~Hello, all. Some context: this story ties into my larger crossover piece Sky Blue, Ocean Blue. I don't think you need to read that fic, at least not in its entirety, to understand this fic, though (but I'd love if you did :D). All you really need to know is that when SBOB recounted the events of Change Your Mind, Pearl and Steven didn't end up fusing on Homeworld. I understand why they rushed to show us all the new fusions on the show, but I thought the forming of Rainbow 2.0 deserved a little more time and emotional depth, especially considering Pearl's relationship with Rose. Voila, this. Hope you enjoy!~
This conversation was not on Pearl's itinerary for the evening.
Darkness has descended now, the Diamonds have left, and the band has dispersed, leaving the beach colored with Crystal Gems old and new. Steven has to use the restroom, and she follows him into the house, still halfway disbelieving that it is over now, that there is no one left to threaten him.
She stands with her hands folded behind her back and gazes out the window. Garnet – once so gawky – stands with Amethyst – once so immature – and Bismuth – once so burdened with hate – conversing with allies Pearl had assumed long gone: Snowflake Obsidian, who was fascinated by Earth birds and spent the downtimes between skirmishes observing them; Biggs, who never once left Bismuth's side over the course of the war; and Crazy Lace Agate, who for all her rowdiness always tiptoed across a battlefield in the aftermath, lest she step on someone's gemstone, be it one of theirs or one of Homeworld's.
The toilet flushes behind her, a sound that used to make Pearl's muscles shiver in revulsion. Now it barely reaches her, because what she hears from outside is a symphony of voices long silenced – a symphony with one glaring pause in it, like a record scratch, a gap where the notes do not quite line up. Even now, after confronting all the lies and all the secrecy, it is hard not to miss the beauty, the deep emotions, and the rich luscious laugh of the Gem Pearl will always think of as Rose Quartz.
She knew her as Pink Diamond first, though briefly, and over the years, Rose became less of a disguise and more of a truth, until Pearl found herself classifying Pink as the trick, the fabrication. Of course, what was true and what was false about Rose are inseparably intertwined; Pearl can no more guess at their meeting point than she can sort her resentment from her admiration, or her admiration from her longing. Some things Rose never divulged, and time will only pull them farther away from whatever answers she possessed. But no one who knew Rose Quartz for even the briefest amount of time would have trouble predicting how today's events would affect her.
Pearl sighs as Steven comes up to stand beside her, her forehead fiery, and forgets to measure her words before she releases them. "I just wish Rose could be here to see this."
As soon as she realizes what she has said, Pearl covers her mouth and shakes her head once.
"Oh, Steven," she says. "You know I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I just wish there were a way you two could be here together. I know that can't happen, but she would be so happy to see what you've done…"
She thinks of how she held him on her lap for the first time, this undersized mute human creature with Rose's Gem on his tiny belly, a barrier that stood between her and the person she loved most. She almost did to him back then what White Diamond did to him today. That she was unable to go through with it in the end does little to snap the tension from her shoulders; that she would never again consider the possibility does much.
"It's okay," Steven says, sliding his hand into hers. "I get it. It would be neat if she could see this."
The maturity startles Pearl, and when she does finally look at him, she almost expects to see him fully grown, but he is still the same moon-faced child she has protected for years. She nods.
Rose Quartz's body broke down to become half of Steven, and there are still traces of her within it, curling his hair, lighting his eyes, pushing forth his shield. But as he proved today, her spirit no longer dwells in his gem. It has gone someplace else entirely. Where that place is, Pearl does not know, only that it is nowhere she has been able to find and it is permanent.
Many days she is even strong enough to accept this.
Other days, she straightens and scrubs, trying to dismiss the craving to combine that spirit with hers just one more time.
When they were fused, Pearl had firsthand access to all of Rose's strength, her acceptance, and her passion; there were no Homeworld customs to prevent her from exploring them as thoroughly as she wanted with Rose's permission. Rainbow Quartz's entire body whispered a single refrain: You're good enough, Pearl. Rose said it often to her even when they weren't fused, but only when they were could Pearl feel it, vibrating from stomach to forehead, multiplying like features and limbs as she and Rose slid together. She bonded with her Diamond in a way they were never meant to bond, terrified of the moment when they would let go and Pearl would fall back into herself.
