10. The Seconds Till Home.

"There is no space wider than that of grief,
there is no universe like that which bleeds."
-Pablo Neruda

"Can we do it?"

Lars' pacing footsteps abruptly stopped echoing through the dimly-lit chamber. He turned to look at her, still standing over by the wall. His eyes connected with hers.

Connie's breath caught in her throat. "Give ourselves up for someone else, I mean. Younger versions of ourselves," she added, muttering, running fingers through her hair.

Lars tried to ignore her, but it rolled through his mind like a tidal wave.

"If Rose can," he said slowly, "We can. Right?"

The question hung in the darkness between them. Connie shook her head slowly and shrugged.

He tried again after a moment. "It's... not like it's a new thing for us?" He motioned towards her with a shaking hand. "You died for Pearl."

She grimaced as Lars indicated himself by pressing the same shaking hand into his chest.

"I died for the Off Colors." He frowned. "Moldavite used us as the sacrifice for her thing. As much as me and you got screwed by it, at least hundreds of humans didn't die for her." He tried on some confidence. "We can give ourselves up for younger versions of ourselves."

"You and I got screwed by it," she corrected him.

"Whichever," he said with a dismissive wrist flick.

"But it's not as though we knew those things were going to happen," came Connie's rebuttal. "Reaction... It's different from taking action, being premeditative. We have some idea of how it will go down, so all we need to do is get out in front of the exact moment it happens, and we'll be the ones in control." Her eyes widened at the realization.

"We'll be in control, Lars. Of the future. Of our own self-negation. Doesn't that scare you!?"

Lars looked as lost as she did. "Yeah but, uh, we had a good run? We've lived good long lives?" he tried.

"No," she said miserably. "Our lives were terrible."

There was no arguing with that. Not really. So Lars, with a forced smile, shrugged. "Try not to think about it?"

"Try not to think about it." She spat the words.

His tired face fell as hers grew hard.

"We can't afford to not think about it!" The air around them rumbled from the intensity of her speech. She waited for it to pass before continuing. "If we zone out or get distracted by meaningless busywork, we could miss it entirely! We have to- must think about it every single moment from now until the end."

Lars exhaled through his nose and stared at the floor. He didn't not agree.

Something occurred to her. "How many decades have you been pacing this chamber?" she demanded. "How many centuries have I just been standing here in the dark?"

Lars checked the date on his watch. His eyes widened. "It's been-" He tisked. "Six months."

She gaped at him.

"Not that bad, but… still a problem," he admitted with a frown.

"We're screwed," she lamented. "Those younger versions of us are already screwed, and young me isn't even born yet. We're screwed."

"No." Lars was desperate. "We can do this. You're right, we need to focus on this." He racked his brain for solutions. "What if we set an alarm. Every hour, on the hour. It'll keep us focused."

Connie did some quick maths as she spoke. "There are roughly one hundred and forty thousand hours in sixteen years," she informed him evenly. "You want to subject yourself to being painfully aware of every single one?" She raised an eyebrow. "You want to actually go insane?"

"I don't mean now," said Lars with a hint of annoyance in the voice. "We're going to eventually be checking in with Steven from time to time though, right? We dunno the exact time or day it happens, so we're just going to have to be vigilant."

"It happens on a Saturday," Connie said. "Moldavite told us that much."

"Can we really risk ignoring all the other days of the week?" he asked, eyes wide. "What if-"

She cut him off with a shake of her head. "I don't expect any changes due to whatever missteps we've made in the past," she said, anticipating his problem. "For example-"

Lars watched as she crossed the floor and touched the orb with her forefinger.

"Bear with me," she said as it activated and the room lit up instantly, filling with false daylight. When their eyes adjusted, all they saw as the hand of the statue. The very spot they'd last seen Rose, during her bittersweet final hours.

Last spoken with her.

It was empty and brightly lit, a stark contrast from the last time they'd been there. Both would later report the same feeling: their hearts hitting the floor.

Connie gathered herself after a moment and lowered her eyes back to the orb. She carefully manipulated it and they found themselves on a street. Tiny, flimsy human houses lined the sides of it.

She frowned. Her memory of all this was dim, but there was a house somewhere around here that she'd-

Oh, wait. There was a van right in front of them with the words MR UNIVERSE painted proudly on the side.

"There," she said, ignoring the sudden tightness in her chest. Tapping the orb again, they immediately found themselves inside the house.

