8. Millennia.
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."
- Robert Frost
"Lars!"
She hurled herself through a portal, grabbed him by the sleeve of his shirt and, with inordinate physical strength as a pink post-human, ripped him out of the path of something big hurtling toward him.
The gem on its shoulder glinted viciously in the stark sunlight as the monster skidded to a halt. It snorted in frustration, struggling to regain its footing with its big hooves in the muddy ground before yelping in fright and running away from where a bright portal had blinked out of existence a split second earlier.
In the sky above, Connie saw with surprise that he had his axe out and let him go.
"Aah!" she exclaimed as they drifted slightly apart.
"I had it under control!" Lars said obnoxiously over the sound of the air whooshing past them as they plummeted. "What? You think it was going to be the mammoth incident all over again!?"
She spread her arms wide as her hair whipped upward. "I didn't think you saw it!"
"I didn't want it to think I saw it!"
"You definitely didn't see the mammoth, is all I'm saying."
He glared as he shoved the axe into his head angrily, blade-first. Luckily, being magic, this only meant it was stored in the Pink Darkened Dimension for easy storage.
They'd discovered long ago that they both hand it - the silent and still world beyond Lars' head. It was the same as what lay beyond Connie's. What this meant, they still had no clue.
She glared right back at him incredulously as they hurtled toward the ground.
"We said we wouldn't fight them," she said over the wind rushing past them. "They're part of history, remember? They might do something that actually matters, someday."
He huffed. "You're one to talk! You poofed a whole nest of-"
She rolled her eyes. "Yeah yeah, the corrupted rubies, I know." That had been the climax of an extremely eventful afternoon about six decades prior. "But don't forget, it was you who raked me over the coals about it."
He glared back at her. She was right like she always was, but that didn't change his feelings in this moment. Nor would it stop the ground rushing up to flatten them anytime soon.
He snapped his fingers. It was like a distant thunderclap. They slammed through a portal instead.
Plummeting once again from much higher up this time, they continued their heated discussion.
"That thing digging around in the mud forever isn't going to matter," he argued without skipping a beat. "We proved that ourselves when we dug that big hole."
She eyed him suspiciously. Her arms were folded. "Just hurry up and admit that you're bored again!"
"What - me? Bored of stacking stones in the wilderness?" His eyes were bulging. "No way! I'm all about that! What I'm bored of are the monsters who come along and knock it all down." He clenched his fists. "They're worse now than when they weren't corrupted."
"Well, yeah, Lars-"
"You know what I mean. I wanted to kick that corrupted agate's ass, Connie," he continued, despite her obvious and exaggerated eyeroll. "Hey! Don't pretend like you didn't. It's not even like it would have mattered! She would have just reformed again later."
"We got the stack really tall, you were proud - I get it. I do. But do you ever listen to yourself?" Connie was exasperated. "You yourself said-"
"That was a lifetime ago-" he interrupted before she interrupted his interruption.
"You knew it was always going to fall down! It's called entropy and it happens to everything!"
"H'yeah." He huffed and glanced away. "Everything except us."
And with that, the conversion turned awkward. But the ground was fast becoming imminent again.
Connie clapped her hands together - the sound sent bright ripples through the air like a lightning strike.
This time, their fall was slowed by a sudden upward shift in direction as they exited a portal much closer to the ground. They took it their stride and landed, crouching, in a patch of quiet woods somewhere else in the world.
The trees around them were damp and quiet. It appeared to be spring, or perhaps early summer. There was a familiar smell in the air from the recent rainfall, the only sound that of lingering droplets dripping down from the canopy and echoing birdsong.
Lars straightened himself and noticed immediately that she was staring. And on her face, concern.
"Sometimes I want to burn the world down." He raised an eyebrow at her. "Don't you?"
As she whipped her wild hair out of her face, he could see it in her eyes. She didn't need to say it, but she did anyway.
"I do!" she told him. "Of course I do. There's no other possible way to feel."
"I... know you do," he admitted.
Connie groaned in exasperation. "C'mon. Let's just find something else to do. Okay?"
"Sure," he muttered, glum.
They picked an arbitrary direction on pure whim and began to walk off into it.
It had been a rough few decades for the two ageless revenants since the light engulfed the world and the rebellion ended.
The planet they were forced to wander now was emptier and yet somehow just as fraught with danger.
Aimless, these new creatures lashed out blindly at whatever they bumped up against. They had been like this since reforming.
Lars and Connie watched them occasionally, trying to figure them out. Looking for patterns in their behaviour.
All they could tell was that they were strange, far removed from the beings they once were. They were everywhere - wandering, drifting about the world, bereft of the purpose that had once given their lives structure. They were little more than a mess of fight or flight instincts, belonging nowhere, obedient to no one.
Their ultimate judgement was that these former gems were best avoided. The former humans saw too much of themselves in them.
They watched as the Earth took back its blemishes, the scars of a war since passed. What were once blistering gouges became scrublands and forests as life slowly returned to the places from which it had once been evicted.
Gem structures abandoned in the exodus quickly became overgrown. Vines wound themselves lovingly around the length of the Communication Hub that stood before them. It almost seemed to Lars that they'd shot up overnight.
"Now, I agree with the spirit of what you're saying," Connie responded with a small shrug as she squinted up at the plantbound pillars. "But it's actually been tens of thousands of nights."