That was what it was to be Rose Quartz's Pearl: knowing she was safer than she had ever been before, and feeling more terrified than she had ever dreamed.
Standing before Pink in pristine new clothes, terrified that she would be disliked, dismissed, and sent back to the Reef to be refurbished.
On the battlefield, throwing herself in front of Rose, terrified that one wrong move would end Rose's life. Even the mere destruction of her body would expose her gem in its entirety, revealing her secret to everyone.
Clutched under Rose's arm as the light arced through the sky, terrified that Earth was being stricken from existence, that her unquestioning devotion to Rose had destroyed them all.
Standing behind Rose at the Temple gates as Greg showed up for the ninety-third day in a row, terrified that he was not disappearing as quickly as they usually did. He held her namesake flowers in a pot, and her cheeks turned red, and Pearl remembers clutching herself until her ribs ached.
Watching from the doorway between their rooms, terrified as Rose called a bed and a pillow out of clouds, curled up, and stopped, Pearl worrying that she had already slipped away when Pearl wasn't looking. She had never needed to sleep before Greg had implanted this baby in her, and her lovely face became so peaceful, her generous nurturing form so motionless, that no amount of information Pearl gathered about sleeping could reassure her. Alone in the night, she kept circling back to the thought that Rose could not have gotten pregnant by accident, that she was choosing to go somewhere beyond and leave Pearl behind.
On the beach as Steven took toddling steps toward her, crying, "Purr! Purr!" in delight, terrified that she would somehow err and damage this person whom Rose had wanted so badly to become.
"It's still really hard, isn't it, Pearl?" Steven asks.
Pearl walks over to the couch, sits down on it, and squeezes her fists. She is about to dismiss the question, wave it away, but the shine in his eyes has deepened and widened since the day he first summoned his shield. Unlike every other part of him, it looks old enough to understand.
The words do not come easily; they slip through the seams in her head's pocket, and her mind must follow them from her inner sanctum down through rapidly deteriorating layers until she can only stand in complete darkness before Pink Diamond and watch herself make the decision that changed everything she knew.
"It is hard," Pearl says. "True, I'd fallen in love with Earth right away. But I'd fallen in love with Earth right away because of the sparkle it brought to your mother's eyes. They were usually so…forlorn. I wasn't sure how to survive on this planet, on any planet, without her." She draws herself back to the midway plane, above the abyss, where persistent light flickers faintly against the darkening backdrop. "But – I'm learning."
"You are learning." Steven perches on the arm of the couch, his legs falling just short of Pearl's lap. "And you're doing a great job of it, too. Especially considering you were in love with her, right?"
Pearl flushes, wondering if she should deny it. She has studied Earth culture enough to know how disturbing it would be for a child to think of anyone other than his father – especially another person who was involved in raising him – having feelings for his mother. But she has vowed to keep no more secrets.
And he has traveled into her gem, through her dimensions; the deeper light in his eyes might still belong to a child, but no longer the sort who wanders around the house with at least one article of clothing missing and struggles to make sense of his powers.
"Yes," Pearl finally says. "I was in love with your mother." She straightens her legs, evening out her knees, and stares down at her hands. "On Homeworld, of course, such a thing was…impermissible, to say the least. But on Earth, we would have a chance. And I really thought we had a chance…"
Her voice abandons that sentence; Steven's picks it back up. "Until my dad."
Pearl nods, exhaling as she remembers the first time she saw the young man standing on the beach, on their section of the beach, his long dark hair disheveled from his climb over the fence and his natural human sloppiness, a guitar strapped across his body, his face blinking and searching.
Greg's fascination with Rose had come as no surprise to Pearl. Rose was the sun, and everything on Earth gravitated toward her in a way that was only natural. That Greg was drawn into Rose's orbit was inevitable; that Rose was drawn into Greg's overturned several conclusions Pearl had reached about how the universe worked. It was unfathomable to her how the sun could choose a planet over another star – even as weak and inferior and charmless as said star often felt compared to her sun.