Lars gulped and Connie felt much the same. They knew it to be an illusion of light in a much larger room but, after millennia of outdoors, wide-open chambers and the staggering endlessness of the void on the moon outside the base, mere human dwellings were confining.

At length, they gathered the wherewithal to move around and it wasn't long before they came upon the living room. There, on the couch, was Greg Universe.

In his arms, a baby Steven. Both were fast asleep and peaceful in the flickering light of the projection.

"And... there he is," she continued, forcing herself to feel nothing as her eyes lingered on the little sleeping form. "One baby Steven, staying with his father, at that Cream guy's childhood home. Like before. Like always." Her voice fell. "Things are playing out exactly as they did. We don't need to worry about non-Saturdays. We just have to worry about pulling this off."

"Okay," said Lars, unable to do much more than watch as Connie overthought it further.

"But, what the hell else are we going to do?" She snarled in frustration and swiped again at the orb. It shut off at her touch. They stood in the darkened chamber once more. "Set an alarm for fifteen years from now, just to be safe," she ordered, waving an arm at him as she spoke.

Lars brought up his wrist and squinted hard at the new-fangled digital watch strapped to it. "I, uh, don't think any of the watches we have will do that. They're from some nineties garbage dump, like the rest of our clothes, so..." He trailed off. She sighed.

They set alarms for every twenty-four hours to keep them grounded. A couple of Earth days later, when they felt ready, they turned the orb back on.

They fell back into the groove of watching life spin on without them on the little globe above them. This time, with the added bonus of being painfully aware of every single passing day.

They watched the new century unfold. The world was crammed with people, now. It was all completely alien in a distantly familiar way, to see everything they had once known come back around again. It was like inhabiting a hazy memory, a half-forgotten dream.

But checking the beach regularly was a habit they knew they needed to get into as quickly as possible, so they did. It was like looking for the Sea Shrine, then for Rose Quartz all over again - but this time from the safety and comfort of an empty, sterile moon base.

The beach house wasn't there one visit, and then it was. They could dimly recall that it could easily take a few months or more for a human dwelling to go up, so they reassessed their choices and vowed to visit more frequently.

They became accustomed to seeing snapshots of the growing Steven's young life.

One such visit to the beach, their point of view from a high angle, they were able to spot a small, solitary figure sitting among the rocks below part of the cliff, away from the waves.

"Is that... little you?" Lars asked, squinting from where he stood in the projected sky.

"Oh no," Connie groaned as Lars crossed the floor and adjusted the angle of the orb. It was flickering worse than usual today, but it never completely failed them. Never for long.

But there was the real-time hologram of Connie, eleven years old and bespectacled, sitting on the beach reading a book not ten feet away from them.

She was fixated on the book, enjoying the peaceful weather.

"Nothing's changed," smiled Lars, pointing at the book in Connie's hand. "A lot older, though."

Presently, young Connie looked up and over the ocean. They turned to see a boat passing by.

A little skipjack, Connie said to herself in the projection.

Lars blinked. "That's how you know about boats."

"Yeah," she said quietly. "When you're shy and have no friends and don't swim, you... look at boats."

"Eh." Lars shrugged. "I think you're alright."

Little hologram Connie's eyes dropped back down to the book, only to tense up and glance around as the illusion of the beachside began to quake.

"Oh," said Connie. "It's today."

When Lars looked at her, eyebrow raised, she smiled ironically. "Keep your eyes peeled, Lars," she said as her eyes drifted past him to see Steven struggling to ride his bicycle along the sand.

"You're going to witness my very first near-death experience."

Lars groaned loudly as the scene played out before them, projected by the orb.

"Aw, hell. What's he doing hanging out with that loser?" asked Lars. He threw a pebble - one of several he'd been stacking quietly - at the projection of his younger self.

The stone shot straight through the right eye of the flickering illusion, which of course offered no resistance.

The guy was leaning against the facade of a pizza place, pretending to be aloof while Steven silently but enthusiastically quizzed him about his motives.

Connie glanced over at him. "Aw. C'mon. I think he's okay."

Lars pulled a face. "He's a putrid mass of insecurity. And he never learns."

"Growth isn't linear."

Lars rolled his eyes. "Look, if it's all the same to you, I'm just going to read. Tell me when it's over."

Connie shrugged and kept watching the glitchy projection as the Lars beside her pulled a book from his head. He turned to face the wall before burying himself in it.

