2. The Seasons.
"Tell me what's the difference
between hope and waiting
because my heart doesn't know
It constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting
It constantly gets lost in the fog of hope"
– Anna Kamieńska
The weeks swiftly piled up.
Every day began by finding food. Only one of them was at risk of starvation of course, which made the job not so taxing. Quick, quiet trips back to the river by way of portal happened multiple times per day as well, but the need for that became less frequent once they'd stumbled across a clay jug, lying abandoned somewhere in the undergrowth down by the beachside while fishing one evening. Once it had been cleaned up, they found that it was watertight and capable of carrying roughly a gallon of water, they guessed. It was a welcome addition to their small collection of belongings and it provided their campsite with a modest supply of fresh water on hand.
But food didn't appear to be an issue this morning. Something was already frying on the campfire - she could smell it in the air as she emerged, eyes bleary and yawning, from the little bivouac they'd built against the trunk of a tree from sticks and mud.
At some point, Connie had started a calendar of sorts. Actually, it was just a tree adjacent to their campsite upon which she religiously tallied the passing days with the tip of the spear each morning. To her surprise, Lars derided the effort; he seemed to think they wouldn't be here for very long. Perhaps he thought they'd be rescued, eventually. Or perhaps whatever went wrong in the universe that landed them here, whenever they were, would somehow smooth itself out. Whatever he thought would happen, she just couldn't see it, but she tended to admire the optimism.
But they'd been here long enough to notice that the days were getting longer, warmer. It must have been spring when they'd first woken up down on the beach. Now, it appeared to be summer...
She bit her lip gently as she carved another notch. One more weird day added to an ever-growing string of them.
She'd begun her timekeeping system right at about the point when she'd begun to notice the days were blurring together in her head, so she was certain there was a margin of error of maybe a day or three. She was obsessive compulsive enough that it bugged her, but she was still able to tell herself something to the effect of:
It's a waste of energy worrying about it. And, given enough time, it won't matter.
Presently she stopped herself, blinking hard at this odd thought. Had she somehow started to think they weren't getting out of this? At all?
Quickly taking a count of the tally, she tried to analyze her thoughts. This was day eighty-four, give or take. They were almost three months into whatever this was and it struck her that maybe some part of her had already given up.
She frowned. She hadn't meant to seamlessly fall into the groove of 'getting on with it'. She didn't want to, but it was hard to know what to do and it had been easy to just adapt to all this. She'd already been in great shape, she knew a lot about the wilderness, and was a survivor after all. But she was also a fighter, and in this moment she reminded herself of her intention of seeing her family again.
And Steven. Her wonderful, wholesome, galaxy-saving Steven.
This morning, wiping unbidden tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her borrowed jacket, she set her jaw in grim determination. She would see him again - and everyone else. She'd make sure of it.
They never tended to stray far from one another. Thanks to the encounter with the tribespeople on their first day here, they had long since become petrified of losing track of the other. Connie therefore found Lars less than thirty yards away from their makeshift shack, over by the cliff's edge where he was sitting cross-legged in full view of the dawning sun, attempting to fix the sole of one of his shoes with a small glob of tree sap he'd managed to scrape onto a leaf with a twig.
The endeavor wasn't going well.
"Morning," came her greeting as she came to a stop next to him to check out what he was doing.
"Yo. 'Sup?" he asked without glancing up, using that energy instead to glare furiously at the shoe stuck to his hand.
"Not much. What are you doing?" she asked.
She was surprised to see him sink at the shoulders, slouching away from her, focused intently on his task. This wasn't the correct response at all.
"Uh, Lars?" she asked, mild alarm in her voice.
"I stood on a squirrel in the night by accident, okay!?" came his irritable reply. "Then the little jerk went manhunter on me or somethin', and now my shoe is screwed." He took an annoyed breath. "At least you kinda have something for breakfast already, though. So, win."
She tsk'd at the story about the rough night he'd had. She'd checked out the small meal cooking on the fire as she passed it - chunks of lean meat alongside a medley of miscellaneous plant matter alongside a frying egg he'd pinched from somewhere. There was not a lot of meat on a squirrel, but it was protein and good fats, and she definitely appreciated his willingness to cook for her.
"It smells great. Thanks, Lars."
"Whatever," he muttered bad temperedly as he fixated on his irritating task in the rising light. "Uhh, I mean, you're welcome," he added reluctantly.
She found his occasional moods amusing sometimes, of course, but didn't want to let him know that. "Aren't you hungry too, though? I haven't seen you eat in-" She frowned, unsure if she had at all. "Ever?"
"I told you, I'm never hungry," he said simply before sticking out his tongue to better concentrate on the shoe repair job.