"Oh yeah," said Lars, despite it being no real surprise.
Later, they came across the Pyramid Temple snaked by trailing brambles and moss. This was a new structure they hadn't seen before, probably placed down sometime near the end of the war. They entered... and then quickly left again. It was clearly designed as an elaborate trap.
Even Stonehenge was taken over by brambles and trees. The first time they found it like that, barely recognizable amidst the greenery, they were astounded by the speed in which it seemed to have happened. They thought about clearing it and allowing the stones to stand free in the sunlight once more - they mulled it over for a good two years before deciding to leave it for future humans to uncover and wonder about.
They revisited their hole in the desert, once the size of an impact crater and as deep as an oceanic trench after a century or more of effort. It was much shallower now, more filled in by wind-driven sand with each passing decade.
All around them, time was slowly fixing all the little damages that had been rendered upon the Earth.
They wondered why it wouldn't fix them as well, but they knew the answer. They were anomalies. They were no longer of the Earth. They no longer even needed to take from it. They were instead merely observers, waiting, with only one vague and distant purpose they had no idea how they were going to fulfil.
They stood on the precipice of the Prime Kindergarten, the one thing they knew the planet would never be able to reclaim - not during the ensuing several thousands of years, anyway.
But it was inhabited, for once. They quickly dropped down to avoid being seen.
Amethyst. Freshly emerged, she sat leaning back idly against a desolate wall. Her solitary figure was dim in the low light, but they definitely could make her out. They were overjoyed to see her! They'd visited often since the light of the corruption swept the Earth. They'd waited so long.
Careful not to alert her to their presence, they watched on and off from the top of the canyon for years as she milled around in the darkness of the bleak and lifeless pit. Often she just sat and watched the walls. Sometimes, she threw stones. Other times she broke rocks, kicking them apart like she had nothing else going on.
Although they knew they could never speak with her, they wanted to. They wanted to greet her and help her out of there.
They could tell she was listless. Bored, confused, and empty. In fact, they were pretty sure she'd never even uttered a single word - not to herself, and certainly not to another. The little purple gem appeared blank, as lost and devoid of purpose as they themselves felt.
They wanted to go down there. They yearned to help her, they longed for her company. But all they could do was visit and watch from afar as often as they could if only to convince themselves of her continued safety.
So they did.
And one day upon returning, they found she simply wasn't there anymore. Connie carefully descended into the kindergarten's depths to investigate, jumping deftly from exit hole to exit hole, hiding in the shadows between each jump just in case. Lars followed suit.
When they reached the bottom, they found in the dust three distinct sets of footprints alongside those of Amethyst's - newer, fresher tracks that lead the way out, with Amethyst's in tow.
"She's found the others already," Lars said in surprise, turning just in time to see Connie wiping her face.
She was only just able to hold back a sob as her tears thwacked one by one into the dirt.
Lars pulled her into a hug that she gladly reciprocated.
"I know she's going to be okay now," she said, sniffing. "That she's going to learn and grow and become herself-"
Lars shut his own teary eyes as he listened.
"So why am I crying?"
They stared a long while at the newest exit hole that graced the base of the darkened canyon wall. They'd looked for it once, almost a thousand years earlier, but it had been right here waiting all along.
It took almost an entire year to circumnavigate the planet at roughly the equator. They walked without rest over mountains and across oceans, without using magic to move faster.
They used the stars to keep them on course, a skill they had honed over the centuries, and relied on the sun's passage during the day. Adjusting for the seasonal tilt of the Earth on its axis was second nature to them by the end of the trek.
"Disappointing," was all Lars had to say about the endeavor.
He stared up at the jacaranda tree that they'd started from, somewhere on a South American coast. It was in bloom when they'd started back then, and it was in bloom again now.
"I wanted it to take longer," he whined.
"Told you, didn't I? I said a year or so," gloated Connie, arms akimbo in triumph as she enjoyed her little victory for this brief moment. She then stuck her hand out, palm up. "Now pay up," she demanded as she wiggled her fingers.
Lars looked up from her hand to her face. "You can't be serious."
His incredulity was met by her searing look. "I'm always serious."
Lars scoffed and walked over to pluck from one of its lower boughs one of the delicate purple flowers. He offered it to her. "Is this enough?"
She smiled and shook her head once, folding her arms. He held it up and let it go. It swung upon the warm breeze a little, to land gently atop her head.
She snorted.
"Isn't that good luck or something?" she asked.
"Huh?" he asked right back.
"If one of these flowers lands on your head, you get luck."
His eyes widened. "Damn, really? Is that all we ever needed? Purple flowers in our hair? Dude, I'll shake this whole tree down while we both stand under it if you like."
"Better not," she said with a slight laugh, adjusting the flower slightly so that it sat nicer in her hair. "It's not really in the spirit of, you know," she started muttering a little. "Impact minimization..."
The sin of being the ones to build Stonehenge loomed always in the backs of their minds.
Presently, Lars shook his head. "So, I was thinking what if we tried pole to pole then back again."
"That's not going to take very long either, and you know that." She smirked. "You must really like this tree."
"Connie, I love this tree. And yeah, I know a year is barely a thing anymore. There's just nothing else to do."
"There's plenty to do. We have this whole planet-"
"Such as?" He looked at her expectantly. She glanced away.
"Well, what if we went back for a bit? It's been-"
They had long since given up counting the days. There was no point in it anymore. It was roughly as useful as a human counting down and lovingly recording each and every passing minute of their life, after all.