The Sea Shrine has reformed-

The words, silently rolling from the lips of the flickering holographic projection of Pearl, caused them both to sit up straight.

As always, Steven was ecstatic. He punched straight up into the air with both fists. The Crystal Gems exchanged words further as the four of them began to move toward the warp pad.

Connie sprinted over to the orb and began futzing with it. After a brief glitch, the Sea Shrine's interior surrounded them.

"Wow," said Lars, a little impressed, seeing it for the first time.

"Here it is," Connie said, rubbing her hands together nervously as she glanced around. The dimly-lit blue-green chamber seemed unchanged since the last time she'd actually been there in the real. "The site of my biggest failure."

"Our biggest failure," Lars reminded her as he wandered the room, studying the hourglasses that lined the place. "Remember how I couldn't make a portal down here? How I couldn't swim down with you?"

"Remember how I picked wrong and almost drowned?"

He did. The events of that and the following day were etched on their minds. If only it had worked back then. If only it was five years and not five thousand that separated them from what they'd lost.

Presently, Lars reached a hand out towards one of them. Connie, with anxiety playing stark on her features, lurched over to grab his arm just in time.

"Wait, don't!"

He merely blinked at her. "Uh, Connie?" he said as he used his other hand to 'grab' an hourglass. But it passed through the object like that of a phantom. Like it always did.

Connie's eyes widened. She released her grip on him "Sorry," she stammered. "I just-"

She deserved kindness, so he gave it. "No, it's okay. It's weird to be here again. I get it."

There was no noise, but they were alerted to the gem's arrival by the way the warp pad's sudden brilliance lit up the surroundings.

They piped down to watch with interest as Steven and the gems stepped down from the warp pad.

Which one is it? Which one is it!? Steven mouthed in excitement as he cast about the room. It took them a moment to work out that Pearl was the one trying to calm him down and explain what they were doing here.

"C'mon, Pearl," muttered Connie. "You should have gone over all this with him before you left."

Lars would have snorted, but lipreading took concentration.

Steven, peering over the top of one of the shelves, was talking again.

Hey! How about this one here?

Lars moved out of the way as Pearl walked over to see the little round glass that had captivated him.

What one? she asked.

This little one... It's ad-orb-able.

Connie gaped. "That one!?" she croaked. "Is that the one that took his fancy!? That is the Glass of Time!?"

"Connie-"

"I saw that one, Lars," she whined, aghast and pale. "I dismissed it out of hand!"

"Hey, shh! He might not even pick that one."

She glanced at him. "The hourglasses I did grab, are they still in your head?"

"Yeah," he said curtly. "I'm a packrat. Now shhhhhh," he hissed.

Steven was distracted by the others briefly as he and the gems looked around the room, and Lars motioned towards them. Connie exhaled after a moment and walked over with him to try to catch up on the unheard conversation, but they were too late.

Suddenly, the gems and Steven appeared startled by something. For a bizarre moment, the silly idea took them that they'd been spotted somehow, and then they turned to see Amethyst holding one of the larger hourglasses.

"Whoops," said Lars with sarcasm. Moments later, the projection shook. The effect was dramatic enough to cause them to stumble for a moment.

The shrine was filling up with water.

Amethyst gets to keep hers, mouthed Steven as Amethyst proudly walked past with her prize in her hands. I'm gonna get the one I picked out!

He turned and began running to the little glass of time on the other side of the chamber, completely ignoring the cascading waterfall that was coming in from the ceiling.

Lars and Connie watched helplessly as the little kid picked it up, said something to it...

And a second Steven appeared out of nowhere.

This second Steven, deadly serious with amazing rockstar hair, held out his hand and demanded the hourglass.

Wait, said the Original Steven, eyes wide with shock. Are you future me?

Just hurry up and give it!

Lars and Connie's eyes went wide as more Stevens exploded into being around them - first two more, then a third which began to fight Original Steven for the object.

Unable to help, they could only look on as more stevens appeared - all of them frantically fighting each other, all of them desperate for the hourglass. Many had pompadour hairstyles while equal amounts had 3s, 2s, and 1s written on their cheeks in what appeared to be sharpie.

It was insane. There was no logic to it. What bizarre sequence of events took place that could have created such an out-of-control situation, neither had the faintest guess.