"But surely you need to eat something," she persisted.
He groaned at her, and she fell silent to watch as he painstakingly applied sap to the sole of his shoe with the stick. After a few minutes, he seemed satisfied that the shoe was fixed and placed it down before turning to her.
"Look, I'm fine. If I wanna eat, I'll eat. If you keep talking about it, I'll start overthinking and get all weird about it."
"Fair enough." She paused a moment, eyes flicking to the leaf with the leftover sap on it. "What'd you mix the sap with?"
"Huh?"
She raised an eyebrow. "Just... straight-up sap?"
"Yeah? So?" He pursed his lips together at the odd question.
"So, all you've managed to do there is ruin your shoe even more. Sap doesn't really set like how you're thinking." She gave a small smile. "Your shoe's still going to have a chunk taken out of it, but now it'll also be really sticky for a long time."
He looked at her, pain in his eyes. "What."
She scratched the back of her arm, feeling really bad for him as she explained. "You need to heat the sap up and mix it with some ground-up charcoal at least before you can-" Oh. Oh, no - the look on his face. She couldn't help but crack her smile wider as she finished her sentence. "-make wood pitch glue."
He blinked! "You're fifteen! How the hell do you even know any of that!"
Connie raised an eyebrow at him. "I told you! Wilderness survival is one of my three favorite genres. You should have waited till I woke up, I could have helped you."
He inhaled, but instead of it being a calming breath, she thought she could see his face go a deeper shade of pink.
Hurrying to placate him, she began saying, "Hey, look, it's not a big deal. We can-"
But he yanked himself up his feet, shoe in hand, and pulled his arm back as if to launch it from the cliff.
She lurched forward to try to get him to stop. "No, wait-!"
Before she could plead further, the shoe was airborne. Lars had a pretty good overarm even before he was pink, so it wasn't a surprise to see it sailing straight over the sandy beach far below them, heading straight for the water.
She tracked its descent with her eyes and glanced up at him. "It can still be fixed!"
He stomped his bare foot down, screamed in frustration and a portal opened up in front of him, expelling the flying shoe directly into his face.
"G'AK," came his cry as he fell backward - the shoe still had that 'thrown from a great height' momentum going for it, after all.
Connie couldn't help herself. As the portal swirled out of existence, she snorted and quickly covered her mouth to try to hide the really obvious fact that she was laughing as Lars lay there a moment. She soon opened her eyes to find him glaring daggers up at her.
"That was hilarious!" She struggled to catch her breath at the same time clearing her throat. "S-sorry for laughing. Are you okay?"
He covered his face with his hands. "No! Of course I'm not! I'm going nuts."
She spread her arms wide, frowning suddenly. "I can see that! Why are you getting so worked up about a shoe?"
"Whaddaya even mean!? I-it's not about- Haven't you noticed how we're stuck here?!"
His attitude was annoying her now, but she bit it back. "I know, but c'mon. You were lost in space once, remember? You handled that okay."
"Space was easy! Time just blows!" he complained loudly. "You can always do something about being lost in space - you can go places, do stuff! You can, like, find shortcuts, sneak past guards, steal ships. And I had a bunch of locals on my side who were awesome at all the stuff I was bad at - which was most things."
Above them, out over the water, came the cries of swooping gulls as they attempted to find their breakfast. It took their attention for a moment and Lars moved himself back up into a sitting position. She reached down to help him, but he shook his head.
"But we don't even know when we are, the locals here would rather kill me for the color of my skin, and as far as I know, the only way out of a time-hole is to wait." Geeze, it was all pouring out now. "But - what are we even waiting for!? Is something just going to... magically happen someday, and we're back home!? Can we even wait however long that takes!?" He took a deep breath. "I don't know how long it's been, but your stupid calendar tree thing is just lording it over us at this point."
She sighed. His feelings were only coming from the same place that hers were. "Yeah, I feel you."
He hesitated. "You do?"
She nodded. "I guess it's like... our real lives are on hold and there's nothing we can do." She glanced down at the dirt below them. She never guessed she'd ever hear such relatable feelings being so eloquently described by the unhelpful jerk who once made fun of Steven through the bubble they were stuck in, back when they first met. But she also never guessed she'd be in this situation, with him as her only company.
But here he was, rubbing his head hard with both hands, feeling like it was good to talk about this stuff that was troubling him. "Ugh. I just. I feel useless." He waved a hand at her. "Meanwhile, you seem like you're having fun, almost?" He hesitated. "All survivor action girl over there..." he trailed off as he realized this train of thought was making him sound like a prick.
Having his own shoe kick him in the head just now had apparently done wonders for his attitude.
