels' suffering or lack thereof, she merely wanted them gone, like ants under the soles of her feet, so she was content to wipe them out from up high as long as she would be making an example of them to ensure that all possible versions of this tale would end with a draconian display of her might, lest they forget the inevitable consequences of defying Her Who Had Made Them.
Her mind was made up, which meant that there would be absolutely no point to any further discussion – so, the ever loyal and action-oriented Yellow Diamond moved right to implementing the plan. "As you command. I'll go sound the evacuation." and with that, she was out the door – She was frankly sick of this place and could hardly wait to put this all behind her.
Blue was the only one who took a moment to consider, and hesitantly looked to White as she readied herself to leave. "...but, evacuating an entire planet just like that, on such short notice..."
"What about it?" the Grand Matriarch raised an eyebrow in displeasure.
"...Nothing White. It's not like it really matters anymore..."
And with that, Blue clasped her hands together and shuffled out of the room.
As she was leaving, she thought she saw White stepping closer to the windows from the corner of her eye, sneering down at the planet below with a poison-like smile on her lips, possibly even mumbling something to no one in particular.
Blue even thought she heard what it was before the sliding doors closed behind her, but she was certain that she must have been mistaken.
("Fine, Starlight. Have it your way.")
10. Plague (Death The Song of Madness)
The Earth was engulfed with Babylonian confusion.
For those far from the last battlefields on the other side of the planet, it might have started with the uncertain, dubious perception of a song – where humans were nearby, they would have heard nothing at all.
If they were on the right side of the planet, they would certainly have noticed the sky filling out with light, but it was nothing compared to the panicked outcries of every single gem, fighting, working, wherever they may be, and whatever they might have been doing.
There might have been a brief, transitory period before their minds were fully overwhelmed where they were able to sense the disturbance, but their thought processes not yet too distorted to process them, moments in which they might have ascribed some sort of quality to the stimulus as one senses the taste of an exceedingly spicy dish, but it scarcely lasted more than a moment, and their minds would have been too seized up in alarm to give it much thought.
Was there some notion of wrath or grief or something like regret, but without understanding or for all the wrong reasons?
Even if anyone knew, no one remembered.
What came down from the skies was soon become pure force, sounds too loud no matter what tales they told, light so bright no matter what color it was, a rush of signal so wild it would break a mind no matter its meaning, a reaction or sensation that stopped being a feeling and started being some pathological malfunction, as any however well-deserved sympathy might dry up if their recipient had taken it all out on others once too many.
If there was a recognition, it would have been purely instinctual: The light was to them what the taste of blood and iron would have been to a human: That which gave birth to them, yet is foreign to them, not unfamiliar, and yet spelling doom.
All over the ravaged planet, minds struggled to find their words, forms spasmed, warped and contorted, and souls burned with untold pain as all semblance of will and direction was purged on them.
Exactly where they had been standing moments before, they had found themselves transported to some mythical place of torment, dropped into the lake of fire without moving a step.
There was no beauty to the act, not even the terrible sort – it was over much to quickly, often before the so-called sinners had any chance to realize what was happening: One moment they might have been slightly worried why their hand feels weird, and in the next, all their thoughts are extinguished.
The evacuation was chaotic and disorganized – their leaders did not actually intend to fry the circuits of anybody still loyal to them, but with billions of gems, is is unavoidable that some are going to be left behind.
Hessonite knows better than to try going back for what she keeps in her quarters when the evacuation sounds; A Zircon drops a stack of interrogation mirrors filled with various suspects is too hurried in picking them back up to notice the one that landed a little further away. A certain Nephrite captain gets separated from her crew, all of whom refuse to take off without her. Through palm tree canopies, Tanzanite sees the light and knows that it can't be anything good, and somewhere in the ruins of a magical facility that had been abandoned since the early stages of the colony, a lonely pearl is overtaken by the radiance as she sweeps the floors that no one but her had walked on for very long.
Only the war-ravaged spires and temples remain behind as remnants of a bygone age, abandoned, antediluvian elf-dwellings to fuel the fantasies of the younger civilization that would one day come to overtake this green earth, like poppies growing over a battlefield.
...
The return trip back to homeworld was beyond miserable.
With no more war to occupy their waking thoughts and no more rebels to focus their efforts, the three empresses would have been left to reflect on the last thousand years in silence.