Now Pearl has gotten to know that planet and encountered its joyful, accepting life, and she understands better. Even so, remembering Rose's hand lovingly cupping her stomach where Greg's baby rested suffuses Pearl's entire body in an ache, an ache of a type she has never known before: one she cannot heal and one that cannot destroy her.
She held Greg in contempt not just for being inherently imprecise, winning Rose's heart, and playing a role in her end, but also for how quickly he recovered after her departure. His pain was real, and it was raw, but in a negligible two and a half years, Greg had returned to his cheerful self, as if Rose could be packed away that neatly. Of course, she realizes now, Greg had a personhood to resume from before he ever met Rose. Pearl did not, and that pain is older than Greg or Earth.
"Were there…others?" Steven says. "Before my dad?"
Pearl rises, bends over, and picks up a piece of plaster smashed on the floor. Bismuth did a great job rebuilding Steven's house, but cleaning up afterward was never her strong suit. "There were…" She pauses. "Flings."
He does not ask her to elaborate; perhaps he does not want to know. "But Dad was different, right?" he says.
"Oh, yes, Steven. Greg was very different to Rose. I mean, of course they had their rough patches, especially at the beginning, but I watched it evolve – the way she looked at him, the way she talked to him, the way she talked about him, the way she wore his shirt from the concert. She didn't consider him part of a species that needed her help to survive anymore. She saw him as an equal." Pearl smiles, only for Steven and for the fact that she can now say Greg's name without grimacing. "She loved him very much."
"She loved you, too," Steven says.
The words unexpectedly sting, an attack from behind, forcing a quiet, bitter laugh out of her. She hates the sound; it comes from at least three layers deep. "Well, thank you, Steven. But over time, I had to come to terms with the fact that no, she didn't. Her affections lay elsewhere. She never came right out and told me she wasn't interested in me." A hot bubble rises in her gem, and she flattens her fingertips, presses them together. "I suppose she thought she was being kind, but it might have been kinder to let me know she didn't love me."
She remembers moving toward Rose's heat in the fusionscape, knowing she needed to have it even if it ripped her open and ruined her, remembers Rose gently pulling back and redirecting her attention, always so careful never to reject her outright.
"But she did, though." The soft intensity of his eyes probes at the space between them. "She did, Pearl. I know she didn't feel the same way about you that you felt about her, but that doesn't mean she didn't love you. You know, in some other way."
Pearl tucks her lips in.
"Garnet says Mom grabbed you first thing when the Corruption Bomb came down," Steven adds. "She wasn't gonna let anything happen to you."
"I can hardly remember that. It was all so fast." Pearl pauses, rubs at the temporal bones beside her eyes. "But if Garnet says that's what happened, I trust her memory."
So much goes unsaid with the use of the term "Corruption Bomb;" there is so much about that day that words could never encompass. Pearl can hardly remember the order, but other things she remembers with vicious clarity. She remembers light arcing through the sky, the sound of Rose's shield locking into place, the sensation of being pulled flat against Rose's shuddering side, and the screams of their comrades-in-arms as the Diamonds' light warped them. When the light faded and the shield dropped seconds later, Pearl was surrounded by unrecognizable monsters who had fought alongside her the night before.
Rose ran up to Biggs Jasper and embraced her, crying and expecting, or at the very least hoping, that this was a sickness her tears could remedy. It was Garnet who had to run forward and pull Rose back before Biggs's cloven foot came down on her head, Garnet who terminated Biggs's body with a blow from her gauntlets, Garnet who turned around and prepared to do battle with the Corruptions that had not already run away. She had never seen Garnet weep before.
Pearl hurled her spear through Crazy Lace Agate. Both of her gemstones dropped to the ground – and so did Pearl, her hand over her face, her body rocking and shuddering until Garnet stroked her back and told her it was safe.
Today, it truly is safe.