"Decades?" she wondered as she frowned up at the bright sky. "Maybe?"
They returned to their old clifftop to find it as it always was whenever they came back - in an advanced state of disrepair. The cabin was crumbling once more, the hearth they'd tended to an age ago again covered in wet leaves and dirt. The earth was trying to claim it all back, to bring it into its loving embrace. To break it down and spit it back out at the atomic level for new and different grand works.
Like it did everything besides Connie and Lars.
They tried to refrain, but they couldn't. They rebuilt the cabin. Lars still had tools stowed away in his head from back when one of them still needed a place to sleep and sustenance on the regular, so that was a fairly easy task to carry out.
For old time's sake they cleared the pit, rearranged the stones, gathered some kindling and struck up a fire, only to sit around it in the night, suddenly unsure of what else to do.
Lars pulled the dark glassy lump of resin from his head. Moldavite's gemstone sealed inside was dimly visible in the flickering firelight. They each studied it, turning it over in their hands, checking the container material for cracks or chips as they had done many times before. They'd repaired it many times when they needed to, but this night it remained intact.
The sounds of the waves lapping at the sand rose up from the base of the cliffside far below them.
"Do you think she ever would have been sorry?" he wondered aloud as he put the faux-bubble back into his forehead. "For what she did to us, I mean?"
"I don't think there's even a slim chance I could care if she did." Connie shrugged, her voice flat. Checking that Moldavite's gemstone was safely contained always lowered her mood, not to mention the fact that it was right here in this very spot long ago that they'd last encountered her.
Three nights passed before either of the two spoke again.
"Want some food?" Lars joked. Connie looked up and smiled, the embers of their latest fire only able to dimly light up her face.
"I don't remember what eating felt like," he said finally.
She shook her head. "It's, uh, been a while."
He sunk at the shoulders. "Oh. Sure."
"Do you think that's the real reason why we haven't come back in so long? That it just reminds us of something we'll never have again?"
"What? Food?" he asked, mystified. "We can eat anytime."
She was silent, sunken at the shoulders, looking down at the softly dying embers reflecting at him in her magenta eyes.
"You mean, like home?" he tried again in a small voice.
She flinched slightly. "Yeah."
"Maybe?" He cleared his throat. "You know, I'm glad we came back here this last time. I guess this place used to make me feel safe. And useful? Like there was something important I had to do whenever I was here."
"Like wait for someone to save us?"
"Well, to an extent, but-"
"Like look after some vulnerable human?" she suggested, smiling self-deprecatingly.
He raised his eyebrows at her. "You say it like it was an annoyance. But actually, it was nice. This is like, home, after all."
She lost her smile. "But, no. We shouldn't think like that. Home isn't this hill, or the beach, or this forest. Or that cabin. Home isn't, like, a place. My family moved around a lot, so even before, I guess I had this idea-"
There was a time long ago when talk like this would rip raw chunks from her bleeding heart and leave what remained stinging like nothing else. Say what one will about the difficult passage of time, it does however make certain things easier.
"Home is a feeling," she said quietly. "Home is people. It's you and me, wherever we are, until we fix all of this."
He took a breath in what would have otherwise been a ponderous silence. "I'm selfish, Connie."
Only when she looked up at him in confusion did he elaborate.
"I know I made a big deal about it, but I would have taken you to Rose whether you asked me to or not," he said quietly, his eyes fixed on the embers. "I didn't want to admit it. But, you know that, don't you?"
She smiled softly and nodded. She knew that unequivocally.
They watched the sun as it rose over the vast ocean. They watched it do that over and over again, ever so slightly further to the south every morning and then gradually working its way north again in an endless procession.
They spent an extended period on that cliff, watching the seasons turn. Watching the life fall from the trees and shrubs around them only to return with a vengeance in due time.
They watched as comets and meteors blazed through the trails of stars in the dark.
A supernova flared up once, so bright that it was visible even against the blue of the day. They watched constantly as it slowly diminished over the following months.
The cabin, never once used, fell back into disrepair. They discussed fixing it again, but ultimately decided there was no point. They watched it fall and rot away.
They knew their time here was running out but neither was sure how it was going to play.
But at last, after almost two centuries of waiting, they found out. Far over the ocean a figure appeared, distant but towering over the horizon. Each vast and lumbering step through the water's murky depths caused tremors through the earth.
They watched from the cliff's edge as it approached. It could have easily been mistaken for a gem monster if it wasn't so massive. If it wasn't driven by clear purpose.
In one of its eight hands it held what they eventually recognized as an unearthed warp pad. Specks of deep red, purple, white and magenta hovered behind the dark visage - bubbles, laden with gems of the captured corrupted, following like an obedient cloud.
Lars was alarmed at first, but the approaching fusion was familiar to Connie.
"Obsidian," she whispered and he understood.
Driven out from wherever they had been, by whatever force they couldn't imagine - perhaps something as mundane as scared humans, or perhaps they were merely in need of a quiet haven far away from the bulk of the creatures that had been their erstwhile friends, the Crystal Gems had come at last to the cliff on the little peninsula.
Lars and Connie watched Obsidian's approach until they could risk it no more and disappeared from their ancient camp one final time through a portal.
Despite the misery they felt about having to leave, there was consolation in the fact that everything that had happened was happening once more.