Suddenly, the First Steven had the hourglass. He laughed maniacally and soundlessly before catching sight of the original Steven on his butt in the water below him.

The kid was terrified. Speechless. Shaking.

"Oh, Steven," breathed Connie, unable to take her wide eyes off the poor lad.

The sight appeared to affect the First Steven in much the same way. He gasped and, in a sudden sober moment, appeared to take in the chaos of his surroundings.

The Steven Battle raged on as the projection glitched briefly. From the warp pad, the rest of the Crystal Gems looked on, as confused and alarmed as they themselves.

The First Steven cried out loudly, though Lars and Connie heard nothing. Stevens everywhere turned to take notice and the fighting simmered down.

The Original Steven found himself being helped back up onto his feet.

When Steven fights Steven, who is the winner? The First Steven bemoaned unto the room as Original Steven stood beside him, smiling awkwardly at the crowd of himself.

What have we become? the First Steven cried.

The crowd became sympathetic and somewhat confused.

Lars folded his arms nervously and Connie balked at what followed.

The First Steven placed the hourglass on the benchtop and, locking his hands together, bringing them high above his head, smashed it.

The tiny object exploded into sand and dust and all its copies throughout the crowd of displaced Stevens met the same fate.

Then it began to happen to the stevens.

It started slowly at first and then spread out like a ripple through the crowd. Silent yelps of surprise and cries of agony took hold of each of the duplicate stevens, and one by one they fell into the water, their bodies crumbling into sand, their cries ending as they did.

This horrific scene played out as the water continued to rise. Original Steven, just as terrified as they were, was immediately beset by one bearing 3's on his cheeks. The copy appeared to be begging something of him. The 3 then cried out as he also deteriorated into nothingness.

As if that wasn't enough, the poor kid turned to look upon the First Steven, the one who appeared to have started all this. None of the mouth-shapes made sense anymore in this horrible moment gone wrong - this moment that laughed uncaring in the face of causality.

First Steven - the last extant copy - finally met his fate as the sole remaining Steven stood open- mouthed and wide-eyed at the now-empty room, trying and failing to process what he had seen as a new wave of water smashed in.

He was rescued by Garnet shapeshifting an enlarged hand out to reach him, and the warp activated just in time.

Connie felt like she was drowning, alone, once more as the water rose.

"Steven," she said quietly. "Grab my hand."

But she wasn't alone. Lars gathered his wits and belatedly lurched forward to shut off the orb as the projection of the rising water engulfed their heads.

He shut his eyes a long moment, then he turned toward her.

"Connie. You know we weren't there, right?" he asked her belatedly.

Once again, they stood in darkness. Once again they were overwhelmed by the task they'd been waiting forever to carry out.

"We shouldn't have done this." Lars tried to swallow his anxiety. "This was a mistake."

"No," Connie croaked. "We needed to see this."

He raised his brow. "Did we?"

When she didn't answer, he spoke again. "You're saying we needed to see a bunch of kid versions of our old friend die in the same manner we're going to later?"

Minutes passed. Or hours, it didn't matter. All the while, Lars searched for something to say.

"Okay. Right. Upside? Now we know we can exist long enough to stop her," he admitted. "That's good, yeah?"

He saw the tear spill out from her eye.

"Hey, stop," he asked of her, softening immediately. "You're gonna get me going."

But it was too late.

It took a long time before they could go back to watching and even then they weren't ready. But they just had the one job.

Not long later (in the relative sense), there was sound from below. Lars and Connie both tensed up. Whatever they were looking at in the projection? Immediately forgotten.

"Was that a portal?" asked Lars, bewildered.

Then, noises like voices, muffled.

"Oh shit," hissed Connie. "They're here. The gems, and-"

Lars was floored. "Already?! How-"

But there was no time for questions. They lurched to their feet. Lars quickly crossed the floor to turn off the orb as Connie scanned the room for mess. Books, mostly, a couple of chest-high stacks of them. A chessboard abandoned in the frustration of a fifty-year-long stalemate. She picked them up and hurriedly shoved it all into her head - as many as she could at a time. Lars rushed over to help her in the now-darkened room.

In the middle of it all, something unsettling occurred to her. She sprinted over.

"We can't go to Earth," she whispered at Lars. "We'll make too much noise."

"So, the castle."

She nodded. They couldn't get to Earth from there either, but it would have to do.