Pearl walks back to the window and poses her question not to Steven, but to the stars. "If she loved me, why did she feel there were things she couldn't tell me?" Her eyes land on Lion, the mammalian creature she did not recognize on sight, filled with things she did recognize – Rose's sword, the T-shirt Greg gave her, a long-lost bubbled friend…
Light burns behind her forehead again.
"I don't know." Steven kicks his sandals off, leaving them in the center of the floor, next to the coffee table. "I really don't. I guess…I guess she didn't fully trust anyone. And you know what? That was her issue, not yours."
Pearl can't find an answer. She picks up Steven's sandals, brushes sand from their undersides, and places them beside the front door.
"She trusted you the most, though," Steven says. "She didn't tell you everything, but she told you more than she told anyone else in the whole universe. Including my dad."
She walks back to the window, palms against the glass, and stares out across the beach, trying to tell herself that Steven is right, trying to tell herself that none of that matters anymore.
Steven wraps his arms around her from behind. "I know she did a lot of dumb stuff," he says, "but I don't think she was dumb enough to not know that you were the best friend she'd ever have."
Pearl's tightened hands fall to the windowsill and crumble. Her chin quivers. For a minute, she is outside of her own control and the feeling still unsettles her, calling the ground beneath her into question.
She turns and looks at Steven, at Rose's curls and Greg's nose. Rose's preference for someone else produced this magnificent being, just as a broken, misguided Kindergarten produced Amethyst. With the floorboards no steadier beneath her, she imagines herself floating, not falling.
Steven stares back, his brow in a fierce pucker, his eyes shy. "Are you ever…do you ever get mad at her?" he asks.
Pearl frowns. To answer this question, she must dive through herself into her grimmest, bottommost layer and pry loose something abstract that has been there all along, blending with the shadows well enough to nearly disappear.
She turns away from the wall, away from the portrait of Rose keeping watch from over the door. "Yes. Sometimes I do." Pearl hesitates for a moment, but he has not objected to anything she has shared so far, and she finds no reason not to see it through. "But it's…complicated, being angry at the person who first helped you understand that you even had the right to be angry. Especially when she's gone."
Steven nods. The imprint of disillusionment on his face saddens Pearl, not for its insult to Rose but for how it chases away his signature grin. "It's all right for you to be mad at her, though, Steven," she says anyway. "No one can tell you how to feel about her."
"I kinda wish somebody could," Steven says with a small scowl. "Because I don't know how I feel about her. Except that I am mad at her for things. Like the way she wouldn't let you tell anyone who she really was."
Pearl remembers the wires that laced around her throat from the inside every time she tried to open her mouth and explain the situation to him. Even so, her first instinct is to argue, to defend Rose, though she has nothing to offer but conjecture. It could have been her own guilt tormenting her – or the woman she loved could have placed a curse on her. Whether or not such a thing was within Pink's powers, even Pearl didn't know. She had always been too afraid to ask.
"And I mean, I understand why she had to poof Bismuth to keep her from killing, like, all the Homeworld Gems," Steven continues. "But she should've told you guys the truth."
Pearl dips her chin in agreement. In reality, she isn't sure if it would have hurt less to know that one of her closest friends had succumbed to dangerous rage than to be led to believe she had been shattered. Every time she thinks of Rose's lies, though, the memory of how it felt to be skewered by her hologram's sword rises in her gemstone.
She stares down at the filthy floor and hopes the broom is still in the kitchen, next to the refrigerator, where it belongs.
"And it feels like…it feels like…" Steven crams his hands into his pockets. "It feels like she just ran away and left me to clean up the mess she left behind! Because she didn't want to deal with it."
Pearl forgets the mess that surrounds her, forgets the broom. This time, she does speak out on Rose's behalf. "Steven, when Rose…left, the war had been over for thousands of years. No one had heard from Homeworld since. Your mother didn't know about the Cluster, and she had no reason to think the Diamonds would ever try to take Earth again. Even Garnet didn't see that coming."
She remembers watching the robots patch up the warp pad and a Homeworld Gem appear – Peridot, almost unrecognizable as the hyperactive, childish Gem who romps on the beach with the rest of the Crystal Gems. She remembers her thoughts: How can we fight them again without an army? How can we fight them again without Rose?