Now that their foes were vanquished, their anger burned out, after their vengeance was exacted and after all they had justified by it, and in spite of the absurd monsters they had allowed themselves to become, they had nothing to distract them from the knowledge that Pink Diamond was still gone at the end of the day – to that effect, none of their unholy deeds had made the slightest sliver or a difference, and though they might have had convinced themselves otherwise here and there, in the end, they had known all along.
Their departure from the Earth affixed her death with a seal of finality, one last bottom line reminding them all that no more bargains with the universe would be accepted.
Predictably, it was not long until all this proved too much for Blue, and inevitably, White's response followed on the spot, harsh, uncompromising as she could never stand not to be: "Oh quit your pathetic whining!", she spat, coldly, the simmering tar-black contempt she had harbored all along finally coming to a boil. "Look at you! You have the power to destroy worlds and yet you do nothing but wallow in your own pitiful weakness. Stars, the sight of you! You disgust me!"
This, of course, could never have possibly resulted in an outcome where Blue would have been crying less. Under other circumstances Yellow might have urged her to pull herself together, though she would have chosen to do it more... delicately than White had, but she knew that it would prove useless. Blue was way beyond being reasonable today - Perhaps this could be said for all of them.
Sensing that this could not end well, Yellow attempted to intercede, though she knew that she was not going to like the result.
She began by bowing deeply.
"I'm sure Blue didn't mean to offend you. I know we must have given you more reason to be disappointed, and for that, we must ask your forgiveness."
The words had been calculated, but the remorse was a little bit too real: "It's just that this is all so... unprecedented. Nothing like this was ever meant to happen..." Her words were rather stiff, unsuited to containing the true magnitude of what needed to be said, and what may, indeed, have been impossible to say within the narrow range of replies that had any theoretical chance of being tolerated.
Not that this much concerned White Diamond.
"Both of you, disgusting!" She specified, making sure that Yellow knew just who was meant by that. "I can barely bear to look at you anymore! Have you seen your own face lately? I don't know how you have the nerve to speak. You two should have ended that mob of mongrels and deviants ages ago rather than forcing me to come all this way. If you two hadn't been so soft on Pink to begin with, we would not be here right now. And can't Blue speak for herself? Why do you presume to lecture me about what is going on? Who put you in charge? Are you perhaps forgetting your place, Yellow?"
That silenced Yellow rather efficiently, ensuring that she would be too consumed with attesting her honor to continue any previous train of thought:
"No, White, of course not- We-"
Blue, however, was not so easily moved by reprimand alone, and responded on a rather different channel, and unlike Yellow, she would not think of constraining her words:
"But don't you care at all? Does is really mean nothing to you that Pink was shattered?"
"She's not." There was a flash of light, passing right past Blue's face, leaving a spiderweb-crater in the wall and making it very clear that she would be very much poofed now, if White had truly wanted to.
"She's not shattered. She's not, because she can't be!"
The next victim was a nearby wall. Then, she went out the door, continuing down a nearby hallway, followed by ubiquitous sounds of crystal cracking – Her quarrel was not really with Yellow and Blue in particular, but with the world at large.
For such a being as a human who began their lives with very little power or knowledge, it was easy to reach the conclusion that their understanding of the world must adapt to the world itself and not the other way around. Their own finite nature was all too easily proven – It was only a mature, influential and self-aware human who could entertain the notion of changing the world to suit their ideas, such as to enforce ideals of justice.
But White Diamond had access to vast reaches of power from the moment she attained sentience, and dedicated herself to remaking ever-larger strips of the cosmos in her image ever since, so the opposite would outright appear more natural.
She was accustomed to making the world bend and having it obey, too, but just this once, it was intent of denying her, and that was as new to her as it would have been to a human toddler trying to force a square toy block through a round hole, and she was not any more discerning differentiated in her response, with the important distinction that she wielded all this incomparable power much beyond any force contained in flabby human baby limbs.
Enough power to destroy an entire world, yes, or to raise up a new one from the dirt, but even she could not undo thermodynamics and force back together what had broken into chaotic pieces.
No sooner than White was out the door, Blue would have collapsed into a sobbing mess in Yellow's arms. The immediate fear of White's retaliation might have stopped her simply by being an older terror, but mere considerations of wisdom could not.