"I want to get home too, Lars," she said, frowning as she dropped into a sitting position beside him. "You think I don't want that?"
"Of course I don't." He sighed. "I guess it's just, I see you doing normal person stuff - all this nature stuff like hunting, fishing. Knowing how to make glue out of nothing... and part of me just feels like you're getting on okay." He looked ashamed. "In your element, maybe."
She shook her head. "Nuh-uh. That is categorically not true, man," she said grimly. "The past is terrible and I don't want to be here any more than you. I learned everything I know about the wilderness so that I could survive long enough to get out - not so I could just abandon everyone to go live naked in the mountains."
"Heh, okay, that makes sense," he admitted.
She nodded. "But, y'know, I was thinking about all this just now."
"Yeah?" She'd piqued his interest.
"Yeah. Listen, you're right. First thing's first, we need to stop just existing and put more effort into figuring out when we are."
He was skeptical. "How are we gunna do that? I have literally no ideas."
"Well.." She narrowed her eyes a moment, sucking air in through her teeth. "We obviously pre-date the Crystal Gems building the temple into this cliffside - which, y'know, sucks, but hey, that's a start," she said, smiling in what she hoped was an encouraging manner.
He appeared less enthusiastic, mouth twisted up in distaste at the reminder. "Okaaay."
"And according to that lady we met, we don't pre-date gems on Earth."
"So." He furrowed his brow. "When does that place us?"
"I-" She paused and exhaled sharply. "Don't know. Before or during the rebellion? Or just after? But if we find out roughly, maybe we can work with-" She suddenly sniffed the air. "Hey? Do you smell burning?"
Lars' pupils constricted; he did. "Oh, no-"
He immediately staggered up onto to his feet and hurried over to the campfire to try to save her forgotten breakfast.
In the time they'd been living on the cliff, they hadn't run into any sign of gems, so they made a plan. After mixing up a batch of wood pitch glue, they mended the shoe as best they could, stored the remainder in Lars' head as a solid block, and spent the following weeks specifically in search of signs of gem life.
However, what would much later become the state of Delmarva appeared to be an area devoid of gems at this time. Whenever that was. Is.
Their goal was to pierce further into this wild world.
The two inherently knew the main implication of their situation - whenever they were, it must have been many, many years before when they wanted to be.
The woman they'd met on their first day had made reference to the diamond-ordered abduction of humans for the Human Zoo, which could have meant they were back during the heyday of gem colonization, or perhaps they were later than that, the tribesfolk still operating under a kind of passed-down history regarding what gems were like and what they did.
Both situations were bad, but one felt much worse than the other.
"Or maybe this isn't the past at all, but some far flung distant future we couldn't have ever imagined." Connie's intrusive thought became real on the breeze passing between them.
"Okay. Okay, stop," said Lars as they walked. "What we already think is horrible enough."
"Right," she said, gripping the spear in both hands as they walked. "I'm just letting my imagination get carried away."
"Yeah, as you get older you'll learn how to cram that stuff down," he said despite himself with a toothy smile. "Deep, deep down. As far as it'll go."
Their preferred method of operation was to walk, since it seemed that Lars couldn't throw portals down to places he'd never been before, that weren't in his line of vision. They were able to portal back to the safety of their campsite on the cliff every evening, however - and in the morning after breakfast, they merely had to hitch a portal back to where they'd left off the day previously. The two were big fans of exploiting what little they had going for them, and they found themselves relying big time on this power of Lars' in particular.
They were making for the closest gem location Connie knew about from having read the journal of the great explorer Buddy Budwick, several times over now. She didn't have it on her of course, but she had a very good capacity for retention of facts and knew roughly the direction they were wanting to head in. It was somewhat of a multiple-pronged stab in the dark getting there without a compass, though, and although they occasionally attempted to keep track of their direction and location using the stars, that skill was largely a mystery to them.
Every so often, when the desperate urge to get their bearings came up, Lars would fling a portal high into the sky and for a terrifying handful of seconds, clinging to each other - teeth grit and butts clenched - in freefall together, they did their best to take in the main features of the surrounding region before dropping into another portal to land safely again on the ground. This play was ridiculously risky and could generate unwanted attention, so they used it only sparingly.
But the last time they tried it, they finally saw what they thought they were looking for - a dark shadow stretching across the distant horizon, past forests, hills, and grassy plains.
"Location unlocked - wanna just portal there?" he asked after they landed safely amid the trees they were falling toward a moment earlier.
Connie looked torn. "If it really is the Prime Kindergarten, it could be crawling with gems," she said, frowning. "Maybe Homeworld gems, who wouldn't know what to think about us if we dropped in via portal." With that said, she reluctantly shook her head. "I guess that's a no from me."