But hope was fickle and fleeting.
Every distant sudden thunderclap reminded them of war. Every lightning strike against the black of night brought them screaming back to that singularly terrifying moment of The Corruption.
Once, in a high panic, Connie fled through a portal at the sight of a particularly big one that seared into their vision.
She found herself in a dank river valley, dense with twisting trees. The air, although muggy and thick with echoing birdsong, was easy here. The sky, light and peaceful.
She immediately felt a pang of guilt for having left Lars alone, but she couldn't quite bring herself to return just yet. Now that the Delmarvan cliff belonged henceforth to the Crystal Gems, they had a loose agreement to meet up again wherever they last saw each other if they were ever to become separated.
Besides - perhaps he'd fled, too.
If she could only give the storm enough time to pass, she would return soon enough.
But there was a civilization taking place right here. After a brief exploratory walk, she was able to see from a vantage point that overlooked farmland sprawling around the river snaking its way through the valley.
A city, occupied and thriving, stood tall beyond it in the distance. The sight of it against the lush mountains in the afternoon sun took her breath away. It had been a long time since she'd seen one of these, and it was gorgeous. Had these people even discovered metalworking? Because the architecture was unlike anything she'd ever seen before. Not since her young life had been suddenly and irreversibly ruined.
"Wonderful, isn't it?"
Connie's eyes widened. She spun suddenly to see Rose Quartz standing there amid the shadow cast by the trees and stumbled in an attempt to back away from the gem. She instinctively pulled her sword from her forehead.
"Aah-"
But she found herself unable to raise the weapon against the unarmed diamond. Rose even showed her empty palms, as if to prove she meant no harm.
"Please," Rose asked of the strange being in front of her. "Don't disappear. I just want to talk."
With hard uncertainty stamped upon her features, Connie found her voice. "How did you-"
"I saw the light you made from higher ground," Rose openly admitted. "I left the others to see if it was really you. And here you are!"
Rose paused but found Connie's face unreadable.
"I'm glad to see you again," the gem added.
"So they're just... out there?" Connie glanced around, paranoia clearly printed on her face. All she could see were the trees of the forest, the odd bird or two flitting around the lower branches. Then her eyes flicked to Rose, who wore a placating expression.
"Don't worry," Rose said. Then quietly, almost as an afterthought, she added, "I'm good at keeping secrets."
This put Connie slightly at ease. This was undeniably true, after all.
Rose glanced around, her ringlets flowing with her movements as she did. "Where's the other one?"
Connie held her tongue. Rose was used to this behaviour by now, but remained silent anyway, hoping the other would say something.
When Connie finally did, she instead changed the subject by indicating the civilization before them. "What is this place?" she asked.
Rose sunk a little. Of course these pink people would continue to dart around her questions. "Isn't it impressive?" she asked. "They're building cities again. I forget what they call this one, but it's been around for more than five hundred cycles of your star. Isn't that something? They themselves are impermanent, but what they build - although it changes - endures."
Connie blinked. Rose thought she seemed slightly off-balance for a moment.
"What are you doing here?" Connie asked suddenly, looking her up and down, still weary.
A fair question, though Rose could have asked the same of her. Despite this, she continued to be very forthcoming with her answers.
"The humans living down there are being bothered by something," she explained, tilting her head in the direction of the farmland they looked out over.
"You've noticed them in your travels, yes? Those who are corrupted?" asked Rose with perhaps a touch of guilt to her tone.
Connie nodded once. They had noticed. They were numerous and everywhere.
Rose set her jaw in grim determination. "We're here to find it."
"How is Amethyst-" Connie said before she could stop herself. Rose merely laughed.
"It was your tracks at the kindergarten, then. I was wondering."
She dropped her smile at the sick look Connie wore and spread her hands wide. "Amethyst is an amazing little gem," Rose was quick to continue. "I'd even let her know you asked about her if she had any idea who I'd be talking about, but she won't, so I'll keep that a secret, too."
Connie felt lightheaded for the first time in more than a thousand years. "Thank you," she croaked.
The two secret keepers were silent for a long moment, before Connie at least decided to speak.
"I'm sorry," she said. "About your friends."
Rose, an extremely expressive person, suddenly looked pained. Her falling face was awash in it. Then, as if trying to spin the subject, she turned back to the valley civilization.
"But isn't it beautiful?" she asked quietly of a silent and staring Connie. "Finally, humans have their world back, despite everything." She was speaking louder now. "They have a real chance at being what they were always supposed to be, don't you think?"
This piqued Connie's curiosity. "What were they always supposed to be?"
Rose smiled widely. "Well, humans, of course. Which means... anything!" Her dark eyes fixated on Connie's as she gushed, "I'll admit, that's a big part of why I want to know more about you," she frowned suddenly as she waved a hand about. "Before you go running off through your rip in space again, I mean. You have to tell me what it's like."
"What what's like?" Connie asked cluelessly.
Rose's smile became small and soft, bringing to Connie's mind a subtle smile in a portrait not yet painted that would someday hang in a beach house not yet built.
"To be at the same time both a human and yet not," said Rose. "It's fascinating."
Connie wanted to explode. To tumble her words out, all at once without restraint. She wanted to explain everything and cry and rail, to clutch at Rose's skirts and feel everything ripping and tearing at her as it all came out.
She didn't, of course. Even though she couldn't help the way her hands tensed up on the handle of her sword.