Movement not far from them caused them to turn. A small part of the floor was opening like a square trapdoor. Suddenly the material that made up the floor around the perimeter of the chamber rose up to form floating stairs around the edge of the circular room. The new stairway led up to another new doorway that had opened up into the room above.

They could hear what was going on below far more clearly, now.

"This is so incredible," a distantly familiar voice floated up from below. "Only the elite of the elite can enter these sanctums. We are literally walking in the footsteps of the-"

Connie gasped. Lars took charge. He spread his arms wide and brought them together into a clap which sparked out into a portal.

Moments later, the portal's light died and the room existed empty in darkness for a brief moment, as though it hadn't played home to a couple of people at odds with time for the last three millennia.

And then Steven popped his head up out of the hole in the floor.

"Hey, what's this room?" the boy asked as he eyed the orb hovering mysteriously in the center of the room.

Garnet's reply came quickly. "It's not what we came for."

"Can we hurry it up?" asked Amethyst. "This place gives me the creeps."

Steven, the Crystal Gems and Peridot continued making their way up the staircase.

They sat out the following months in the moon castle. Their watches still worked in the void of space but the alarms didn't, so they kept a careful eye on the passing hours.

Connie resumed her old habit of marking down the days, using the ancient stone chisel to scrape each one into the inside of the battlements.

With no weather to worry about, they existed for a time on the highest tower. They sat, paced, read, sparred down on the surface and conversed in their made-up sign language. At one point they began adding a new wing to their already expansive castle, only to abandon it abruptly when they couldn't agree on some small detail or other.

But most of their time was spent lying with their backs against the stone floor, staring up at the beauty and horror of the endless cosmos that sprawled out and away from them, in every direction.

Avoiding detection by Steven and the gems had been a close call and they agreed that sitting out the final two visits was the best play. They couldn't risk their plan - not when they were so close.

They knew they would be able to go back someday, after Lapis had returned to Earth.

Long days blended into long nights then back to day then long night again...

Finally they saw it. Two blips, off in the distance. Connie pulled a telescope they'd picked up during the years following what they supposed were now called the Late Middle Ages and they both looked through it. One yellow ship, one blue. The left and right arms of the Great Diamond Authority. They stood to observe as the giant ships passed them by, squinting through the glass as well as they could.

Blue and Yellow Diamond were coming to Earth.

Lars caught her attention. We can go back soon, he signed enthusiastically.

She frowned. In a few hours? To be safe.

Lars had long ago learned about the events that took place the night of Garnet's wedding, he knew that Lapis had to leave the base before they returned, but he was disappointed. He'd wanted to see the battle, and signed as much. He'd been stuck in space the first time around, and this time wasn't panning out much differently.

Sorry buddy, she signed sympathetically.

Gigantic pink legs stumbled awkwardly across the beachfront, past the two great destroyed arm ships which were still smoking in a heap in the sand. Connie purposefully kept her eyes from settling on the crowd of people gathered on the beach below. She knew who was down there. She reminded herself that she'd stopped missing them centuries ago.

"So. Homeworld, huh?" said Lars, sharing her view of the mecha legs and pelvis clumsily splashing through the water.

"Yeah," sighed Connie.

"Too bad we can't follow."

She eyed him with surprise. "You'd go back? If you could?"

Lars scrunched his face in thought. "I mean... no. Well, maybe. To the fancy parts, like the palace. Not the kindergartens. Would you go back if you could?"

"No," came her solid reply. "Not even to the fancy parts."

They watched the leg ship at last jump from the ocean into the flickering blue sky as if from a diving board.

Although there was a staircase now, they'd sooner die than use it. Instead, they stepped out of a portal into the top floor of the base. The Earth hung, as it always did, right front and center of the chair that had long ago belonged to Pink Diamond, before she was their friend. In front of it, the smashed console. They'd found it destroyed not long after returning.

But none of that was important. They scanned the spacescape for something else. Suddenly, Connie saw it and pointed.

They were just in time to see Steven's leg ship punch its way out of the system.

They were staring down the barrel of Spinel and her biopoison injector, clamped to the very hill they'd called home for eight centuries. They knew it was going to turn out okay, but that didn't stop them regretting their choices a little as Steven, gem awry, forced himself to climb to the top of the cursed thing.

"We should have rescued her before she broke like this, you know," said Lars with an air of irritability about him.

Connie's mouth hung open as she stared. "You're the one who didn't want to keep looking for ships!" she cried.