Lars sighed, but couldn't fault the reasoning. He followed along behind her.
Despite the encroaching twilight the two explorers were relatively certain they were alone in the thinning forest, save for the odd scurrying through the undergrowth below and the canopy above them. It was merely the local crepuscular creatures, they knew, but predators were also likely to be around at this time of day. It was for this reason they'd usually be back at their campsite on the coast by now.
But they were armed with the spear, magic, and their own nervous excitement; and this evening, they were curious to see if they'd finally made it.
The closer their approach, the rockier the ground - the less plant life was able to take hold in the soil around them; a sure sign of a successful kindergarten. Eventually, in the light of the crescent moon they found themselves crossing an open plain, again devoid of gems.
Connie walked fast. Lars did an awkward half-jog to keep up, eyes and ears alert to everything around them.
The canyon seemed to open up in front of them. The lack of vegetative life surrounding them was strangely promising but their approach down into it was still slow and careful, ducking into shadows where they could. Connie held the spear aloft and ready while Lars remained in a fit state to throw down an escape portal at any sign of trouble.
Their trepidation wore down with every passing moment and soon they grew bold enough to enter. The air was still, silent in this deep canyon. In the silky moonlight - what little of it made its way down here enough to bounce off the cliffsides, anyway - they saw exit hole after exit hole lining the walls.
Connie had never visited a kindergarten before and found the atmosphere incredibly oppressive. She couldn't bring herself to tear her eyes away from the person-shaped holes - black, empty, sinister shapes cut out of the cliffside. She imagined that they stared back at her, unblinking.
Dusty injectors that hadn't been used in a while still lay around - some on the ground, others left sticking into the sides of the cliffs. She swallowed hard. "Yeah. This is creepy," she muttered quietly.
Lars merely shrugged as he glanced around, arms folded in front of him. "Go hang out in the ones on Homeworld for a bit then call me."
Connie raked her brain as she swallowed a small uprising of fear. She walked over to one of the lower holes and glanced inside.
She was thankful that she'd often quizzed Steven about everything he knew, thirsty for knowledge as she was. "This places us at least just before the start of the rebellion," she said, extrapolating what she could from what little clues they had.
"Greeeeat," said Lars. His voice was quiet, but still dripping with sarcasm. "So we're what, a bajillion years ago. Nice."
Connie stood back from the exit hole and gazed up at the moonlit cliff face. "At most, almost six thousand, maybe."
They fell silent as the weight of this settled over them. It felt like too much.
Lars knew his own general moodiness was coming from a place of fear, but in this moment he saw how Connie was keeping rational and calm about everything. He thought about the time he spent as a space fugitive-come-pirate, how he'd been forced to learn to keep his cool for the sake of his friends despite how everything endlessly piled up on top of them.
He decided then and there to make a conscious effort.
The first step was ditching the sarcasm in favor of a more serious tone. "So. You seem to know stuff about things. How do we figure out more from this place?"
"Well," she started, before folding her arms to think. Something quickly occurred to her. "Amethyst came out late - after the rebellion." She ran a hand along the chassis of a nearby injector, coated in dust. "After the corrupting light engulfed the Earth..."
Lars knew about this - it was now a relatively well-known story in Beach City, with the introduction of all the new gems and the recent founding and development of Little Homeworld in the hills outside of his hometown. Since many of his friends these days happened to be gems, he'd spent a lot of time there himself - and he desperately wished to again, soon.
He bit on his bottom lip briefly. "Okay - we find her hole, we know more. But how d'we know for sure this is the right kindergarten? There's at least one other."
"It's the right one," said Connie. She scratched at the side of her head as she stared warily upward at the sliver of night sky beyond the high walls above them. It was all she could say.
Lars stood with arms akimbo. "So, which..." He trailed off as he looked around. All the exit holes seemed identical. Connie stood confused as well, glancing from shadowy wall to shadowy wall, unable to say which dark hole could have possibly been the one variable here in this insurmountable equation.
"It would have to be half the size of all the others," she supposed, shrugging, at length. "And at ground level, Steven said once."
Lars exhaled slowly and together they wandered around the empty canyon a while. In the darker parts, hidden from moonlight, Lars lit up his eyes. A white glow emanating from his eyeballs was a byproduct of his powers, but he was also able switch this ability on at will when he needed to illuminate his surroundings. It was a dead giveaway in the open, but here in the obscurity of the dead and darkened kindergarten, it proved rather useful.
However, as the night wore on, their search turned up nothing.