The way her breath stopped at her lips.
She realized that Rose had noticed.
"I'm sorry," Rose breathed, her smile gone, her eyes wide. "I didn't mean to upset you. Please-"
"I. I can't-" Connie said, breathless.
"Are you okay?" Rose asked, raising an eyebrow as if in sudden realization. "You and your friend, do you need help?"
Connie, blindsided and reeling by the personal question, was taken by the urge to answer any and all of what the diamond had to ask...
And she took a shaking step backward.
Rose inhaled sharply. She knew what was about to happen.
"No. No, wait-" the gem uttered, but it was too late. A bright rip in space opened below Connie the moment her foot came down into the dirt, and she fell through.
Once again, Rose watched a portal blink out without getting any answers.
Next time, Rose told herself as Connie rematerialized on the top of a dusky Mount Everest, tears driven by the wind freezing in streaks across her face.
Sometimes, the passage of time made these things worse as well. She hugged herself uneasily and waited for the storm to pass.
She returned - perhaps almost a year later? She had no clue, no way to be sure. But Lars was there, waiting on a tree bough in the canopy of the forest where she'd left him, as she expected him to be.
"You good?" he asked casually, jumping down from the branch. He landed next to her easily on both feet, a hand at his hip.
She nodded, smiling slightly.
He smiled back. "I was starting to get worried."
"I went up Mount Everest."
He lost the smile. "What? Without me!? Dude."
She snorted. "We can go there together right now."
"No." He shook his head. "It won't be the same if you've just been there. We'll have to wait a while."
"What arbitrary and vague amount of time do you have in mind, then?" she asked, prompting him to consider the matter closely, tapping his chin with a forefinger.
They started to walk together through the forest as they deliberated. They had no destination in particular in mind - they hardly ever did.
She would tell him about the encounter with Rose, but later. There was always, always time.
A festival was taking place around them.
Having come across this bronze age settlement at just the right moment, they'd been captivated by the sounds and, as the evening grew ever darker, the lights emanating from within the walls. It would have just been another new thing to avoid if it had been any other moment, but the sounds of joyful merriment and music were alien to them after so long.
They lurked at first. And then curiosity swiftly overcame them as it grew darker and they realized they could hide in the low flickering light of the affair.
They quickly gathered that these people were celebrating their recent harvest. It had apparently been bountiful on account of a patch of warmer weather in recent years. There was food - a slab of something roasting on a spit, and nearby there was a table loaded with various other foodstuffs being grazed upon.
There was even a band playing. These people used the most curious stringed and piped instruments, perhaps some kind of proto-harp and flute which sent such joyful melodies into the night.
And the people were everywhere. They were laughing, eating, drinking, dancing...
To say it was a trip would have been an understatement. The last time they'd set foot in a human city, it had been empty ruins. Now, they were literally bumping shoulders with members of the very species they'd been jolted out of by a mixture of death and magic.
Lars was handed a ceramic cup of something by a passing reveler. Taking it with both hands he sniffed its contents and found the sour smell worthy of a nose-wrinkling. He tapped Connie's shoulder and offered it to her, but her reaction was much the same.
He shyly offered the cup to another passer-by, who accepted it gladly and immediately started drinking.
It was weird. All of this brought back fuzzy memories of concerts and parties and gatherings with friends. But here, they were strangers and to do this made no sense.
It was cold, but the bonfire kept the partygoers from cooling down too much.
"Maybe we can be humans again," Connie mused, shrugging as she fought through the feelings. "It's just one night." She looked up at him. "Do... you want to dance?"
"I mean, we could." Lars swallowed, but his anxiety didn't go down. "But I just realized there's nothing stopping me from like, sleeping for a hundred years."
He had Connie's full attention. "That's interesting," she said.
They left the harvest festival. When they felt they were alone, they hopped a portal to somewhere lonely they knew would be safe.
The Galaxy Warp in the middle of the Tunguska Sea was broken already - smashed on purpose, they assumed the first time they visited, by the Crystal Gem's few remaining members. The mirror containing Lapis Lazuli was also long gone. They'd made sure to check long ago, before it became a regular place to which to sojourn.
Not only was this place isolated from Homeworld, but the mass of water surrounding the plateau promised them isolation from humans. And, the fact that there was nothing here, isolation also from earthbound gems as well - corrupted or not.
"We can't sleep here," said Connie, her mind already grappling with this new problem. There hadn't been a problem to solve for a while, aside from what to do with themselves.
"If the gems come here for some reason, we're screwed. We'll be on Garnet's radar - however that all works." She frowned and glared at Lars in a thinkerly way. "It's got to be somewhere too annoying for anyone to bother with."
"Blueland?" ventured Lars. "I remember most gems seemed to find snow and ice annoying, right?"
Connie narrowed her eyes at the pillars surrounding them on the little rocky plateau.
"No," she said after a time, narrowing her eyes in thought. "Bears would eat us. I'm pretty sure we can still be eaten by bears."
"Wouldn't that be a shame," sighed Lars. "Hnn, Siberia?"
She shrugged the idea away. "Mammoths could stomp us."
"We'll just avoid Mammoth Island," he suggested.
"Wolves. Humans... bears, again."
He exhaled. "Antarctica?"
Connie still looked uncertain. "Sure, no bears or humans, but... penguins?"