"Yeah," he replied, pointing accusingly at her. "And you should have kept bugging me about it!"

"Huh?"

"You could have changed my mind!"

She balked and spread her arms wide. "Weh-heh-hell, why don't we just go there right now! We could help him! Oh, wait, I know why!" The sarcasm dripped from her mouth.

This argument went on for a time as Steven pulled himself, inch by painful inch, vertically up the side of the gigantic injector.

When they looked back at the projection, there was Steven - exhausted but persevering - on the top of the monstrosity in the air over Beach City. He was trying to reason with Spinel. They watched awestruck at the final confrontation played out silently in front of them.

They watched the injector explode, destroying everything around it.

The pool of landmark events to watch out for dried out. It could happen at any moment. It was going to be a Saturday, probably - but morning, noon, or evening? They didn't have a clue.

"We could show up at her house," Lars said, not for the first time. "We could overpower her. We've done it before."

Connie frowned. "Yeah, but what if it doesn't work, and that's how she gets the idea in the first place? We can't risk a bootstrap paradox."

A long silence passed between them. Lars raised an eyebrow at her.

"...We can't risk more bootstrap paradoxes," she corrected herself, the image of Stonehenge looming once again in her thoughts.

They set alarms for every hour. They needed to focus intently on their task. The orb stayed fixated on the same scene at all times.

Their vantage point was from up in the air, high above the beach, overlooking as much of it at the widest angle possible while still being able to make out details. Luckily their eyesight hadn't degraded with their extreme age. Nothing physical about them had.

But that was going to change. Any day now, a Saturday or otherwise.

And then there was Moldavite, pacing on the beach one morning. Her wide eyes glancing around, waiting for someone. Waiting for them.

In her hand, a little hourglass.

Lars' voice was urgent. "It's happening."

"I see it," she replied, her eyes as wide as Moldavite's. She couldn't bring herself to look away from the sight of the troubled green gem, flickering every so often with the rest of the projected light.

Between the two of them, they'd imagined all kinds of scenarios wherein they would leap into action. That they'd know exactly what to do, what to say. But here in this instant every plan they'd ever made went out the window, into space.

In this moment, they soaked in their fear. Of fixing everything, of leaving it broken. Of dying, of not dying - they were scared either way.

Connie manipulated the angle the orb displayed, and suddenly they were down on the beach with her, close enough to see her face. There was Moldavite, indeed - right in front of them, waiting on a beach two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles away. She threw the little hourglass up in the air only to catch in her hand as it fell again, over and over.

She wore a troubling expression neither of them could properly identify. Despite her warm green, she looked cold.

She seemed lost.

But they saw here a gem who knew exactly what she was doing. A gem who would happily hurt a human kid and a pink young adult to get what she wanted. Who would happily do it again when it wasn't enough.

The air between them was filled with breathing. They didn't need to, but breathing was still soothing to them. Anything to smooth out the nerves.

"Connie?" Lars started, slowly ripping his eyes away from the projection. "I just want to say, thank you. For-" he smiled shakily. "For everything."

She turned to him, surprised. "Lars-"

He grabbed her hand, his fingers fumbling over hers. "I'm still so, so sorry for what happened to you."

She closed her hands over his.

"It's not your fault. It's hers," she said, for the better part of the two millionth time.

"I know, I know. But I don't know what I would have done if it were just me. I... Connie, I wouldn't have survived. I wouldn't have been able to undo everything. I wouldn't have saved you. I, I would have-"

He faltered. Connie frowned and placed her hands on his shoulders.

"Stop, stop. Lars, I love you."

"I love you too!"

"It's been a pleasure. Really. And it's not going to matter much longer anyway." She sniffed. "It's the end, and they - we - are going to be okay."

For the first time in a long time, they shared a smile that wasn't forced. Lars brought his arms around her, and it quickly turned into an embrace.

"They really are, aren't they?" he said quietly.

"Do you think they're going to be friends, like we are?" asked Connie.

"I hope so," Lars said, smiling shakily. "And if we don't get another chance to talk, I just wanna say... goodbye, Connie." He laughed a little, against all the odds. "It's been real. Really real."

She took a breath. "Goodbye, Lars." She smiled too. "And yeah, it has."

The hug lingered a moment longer, but the seconds were counting down and they knew it. They let each other go.

There was no time for anything more. They blinked back threatening tears.