Connie soon began yawning. Once her hearing returned, she caught the end of what sounded like the howl of a coyote or a wolf. It stirred something primal within her - the instinct to flee, and the color drained from her knuckles as she gripped the spear tighter.
Turning to check on Lars, she saw even in the darkness that it had also broken one of his remaining nerves.
"Listen," he whispered, drawing close to her. "You're tired and this sucks, so let's, uh, pick this up in the morning, okay?"
A bright portal suddenly swirled into being in front of them. Connie bit her lip and gave the ominous place one last brief sweep with her eyes - she wanted so much to continue, but she was honestly very done.
They returned as soon as they could - after breakfast the following morning. Although still cast over by shadow, the kindergarten was a lot easier on their fragile psyches by the light of day.
After a fruitless morning, the searchers reconvened at the location they'd previously agreed upon - a specific injector, the drill bit still sticking half into the ground.
"Still not seein' no Amethyst-hole," Lars reported loudly as he noticed her approach. It was obvious this place was no longer in service and being quiet didn't seem as important in the daylight.
"Neither," said Connie as she leaned against the injector. She slammed the tip of the spear into the ground beside her - her hands were becoming sore and calloused from all the time she'd been spending carrying it around.
"What's that?" he asked, eyeballing something she had tucked under her arm.
She showed him. It was a hand-sized rock, clearly the same as the kind exposed in the cliffs surrounding them but odd in that it was flat and thick and vaguely circular. He glanced at her, dead-eyed.
"I like it," she said without a hint of shame.
"Geek," he smirked.
"Hey," she warned him good naturedly. She offered it to him. "Can you, y'know, put it in your head for me?"
As he obliged her simple request, she began talking. "But yeah, unless we missed something, I suppose Amethyst is still here somewhere, just waiting to pop out." She blinked. "It's so weird to think about..."
He looked wistful after a moment. "Imagine how good it'd be if she popped out right now and recognized us and knew exactly how to help us."
She gazed up at him, thick eyebrow raised. "Now that is magnitudes more optimism than I usually expect to hear out of you. You feeling okay?"
He balked. "You don't think I can do optimism?!"
"Well-"
"You don't get from Homeworld to Earth in wartime as part of a group of fugitives without thinking you can do it at least a little," he couldn't help but brag sometimes, proud as he still was of his achievement. He hesitated before adding, "But, yeah. That thing just now was unrealistic, huh?"
"Insanely so," she smiled. Then frowned. "I suppose that's all we can learn from this place, then. It's empty but exists, and Amethyst likely doesn't yet. That's a timeframe of..." She blinked. "A thousand years? More? Less?"
All this. It's all too much.
She paused briefly. "Which is ultimately meaningless, right?"
Lars blinked at her, surprised and helpless as her brow furrowed and her mood thumped to the ground like a bag full of rats.
"We've got little to go on, nothing concrete anyway. We haven't even come across any gems yet - corrupted or not - and we have no one to turn to - no one to ask for help!" She frowned, balling her fists. "Are we just supposed to live like this forever? Are we just never going to get back home!?"
Lars found himself struggling to reassure her. "Connie, hey. Just chill. Remember what you said - at least we found out something!"
But she wasn't having it. "Why!? Why won't something just happen, Lars?!"
And above them, in this exact moment, something happened. A noise, like a plane in the air, but closer. Both of them raised their eyes upward just in time to see a ship dart past. It was green and angular - clearly gem in origin, and it bridged the narrow gap exposing the sky above them in an instant.
They tensed. Their eyes became wide orbs.
"Get us up there!" Connie practically screamed as she grabbed the spear shaft back into her hands.
In an instant, they fell stumbling out of a hasty portal at the canyon's edge to see the ship - now one of five just like it - all moving in formation away from them, over the large rolling plane toward the forested mountains in the distance, toward the west.
Connie and Lars knew without consulting each other first that they had to follow. They were soon leaving the Prime Kindergarten behind them, riding a series of portals across the countryside, following the path of the strange ships.
They watched from a mountaintop as the ships passed along the valley below them with purpose.
They gazed up from a vast plain as the convoy continued along toward its goal.
Atop a roof in the middle of a walled, stone city, above the havoc of thousands of panicking, screaming human inhabitants below them, they were the only two staring upward with invested interest as the ships continued their relentless journey overhead.
They rode the sequence of portals until they found themselves on a shady mountainside, lush with shrubs. Lars was beginning to falter - there seemed to be a limit to how many portals he could deal over such a short time, and he was hitting that limit. Connie on the other hand was pointing at the ships as they continued on their way.
"Keep going!"
"W-wait up, I-I need-"
His voice was hoarse but he wouldn't have finished his sentence anyway because, right at that very moment, they caught sight of something insane.