Their thoughts weren't even dwelling on the previous incident – it would not have been the first time, nothing too out of the ordinary from what they were used to when it came to White; But her lack of sympathy certainly did little to soften the blow of what had brought them here in the first place.
Yellow had hoped that Blue would finally find comfort in the destruction of the rebels, but instead, she was more inconsolable than ever before and had been crying in Yellow's arms without end ever since that little speck of dirt had disappeared from their screens. She feared to think what might become of her now, if she were to stay this way forever... How would she attend to her duties? What would White do if she couldn't?
Yellow's own face was likewise streaked with never-ending streams of tears – whether they were her own, or the result of Blue's aura, she could no longer tell with certainty. It was hard to remember the difference sometimes.
From somewhere else on the ship, this soundtrack of misery was supplemented by the sound of breaking glass, ripped cloth and falling metal, which she took to mean that White was smashing up the furniture in the distance.
This, to Yellow, was the final nail in the coffin.
She had always known that White was not exactly like them, that she certainly had access to knowledge beyond their imagination – but at the same time, Yellow had long since come to suspect that White did not actually know everything.
There were quite a few things about her that would be inexplicable if she did.
Clever and unloved, Yellow Diamond had been in an excellent position to observe the elder Diamond's powers with both awe and disenchantment. After all, she had known her longer than anyone else, starting in those early days when the two of them were alone... so she could be fairly certain now.
Whatever she knew...
Whatever it was she suspected – She couldn't be certain of it. Oh, she believed it, and woe to anybody who would dare to question what she believed, but she didn't know, or else she wouldn't feel the need to convince herself this loudly.
Whatever she based it on, her opinion was as good as anyone else's, and just as susceptible to biases or denial, as Yellow would know very well.
So there could be no more hope.
For all intents and purposes, they would have to assume that Pink was truly and wholly gone.
And with no enemies left to fight, Yellow no longer knew what to do about it.
Under any other circumstances, she would have been the first to take any sort of action. She would have challenged and beaten whatever needed to be fought and killed – She would have tried to soothe Blue's sorrow and manage White's temper as she had done many times before, she would have taken responsibility, she would have done something, anything to keep the world around her under control.
But all around her was chaos.
The anger that had once propelled her forward had burned itself to cinders, and the thoughts she used to keep so well-shielded were drowned out by Blue's moans and White's irate screeches.
Yellow was just so tired of everything...
She had half a daydream where the other two were gone as well, some irrational scenario where she had returned to the capital to find everything silent, or herself transported into some distant future where the empire had all but perished, and it was somehow all her fault, the sort of disjointed, pitiful vision one could only have thought up in a situation like this.
Her thoughts also stumbled on various mixed up memories of Pink's laughter and a few notions of a future that had never come to pass, what it might have been like to subjugate the universe with her at their side.
How useless.
She'd do her best to forget it.
Her full attention snapped back to the present when the doors opened to reveal White.
For a moment, she feared that it might now be their turn to become the objects of her wrath, and her hands dug themselves into the layers of Blue's robe – Blue, unexpectedly, still had the presence of mind to hold onto her as well. Perhaps that's just how effective White had been at putting her terror into them.
But even her fury seemed to have its bounds -
When she stepped into the room, even the contempt had vanished from her features.
She had a few pieces of tapestry hanging off her long nails, and a few strands of shining alabaster had come loose and fallen out of place and at some point while she was making short work of some innocent lamp-stand, she must have stepped on the long trail off her dress, because there was a noticeable tear in the shimmering fabric. Perhaps even her mascara had become a little bit smudged.
And though it was not physically possible for her to look any paler than she usually did, she seemed... dimmer, somehow, more softly glowing than really blinding, more translucent around the edges – You could have seen right through her fingertips, or the tip of her nose.
But the most shocking thing of all might be that she had not yet remedied any of that, but stepped in here just as she was – In all her years, Yellow had never seen her like this, not even once.
An outside observer might have naively supposed that this might have changed the way they saw at her, but it did not.
They could only perceive her as frightening, and their thoughts were mostly concerned with the sorry sight they must be presenting to her.
There was, in both their minds, just about the same conclusion, though they would have considered it to be more like a deep, instinctual knowing: They must not look.