"If she had had any idea of what you were going to face – she still might have gone away, but she would have made sure you were better equipped for it." Pearl unfolds her clamped fingers from her wrist. "I still truly believe that."
Steven blows out a breath, his clothes seeming to loosen as he relaxes. "Well," he says, sounding nearer to resignation than Pearl would like, "you did know her best."
He continues to search her face with eyes that still need as many answers as she can give him. In the silence that blankets the house, Pearl can almost hear Rose's rich throaty laugh bursting into bloom like the moss she so loved. She props her vertebral column against the wall for support and closes her eyes, picturing the spiraling pink ringlets stolen from a Gem likely still bubbled in the Human Zoo; the strong arms that could cut through the physical form in seconds yet never aimed for the gem; the full pink lips that spoke so many misleading words; the eyes that looked at Pearl and first saw her as someone rather than something – picturing the whole of Rose Quartz.
Pearl is able to smile, thinly. "She was very far from perfect," she says, and strangely as she admits it, she knows it's exactly what Rose would have wanted. "But she was an incredible person."
Steven sighs again.
Pearl pulls away from the wall and crouches in front of him, her weight on her ankles, and takes him by the shoulders. "But Steven – you are not her, any more than I'm any of the Pearls who came before me or Lapis is any of the Lapises who came before her." She brushes her hand across his sticky forehead; it seems so long ago that the feel of perspiration disgusted her. "You are an incredible person in your own way, separate from her, and you don't have to answer for what she's done."
Steven smiles back at her, the strain still visible between his eyebrows. "Thanks, Pearl. Thanks for – everything. I just still don't know how I feel about her. And I don't know how she feels about me."
Pearl's own eyebrows lift. "You don't?" she says.
Steven shakes his head.
"She told you exactly how she felt in that message she left for you," Pearl says. She remembers the videotape in Lion's mane, a secret hidden within a secret, and all the conflict that came afterward. "She said whenever you loved yourself, that would be her, loving you."
Fourteen years ago, Pearl would have cracked herself to receive a similar message, recorded and preserved for her.
"Yeah, I know," Steven says. His bottom lip quivers. "I just – it means – all I know is that she planned to love me."
Tears well up in Pearl's eyes, freeing her to laugh. She does, lightly, a sound regulated by no one's will but her own. Her lowest layer lifts and makes room for something beneath it, something brighter and even something she might dare to call unafraid, the Pearl being handed the sword no longer the final destination. "Steven, I didn't plan to. So how much more would –"
She cannot complete the thought with words, and since she hates leaving things incomplete, she reaches out and finishes with a hug. Steven's chubby arms have scarcely wrapped around her waist before a swath of light cuts through the room, dazzling first her vision, then her gemstone, and finally her soul.
This was also not on the itinerary for the evening.
They inhabit one another; they complement and add to each other. Within themself, hollows give way to solids, and for the first time Pearl feels organs that cannot be shapeshifted away. They feel just that much crisper and cleaner than her imitations – it is completely new and, she decides, thoroughly lovely.
She glances forward and watches them turn and survey the house. They glance backward and see Pearl, her hand in Steven's, forgetting how it felt to be lonely.
They know their name immediately: Rainbow Quartz. Their skin is the same color, Pearl can see from inside – a mauve shade, pink squeezing white, and their view of the world filters through four familiar eyes, Pearl's above and her partner's below, as though nothing has changed. That is an illusion, for everything else is different.
Rainbow 2.0 has chosen Pearl's nose. Their hair sweeps across the tip of their head and falls to curve shortly below their jaw – like icing on a cupcake, a simile that Steven must have thought up but that is still every bit Pearl's as well. This fusion will never know Rose's long, luxuriant curls or the diaphanous scarves draping their body, or the unquenchable heat. In its place, flameless warmth cradles both of them, all three of them, steeped in promises already kept. It synchronizes their steps, directs their arms, and loosens places that have been held stiff for eons.
And now the snug, underlying whisper of You're good enough, Pearl flows not just from one of them, but from both.