Far in the distance, miles and miles down the sloping landscape, against the backdrop of mountain and open sky, a giant four-armed figure with long legs and muscular thighs leapt into the air and landed on the top of one of the ship. The figure then raised the biggest warhammer they had ever seen - it was easily much bigger than its wielder - and almost effortlessly crashed it down, smashing it into the roof of the ship.
The figure, most obviously a fusion of at least two very powerful gems, leapt up and away from the ship as it exploded and fell from the sky.
"Who on Earth is that," breathed Lars.
Connie had a simple reply. "No idea."
Her warcry - a rolling echo of unrestrained laughter across the landscape - finally reached them as she began her assault on another of the ships.
"OH HO-HO-HO-HO."
Connie looked up at Lars to find him staring unblinking in amazement. She pointed at the distant scene with the tip of the spear. "We gotta get closer," she told him, the words tumbling from her with an almost unbearable excitement. "But not too close!"
He sucked on his tongue to try to wet his throat - and it worked. A shout later, a portal sprang into being in front of them.
They touched down again further down the mountainside where they scrambled for cover behind a nearby rock, peeking out to better see more of what was happening.
What stretched out before them was not merely a sloping plain anymore. It was a battlefield. The ground was littered with material weapons left behind by the fallen, whose gemstones were also strewn through the grasses alongside them as, around it all, the battle continued to rage.
Gems of all colors fought against gems of all colors and the noise was immense, unlike anything either of them had ever heard before. It was difficult for the newcoming spectators to be sure who was fighting for which side. But it didn't matter. They stared wide-eyed. Both of them had seen combat in varying degrees due to their proximity to gem-related things, but never to this scale.
Of course, neither one of them entertained any thought of entering the fray.
Above them, the huge fusion was still pulling the ships out of the sky - the second one caught their undivided attention as it came crashing down into the hillside not far behind them. As debris flew up high into the air, Lars grabbed Connie by her jacket sleeve...
...And a moment later they were spilling out of a portal, tumbling in a pile into the middle of their peaceful campsite.
Despite the calm surrounding them now, Connie felt her heart racing - jittery from the excitement of what they had just witnessed. She expected him to have taken her to a different, safer vantage point and was disappointed to find herself back at camp, untold miles away.
"LARS!" she exclaimed as she jumped off him and to her feet. "Take us back!"
Though his pinkified heart wasn't beating nearly as fast as hers, it was still elevated enough to put him into a similar state. And accompanied with a fair amount of anxiety. "We'll be killed!"
She wasn't in the mood. "DO IT."
He grit his teeth as he picked himself up off the ground. "Okay, okay!"
An instant later, they were back, but further away this time and on a different part of the sloping hill. They were more exposed here, without any kind of rock outcropping to dart behind, so they dropped down to watch as the battle wore on. From this vantage point, Connie leered anxiously out over the scene, desperately searching for a sign of anyone she recognized.
But from this distance no familiar face was forthcoming.
The big fusion was still at it - she had just brought down ship number four, which up until that moment had been firing lasers into the mass of fighting gems. The gems on the ground with either very alert, or the gems manning the turrets on the ship were terrible shots - either way, there didn't seem to be any casualties of any sort from this assault.
As the ship's laser's arc swung wide, cutting within half a click of their hiding spot, Lars swallowed.
"Hey C-dawg," he said with a put-on confidence. "We should move!"
"I think so!" said a voice, not Connie's, from behind them.
They jolted and turned to see towering above them a shock of beautiful pink hair. Before either Connie or Lars could process what was happening, Rose Quartz grabbed both of them up, held them both into her chest, and leapt with them out of the way as the fifth ship crashed down into the spot where they had just been hiding.
When their brains caught up to what was happening, Rose was placing them down on a different grassy rise, well out of harm's way. A breeze had sprung up. She had a battle to get back to, obviously, but she felt compelled to take a moment to consider these two.
As she stared up at the gem that brought/will someday bring Steven into the world, Connie's numb hand dropped the spear - the length of its shaft thudding to the soft ground below them. Lars gasped and took a stumbling step backward.
This is the moment, the thought occurred to both of them at once. This is how we ruin the future.
The runaway diamond-come-rebel leader Rose Quartz took in the wide-eyed Connie and smiled before turning to Lars - so ridiculously defective a gem that Rose couldn't even tell what she was supposed to be. But she was beautiful in her own way, regardless.
"You did well to protect this human person," she said softly. "All of Earth's natural life is precious."
"Uhh," Lars said uselessly, unable to fully comprehend this encounter.
Rose stooped down to pick up the spear and studied it briefly. "This is your weapon?"