Lars shrugged. "I like to think penguins are generally polite."
"I think I hate penguins," Lars said with a sniff.
Penguins, they found, were horrible. The noise they made was deafening.
Lars and Connie watched a colony of them from afar. They appeared to be nesting. The snow and ice all around them was covered in a thick layer of excrement and the smell that wafted over from them was repulsive.
"They're awful," she agreed. Then she shook her head. "No, no. This is all wrong. What if we can actually freeze? If we're still for long enough, who knows!"
Lars' face fell. "Oof. We could miss our appointment."
"We might never wake up."
"And if those feathery assholes find us and peck our faces off, plastic surgery times are still a ways off."
She snorted and hit him. "Lars!"
The ensuing smile left him quickly. "But like, how would we even tell how long we'd been asleep for?" He shrugged. "Y'know, what with time being meaningless-"
"Tree," she said, cutting him off. "We pick a sapling. When we wake up, if it's grown a lot, we cut it down, count the rings."
He gaped at her a long moment. The solution was elegant, yet simple.
"You're brilliant, you know that?"
They were able to portal directly to the island which, as it turned out, was almost timeless. Lars' memory of the place wasn't the best but judging from the exposed geodes and the seemingly arbitrarily-placed warp pad, it was definitely the island he'd once been trapped on in a much different life.
"Mask Island," Connie corrected him.
"Indeed." With a glance around at the lush greenery surrounding them he continued, "I distinctly remember the invisible corrupted gem that tried to kill us, though."
They spent the next few months scouring the island to find it clean of gem monsters. They kept an eagle eye out for strange, oversized prints in the mud and muck after every rainstorm, all the while (against their instincts) announcing their presence loudly and often. But all their efforts turned up nothing.
Which was reassuring. They wanted to sleep here, after all.
He woke with a jolt, the image of penguins nipping his face strong on his mind. But he opened his eyes to find himself staring up at Rose Quartz instead.
"Wuh-wha?"
The gem was bent over, filling the cave they'd chosen for the purpose of sleeping. She'd been poking his face with an index finger, but stopped and drew back when she saw that he was awake.
He scrambled back from her. He wasn't used to being freshly awake anymore, and it was disorienting. He blinked his eyes, but she was still there in the hard-light flesh.
"Wh-what are you-?"
His eyes darted past her to the cave's entrance. Before they'd settled down, they made careful note of the location and size of a small sapling just outside.
It was gone. And in its place he saw the base of a fully mature tree.
That's alarming, yes, he told himself as calmly as he could. But first he had to deal with Rose.
He moved his eyes back to her.
"Hi, Rose-"
"I didn't know you sleep. But it makes sense, since you used to be-" She cut herself off. She'd learned from her last encounter that these two might have some issues around the fact that they were no longer human.
"We, uh... Wait." He brushed sleep from his face. Connie was still sleeping softly somewhere in the dark behind him - he could hear her steady breathing.
Lars wasn't interested in answering questions but was compelled to ask, "How long have you-"
"Oh, at least a couple of decades, on and off," Rose replied. "I wanted to talk to you again but you seemed so peaceful. But then..." She became sheepish. "I grew impatient."
He narrowed his eyes. "So you poked at my face until I woke."
When she nodded, he frowned. So much like her son.
Moments later he'd followed her outside as Connie continued to sleep.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, trying and failing to keep the grumpiness from his voice as he blinked in the bright sunlight. "We did the work. We know there aren't any of the corrupted. There's no reason for you to be here."
Rose merely smiled. "I love coming here. This island - it's so beautiful, don't you think?"
Lars spluttered. Of course this was one of Rose's favorite private getaways. Why wouldn't it be? But although he wanted to, he couldn't argue with her.
"Yeah," he agreed, defeated. "It is beautiful."
"Did your friend tell you about when I last spoke with her?"
When he didn't answer her question in any way, she shrugged. "Well, you don't seem surprised, so I'm going to assume she did."
"Why don't you just tell the others about us?" he snapped, finally. "You know Garnet might be able to help you figure out who and what we are. Why are you keeping our secret-"
Before he even finished speaking, he clutched his head. He knew exactly why she was keeping her knowledge of him and Connie from Pearl and Garnet. It could conceivably be as little as only a couple of steps away from figuring out her true identity as Pink Diamond, a disastrous blow for the last extant Crystal Gems, and absolute ruin for Rose herself.
Not to mention a short skip from there to a crazy, uncontrollable future.
She confirmed his suspicion as her own by staying quiet, her eyes in shadow.
He breathed out. It didn't help him relax.
"Look," he said at last. "I'm going to get my friend and go. Sorry we came to your island."
"She mentioned I offered to help you, didn't she?" she asked quietly.
Again, no answer. But she saw the way his shoulders slumped as he hesitated.
"You can't help us, Rose."
She watched him slink back into the cave. Soon a flash of light lit up in the inside of the cave for a moment, indicating their leaving.
"And… that's what happened."
Lars' portal had left them on this rooftop in what appeared to be yet another new city, somewhere warm and dry this time. They were surprised, but tried not to be. Things kept changing so quickly - there always seemed to be more and more people around, encroaching upon what they'd previously known as wilderness.
They decided to chill there for the moment, fairly sure they wouldn't be noticed by the passers-by in the streets below.
"Sorry I didn't wake you sooner," he added as he shrugged, staring up at the sky. "I thought you would have rather not seen her."