But White Diamond must know they had seen her, in that first moment of surprise when she stepped inside, and they knew she was there, and that they would do well to keep paying attention to her, so locked in this conundrum, their glances lingered at the edge of her outline as she passed, never looking at her too directly or with too much focus, so as not to glimpse more than a stray hand, a sandaled foot or the spikes of her hairdo, anything but to even suggest with as much of a look that they could possibly be questioning her, anything but to draw her ire, or do anything she might have perceived as an offense or provocation, though Yellow in particularly could not help but wonder if the entirety of their flawed existences wouldn't already have been considered an affront – Blue, for her part, was way past the point of wanting or thinking anything anymore, naught but a chewtoy of the cosmos hoping to be set down in time.
White passed them without a word, seating herself on her throne once she had made her way to it.
It never even occurred to them that she might have sought out the comfort of their presence, so they did not extend it to her.
They simply remained fixed in their places like silent marble statues, following her very own example.
It was the last they would see of her in a very long time.
...
No matter how many corrupted gems the Crystal Gems managed to track down, there were always more, like an endless, never-ending flood.
It really made one appreciate just how many gems had been required to keep this colony running, how many had been called in to fight the war, even if only a fraction of them remained behind.
Friend and foe alike, twisted beyond all recognition, broken down to their basest instincts.
Sometimes, it would be someone they knew, facets they recognized, gems called up flashes of memory – but most of the time it was not, nameless, faceless stones to whom they could not even offer proper grief, piling up in the Burning Room at the temple, sent up there floating to go untouched for ages.
About two millennia after the war's end, they poof an amoeba-like creature only to find not one, but two gemstones remaining behind – who could have thought, that one could remain fused even like that, but if they managed it, the ones they have defeated must most certainly have been former Crystal Gems: A Hematite and a Peridot, put ut of their misery, but also, separated at last.
Heliotrope.
She never did learn to fight much, so she remained on the maintenance shift, at times assisting Pearl at a mechanic, or helping out around the bases in various odd jobs. Sometimes the newer recruits had been surprised to see an elite such as a Hematite reduced to various menial, physical tasks, but she would infallibly point out that, apart from being Heliotrope, not Hematite at this moment, she found a lot of fulfillment in making herself useful in any way she could, if only she could contribute in the slightest way to helping out her friends, and all others who didn't have the means to defend themselves.
Hers was just one of the countless unique stories whom the Diamonds' retaliation had so cruelly interrupted.
Garnet sent them away in a single, crimson bubble, so that they might be close by if they day of their revival should ever come to pass – but for all that she urged her comrades to believe in such a distant salvation, Rose Quartz could not.
She wondered if they would ever be finished gathering them all up – there were so very many of them, and so very few survivors left to attend to the grizzly task.
The ones she one called her kin had ruined so many innocent lives, and all to get back at her. All to punish her…
(At least, she could not conceive of any other reason)
With her shield, her resolve and her healing powers, she had thought that she was no longer the scared little gem she once was, no longer as powerless as she had been when Pink Pearl was first taken from her…
But in the end, she has as helpless as she had been in the darkness of the tower.
A/N:
Despite earlier notes, I think that I this point I got in most of the content that I wanted to have, I guess I just couldn't always predict what would be a background detail and what would become a full-on scene, but overall I'm pretty satisfied with how this turned out particularly since it has somehow proven to be one of my most successful fanfictions ever ./.
Thanks to all readers for all the love they provided in return, which has seriously added to the completion bar of my life. I am so honored.
IDK if it was just good timing right after s5 came out but like ...I mostly just made it because I wanted it to exist and had some thoughts feels and intuitions about this set of characters, and like, WOW. Perhaps I have finally attained something resembling stylistic maturity and should hurry up and crank out some novels before my brain rots away.
Of course, I still have some ideas left in the box for the grand finale, in which our favorite lightbulb will be spending some wholesome quality time with the precious tiny grandson she never knew she wanted.
ALSO:
So one frequent request in the comments (both here and on ffnet) was "more Pink Diamond content please". I will try to keep that in mind the next time I decide to unload my "ideas box."of half-formed ff plots.
That said, while I love them all, I'm not even gonna pretend that I don't have a decided favorite, or that it's not the angry giraffe. (I wonder how apparent that was)
And I'll probably want to pop out some oneshots or slap some epilogues on some old stuff before committing to another longfic, especially considering how this one ballooned (though I do not regret that at all)
But first, I should probably slap the epilogue on this one before getting ahead of myself ^^°