Lars nodded dumbly, belatedly.
"You need something better," she said as she offered it to him. "I'll take you to see Bismuth when this is done."
Unable to break eye contact, he absently reached out with a quivering hand to accept it.
Her smile faded as she turned to glance behind her - further down the hill, the battle raged on. She drew her sword from the scabbard slung around her back. Connie's heart skipped a beat - yet another of many - as she glimpsed it. The sword she knew so well, intact and unbroken.
With that, Rose Quartz was gone.
They stared after her, mouths open, dumbfounded and reeling from the encounter.
Connie clutched at her chest. It was about this time that Lars regained his senses.
"Nope!" he said loudly, right before pulling an unwilling Connie through the portal generated by his word's vibrations.
"Stop DOING that!" shouted Connie, yanking the jacket sleeve out of his hand. Her yell sent birds flying up out of the canopy above them on the Delmarvan cliffside.
He stomped his foot down. "We're not going back!"
"We ARE."
He shut his eyes hard and slammed the spear tip into the dead firepit in frustration. Their campsite was once again no longer peaceful. "PLEASE tell me you've seen even one single movie! Bonus points if it was about time travel!"
Did he think she was stupid!? She wrinkled her whole face at him as she yelled right back. "Yeah, man, of course I have! I wanna make sure they win!"
"Newsflash, Connie. They win! We know they do because Rose - Pink - rigged the whole thing! But we distracted her! We could have messed everything up!"
She spread her arms wide. "We're still here, aren't we? Don't you think that if we screwed something up, we'd know?"
"But we're products of our past! How would we even know that, huh!?"
"Well, I guess we don't, really. But we're still stuck here. Steven still happened. You're still a stretched-out wad of bubblegum! Our situation here is the direct result of a veeery specific sequence of events - so as far as I can tell, we didn't change squat." She frowned. "And if we did, then it wouldn't matter because we wouldn't know any differently, right?"
He hesitated. "Huh."
Connie rubbed her chin thoughtfully and walked over to the edge of the cliff where she often came to think while staring out over the vast ocean. "We've been disrupting things in little ways since the moment we arrived here," she explained. "We've hunted, we've killed for food. We ran into those tribespeople-"
Lars thought she was missing something pretty important from the comparatively insignificant items she'd been listing. "We just met Rose Quartz."
"Yeah! We did! And, well, maybe that's okay! I'm not saying that the squirrel you stomped last week could have grown up to be president, or that one of his descendants would have become the savior of squirrelkind but, look! It's impossible for us not to have some kind of an impact." She frowned. "And if... If we're here now, that must mean we were already there then. This was something that happened, which meant it was always going to happen. And it's just happening to be happening to us, right now."
He narrowed his eyes at her, attempting to follow along.
"This is just me riffing, but - from our perspective, we used to live in the future of all these events which had already taken place, even though we hadn't done them yet. Even the ones we still haven't done yet. We just didn't know it."
He folded his arms and raised an eyebrow at her. "So, what, you saying we could literally go up to Rose and tell her everything that will happen to her? And it'd be fine?"
Connie bit her lip. "I mean, I'm not saying that, because, y'know... I could be wrong and we could still balls everything up."
She noticed the look he was giving her. She supposed it to be intense confusion and she spread her arms wide in response.
"I'm doing the best that I can, Lars!" she said, voice raised in frustration. "I know just as much as you!"
Lars smacked a hand into his forehead drew his fingers against his scalp. He could see how badly she wanted to return. After an intense internal struggle, he conceded. "Okay. Okay, okay. Maybe we can go back? But we're keeping well away. We can't get involved again."
Connie nodded agreement, and Lars shouted forth his millionth portal for the day. He didn't need sleep all that often, but he figured he would require a long and deep one tonight.
They returned to the rolling mountainside on the other side of the country seconds later to find that it was over. The battle was done, and whatever remaining fighters there were had seemingly withdrawn. Smoking piles of spaceship chunks littered the ground alongside various other debris - the landscape was left seared, scarred and mutilated from the conflict.
"Wow... our argument didn't take that long, did it?" asked Connie, bewildered, from their vantage point.
Lars shrugged. "I'm sure they feel longer than they are but it's not like I can time them."
They chose to wait until they were certain there was nothing down there that would move against them. The only movement was caused by the occasional breeze, however, and soon they grew bold enough to slowly wander down into what was previously the scene of a tense battle.
The ground was ruined, but they knew it would spring back, better than ever, given enough time.
They knew there was plenty of time.
The field was devoid of gemstones. They had likely been collected up by either the remaining members of their own side, or perhaps that of the victor. They still stepped gingerly anyway, carefully, as if they could have broken one by standing on it.