She was sitting hunched, hugging her knees into her torso as she'd listened to the story. "Next time, wake me," was all she said.
"Understood."
The thought of sleeping again was low on their list of priorities, however. After this, nowhere in this ever-changing world felt safe enough.
"Y'know," Connie said eventually. "The air smells different now."
"I noticed. And is the sky bluer?"
Connie exhaled. "I wonder how long it's been."
Lars shrugged and returned to watching the sky. They had to wait until Rose left the island before they could return - the tree was the only way they would be able to tell how long they'd been asleep, after all.
She glanced over at him, finally. "Wanna place bets?"
"I'll bet you..." Lars looked around as he trailed off, but all he could spot was a cloud. He pointed, "That guy, that it's been a thousand years, easy."
She eyed him suspiciously. "You can't just bet a cloud. It doesn't even belong to you."
"Nothing belongs to either of us. What do you bet?"
"Hmm. I'll shave off my hair if it's been less than four hundred."
"Acceptable."
Her hair grew back quickly, relatively speaking, but at least she owned a cloud for a brief moment.
They saw meteors, eclipses, eruptions, auroras, sundogs. They soaked themselves in the beauty of the world.
But they were sick of walking, exhausted from watching. Bored of being forced from place to place by the monsters and humans and the gems of the world. Constantly evicted from whatever remote hovel they thought to claim for themselves, they grew more and more frazzled. More steeped in ennui.
Sometimes they'd portal somewhere, only to find themselves in the middle of some unexpected city or town once again. In a crowded village square their sudden arrival sent people running. On an elevated platform in a grand hall, in front of gasping masses, their shocking appearance was met with cries of, "Demons, demons!"
They could reasonably be assured of isolation in the middle of the sea, but humans were growing bolder, striking further and further out from land. After an incident involving a catamaran, they wondered to themselves the kind of seafaring myths they could accidentally inspire if they remained so careless.
They were tired beyond measure of watching the sun and the stars zip by, day after day, night after night, a kaleidoscope of motion and purpose that mocked them to their very core.
And life - full and beautiful - abounded all around them, adding to the hurt. Often it was small and easy to ignore, but sometimes all consuming, overwhelming...
So the fancy took them to leave it all behind.
There were ships lying around, a lot of them. Most were infested by the corrupted who, perhaps out of some kind of lingering feeling of belonging, perhaps simply out of stagnation, felt the need to remain in these leftovers of gem civilization where they had once been whole.
Since Lars and Connie tended to avoid contact with living things in general and corrupted gems especially, they looked for one that lay abandoned.
It was an Era One dropship, long forgotten and half-buried in the dunes of a windy beach. The entrance was deep in the sand. They were still over digging, even roughly fifteen hundred years after the hole in the desert, so they portalled inside instead.
It was dark, so they lit up their eyes.
Lars smiled for the first time in a long time as he cast around. Good old gemkind aesthetics. The bridge was almost exactly as he remembered his old ship being like, but an earlier model perhaps.
And then he lost his smile. This thing was far more ancient than the style of thing he was used to, and then even that was so long ago.
"So!" Connie wasn't privy to the thoughts going through his head and was still optimistic. "What do we do first, Captain Lars?"
Lars sucked on his teeth. "The core," he said at last.
Moments later they were downstairs, the core of the ship bathed in the glow from their eyes. The central orb - the engine - lay dormant, the panels decidedly off. Connie watched as Lars walked over to fiddle around with something.
She eyed him in confusion as he suddenly stepped back from it.
"It was the crew," he groaned. "They were the brains of the operation."
Connie put her confusion into words. "But you were the captain-"
He became very real with her. "My ignorance meant I was the only one whose plans were dumb enough to work, so they made me 'captain'," he explained with the use of air quotes. "They were the pilots, the engineers, the strategic and technical guys - I was a fraud."
"Oof," said Connie, dejected.
That night they sat on the beach a few yards away from the ship watching the waves roll in and out.
"We could try another," Connie pitched, unwilling to give up hope just yet. "There could be ships out there more like the one you had."
He shot her down from where he lay nearby, on his back in the sand. "Doubtful."
She stared up at the starry night, unwilling to let it go.
"That gem Rose abandoned - Spinel. I think you mentioned saving her, once. We could do that."
He groaned.
"I mean, sure, it won't matter when we fix everything," Connie conceded. "But-"
"We can try, but all these ships are from Era One, and they're riddled with monsters," he reiterated.
"We could clear the corrupted gems from-"
"No. They're not our enemies," he said.
"I know. That's not my point. But we could. I-" She seethed, but mostly at herself. "Look. I'm a fighter. I always have been."
"You think I don't know that?" He became impatient suddenly. "We don't get to be fighters or captains or bakers or college kids, hunters, foragers or even humans anymore. We're just…" He sighed. "We're watchers. We don't get to do anything else."
His morose mood was matched only by her own. "Says half of the Stonehenge construction crew," she muttered.
"Hey, now-"
"You even wanted to sign the damn thing."
He merely shrugged. "So? Even the best of us make mistakes."
"To err is-" she mused into the night a moment before regretting it.
He closed his eyes for a long moment. When he opened them again, he saw that she was smiling at him, a soft expression that had a sadness about it. He smiled back at her briefly and they turned their eyes back to the sky above.
"I did like when we were modelmakers though," he admitted. "We got good at that fast."