Connie caught sight of something lying in the grass on her left. She changed direction and ducked down, picking it up from the ground. It was a sword. Standing again, she tested it out against an imaginary opponent, getting a feel for it, testing its weight distribution.
"I wonder if we'll ever see her again," said Connie.
Lars frowned and glanced away briefly. Moments later, he tried to move the topic of conversation onward.
"So, I'm just gunna say it. She thought I was a gem," Lars said finally in hollow tones as he scanned the field with wide eyes. "Like, maybe she's never pink'd anything before? Maybe the first time she does it is with Lion."
He leaned down to tug something out of the knotted grasses. It turned out to be a spear. Next to it, a double-edged axe, which he also hefted up.
"Heeey. This'll make firewood way easier to chop," he thought aloud, his tone brighter this time. He glanced briefly at Connie, who was still doing her own thing nearby, and then turned his eyes back to the axe. It had a pretty geometric design embellished along the haft. Whoever crafted this took great pride in their work.
It was a day for new ideas, and he immediately had another. "Y'know, what if we stole a ship? We could go find Spinel and help her while we're here. Maybe save Steven a massive headache in five thousand years or so." He blinked as something else occurred to him. "We could go to Homeworld! Hook up with the crew!" Then, frowning, he realized the last idea could change things for the worse.
"Well, maybe not," he sighed, sinking at the shoulders when he realized. "They kinda need to still be there when me and Steven need them. And I guess none of that happened, so we don't do it anyway..."
He trailed off as a pang of homesickness struck him. He missed his life, he missed his friends, his parents. He wiped his eyes and glanced over at Connie to find her within earshot. It struck him that she hadn't responded to anything he'd said in a while.
Her eyes were wide, her forehead wrinkled as she found herself unhappy with the way the sword felt in her hand. The weight was completely off.
"Connie?" he called.
But she couldn't. Not yet. She needed to focus on what she was doing in this moment as the wave broke over her. It was all she could do not to give in to a heart-thumping, spinning panic.
She knew swords. She liked swords.
She discarded the first sword in favor of another that she noticed just below her, down at her feet. This next one was much, much better. The weight distribution was perfect, and it sat in her hand like a charm in comparison. It reminded her of how Rose's sword had felt in her hand, once - before she had come to possess her own sword that Bismuth had also crafted, and it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps this one had been made by none other than Bismuth as well.
The corners of her eyes beaded with tears, but she sloughed them away with the sleeve of her jacket.
A Bismuth who wouldn't recognize them until they'd all reached the other side of a long and difficult future.
Neither would anyone else.
Summer pressed onward and soon autumn rolled around. The introduction of the axe to their collection of things was a definite boon - instead of a rundown bivouac made of branches and mud, they were eventually able to erect a structure more resembling of a tiny log cabin that they felt could better keep them out of the elements.
They weren't too worried about the encroaching cold, however; a cheeky portal could lead them to warmer pastures at a moment's notice after all, but the Delmarvan cliffside was familiar and peaceful - as close to home as they could possibly get. Neither of them liked the thought of leaving for any kind of extended period. They wanted to stay there as long as they could.
They visited the walled city they'd accidentally come across while chasing the ships, and bartered with the inhabitants. Lars of course had to stay and wait on the outskirts while Connie went inside and mingled with the people, bartering among the townsfolk for whatever useful items they needed in exchange for whatever they could hunt or gather that was worth anything.
Blankets for the winter, basic tools, rope, decent boots made of hide and layers of clothing were now available to them. But the city, she'd learned, was slowly dying - gem influence had not been kind to the civilization that had once thrived here. Its nearby natural resources were running dry, its people leaving in droves to pursue more nomadic lifestyles.
Its people were scared. They knew that gems would eventually come to dismantle the city, like they had done many others over the centuries prior. Anyone remaining, they knew, would be collected and taken away, never to be seen again. Either that, or forced out into the wild to fend for themselves.
They realized this was also likely to have been the origin story of the locals they'd met by the river.
The nights passed by quietly. They often sat around the firepit while something edible sizzled atop the flat stone suspended barbecue-style above the flames. Sometimes they'd talk in low tones about whatever nonsense they could think of, sometimes they'd laugh, or argue, or try not to cry. Othertimes they merely sat together in silence - whether comfortable, angry, or awkward, it depended on the day.
Connie had taken to carving into the little round piece of rock she'd claimed from the kindergarten by the light of the fire, working on it slowly and carefully each night before turning in. Lars didn't bug her about it, but once he realized what it was, his heart sank for her a little.
As the nights wore on, it began to take the shape of a five-pointed star.