"We made such cute tiny decor," she agreed. They laughed together a little before settling back down to watch the sky some more.
They'd been lucky, this evening; the wind didn't matter, but the sky was clear and the waves reflected the field of stars that stretched out before them, dominated by the full moon in the otherwise ink black night.
The moon which, far above them, most assuredly now lay empty.
Realization washed over them and they felt foolish suddenly. How had they forgotten?
Portal physics was always interesting to puzzle out and so far there hadn't been a challenge quite like getting to the moon. Luckily, Lars and Connie revelled in this stuff; practical problem-solving opportunities of any sort were rare for them in this day and age, bereft of needs as they were.
Portals within portals were the answer to this one.
This latest puzzle found them on the ground floor of the Diamond Base on Earth's Moon, having spilled out onto the floor in a small inelegant heap. For the first time in a long time, they both felt exhausted from the effort. Their portal blinked out immediately as if also feeling worse for wear from the endeavor.
"What's this feeling?" Lars groaned as he rubbed his head weakly. Connie rolled off him and just lay there on the floor for a long moment. "Is it... hunger?"
"It's definitely hunger," she said, frowning. "Or... tired. Probably tired, actually. Either way, I hate it."
They pulled themselves to their feet in the dark, but their eyes lit up and so did the room around them. The soft glow illuminated the visages of all four diamonds.
They stared up at each of the elaborate murals for a time. The absent diamonds, proudly displaying their conquests, all stared back in silence.
Connie nudged Lars and pointed up.
They materialized again on the middle floor. The Observation Orb hovered, waiting in the center of the room. Connie gasped and gingerly stepped toward it. The entire Earth, at their fingertips...
Lars grabbed her hand and nodded up at the ceiling, concern in his eyes. She understood. They had to check.
Standing on the top floor a moment later, they quickly took stock of their surroundings. The decor was still minimal following typical gem aesthetics, but here they were surrounded by a geodesic dome.
"Well, it's empty," said Lars. "Are we sure Rose will never come here again?"
Connie frowned up at the large geometric chair and control console at the top of a stepped platform. They hadn't seen a warp pad, or anything that looked similar.
"Not entirely, but fairly. Is that good enough for you?"
"Only if it's good enough for you."
They decided it was and stared up through the dome at the Earth they had wandered for so long, and down at the barren rocky moonscape spread out below them.
The coming years were spent solely in the Observation Room. Being magic, they were able to use the orb, so they did. The isolation the moon afforded them was invaluable. As long as they made sure everything remained in full working order and that they evacuated when required, they could exist here without causing trouble.
Able to now wander the Earth remotely, they went back to watching. And for a while they felt like gods.
In truth, it was a limited kind of godhood that they held. They could see anything they wanted from whatever angle they wished without detection, but they had no power. They could choose to go down to Earth at any moment, but knew they'd forfeit their unique perspective if they did.
They watched animals and people, monsters, and the gems. Civilizations were erected stone by stone before them. Others crumbled, bit by bit. Roads were laid, battles fought, technologies developed, grand works built. Stonehenge had at some point been cleared and fixed up, used now as a place of worship. Mammoth Island was devoid of the great beasts, and probably had been for centuries. The bison had decreased significantly in number.
Penguins were still terrible; they didn't linger there long.
They watched as the Crystal Gems at last put the finishing touches on the Crystal Temple - the facade, a beautiful statue of their cross-gem fusion they'd spent so much time on in between bouts of protecting the Earth's people and animals from the thousands and thousands of monsters roaming the lands.
It was weird. It was starting to remind them too much of what had once been like home, so they adjusted the orb and sat in a projection of a clear starry sky high above some lonely part of the Earth instead.
They were physically equipped to survive on the top of Mount Everest. So although this had been calculated, it was still a huge risk to take.
Standing on the surface of the moon, unprotected from the void of space, they were equal parts surprised and unsurprised by the fact they were still alive and doing fine.
Their pink bodies were resilient, moreso than expected. Though they still had to avert their eyes, the sun's unfiltered rays didn't scorch their skin.
The lack of air didn't seem to matter. It was strange to not feel it against their skin after soaking in atmosphere for every moment of their long lives until this point, but they could exist out here amid the craters, the rocks and the nothingness.
They glanced back at the tall and imposing Diamond Base from which they'd come and then at each other. Lars opened his mouth to say something but of course found that he couldn't. His lungs, although riddled with magic and otherwise fine, had nothing to push through his larynx. Without vibrating vocal chords, speech was impossible.
And even if it were, the noise wouldn't have carried in the vacuum of space anyway.
Connie fired him a questioning look and mouthed the word 'what?'. He shrugged back, shook his head briefly and took a step forward.
The bright and swirling portal Connie had left open in case of failure blinked out of existence.
She gazed across the gulf at the Earth high above them, or far below them, or to the left or the right or directly in front of them - it didn't matter out here.
She wasn't sure how long she'd been standing there before she felt something tap her shoulder. She jumped - an odd sensation in 1/6th gravity - and spun, but it was just Lars. The lack of noise out here was going to be hard to get used to.
He soundlessly chuckled as she finally landed, sending up a lazy dust cloud which hung in the space around them. At her questioning look, he motioned with his eyes down at his hands. She saw he was holding something out for her and accepted it with a smile.
It was a moon rock, glittering beautifully in the sunlight.