A scream, and a portal sprung into existence.

The hourglass fell into a pink hand that wasn't hers.

Before Moldavite had a chance to consider how strange that was, or even turned to see who had snuck up behind her, she acted on impulse and grabbed Lars' hand before he could snatch it away.

"Shit," Lars grunted. Her long fingers were like a steel trap.

Connie's mind raced. They were exposed on the beach, about to provoke a gem into a fight. But they didn't have to be.

She grabbed Moldavite by the shoulders, who promptly found herself falling backwards through a tunnel of wind and light. She was too surprised to fight back effectively as her assailant wrestled his hand and the glass out of her grip.

Then, she found herself skidding on her butt along... a beach? The beach. But the sand felt wrong, like it wasn't even there.

She grunted and glanced up, teeth clenched, to regard the figures towering over her, and for a second she thought the scenery blinked out for a second.

But Lars and Connie were used to it. Lars held up the orb, and Connie her sword.

"Lars?" she asked. Her eyes then darted to the female. "Connie."

And in the silence that followed, Moldavite opened her mouth. "I wondered if this would happen." She smiled. "You're here to stop me."

"So you do know about causality, then?" asked Lars with sarcasm. "You're crazier than we thought."

Moldavite pulled herself into a half-sitting position, eying the sword cautiously. "So. What will happen to me? Do I get to go home?"

Connie's jaw tightened, but she did not answer. Lars kept his eyes on the gem as he addressed his friend. "Now what?"

"I dunno," she breathed. "The plan was to destroy it on the beach."

"That's... so interesting," said Moldavite, slowly pulling herself up further. Amusement played on her features. "What's your new plan, then, I wonder?"

She was wide-eyed as always, slowly backing away from them.

She glanced at the hourglass in Lars' hand briefly in the glitching light. "All I need is your help! Your help to get back home."

"Nope! Not another inch." Connie said, stepping forward and pointing the sword straight at her. The gem fixated on it instead, and froze.

"We'll do it here," Connie told Lars.

But he was hesitant. "She, uh, makes a good point? What about her?" he asked, nodding at the gem.

Moldavite was silent now, her eyes darting from Lars to Connie and back again as they spoke.

"It's fine," urged Connie, swallowing hard. She kept her sword trained on the gem as she spoke. "We'll leave her trapped here until someone finds her."

"Right."

Lars took a deep breath, raised the little hourglass, and prepared to fire it directly into the stone floor. But before he did, he glanced over at Moldavite.

Connie was also watching the gem's face, studying it, as she did nothing. Her eyes narrowed as she stared back at them. Her expression was calculating. Cold.

Even in the dim light, they could see it. There was no urgency on her face, no sign of distress. Only an impassive look, as though she was waiting for something. Connie, noticing also her continued existence, glanced back at Lars.

Sidebar, signed Lars with his free hand, a simple gesture that was basically the thumbs-up thrown back over the shoulder. She gave a nod back.

"You," she told Moldavite sternly. "Stay where you are."

Moldavite nodded, but asked, "Where are you going?"

This question too was left unanswered as they reconvened on the top floor a second later, well away from the entrance, courtesy of a portal.

"Moldavite has unplayed cards. Did you see her eyes?" Lars asked in a low voice.

Connie had, and she nodded. She tapped her thumb on the sword's handle. It helped her think. "She even said, back on the clifftop, that she had every intention of following through with her plan. Whatever that meant."

Lars shut his eyes. "Will mean."

"Means, right now." Carefully, with sword still in hand, Connie folded her arms across her torso. "We destroy the thing. What then?"

"We die. Not only that, but our bodies turn to sand in the air," Lars recited, rolling the hourglass around in his fingers. The image of the myriad of self-annihilating stevens falling into dust had never left his mind.

"But she'll still be around. She could do it again."

Lars shook his head. "No, nuh-uh. It's Era Three now. She said back then that the parts to make this thing are hard to come by."

"Yeah. And even despite that, she made one," Connie frowned and cast a disapproving glance at the trapdoor to the stairwell. "She could have another. She's certainly acting like the one she has is no big deal."

Lars set his jaw. The solution was obvious. "So we shatter her."

The statement hung in the air until Connie shook her head.

"She'll still be there. Her mind, in each of her shards. If someone finds her and pieces her back together…" She grit her teeth. "Look, the only reason we're alive right now is because of gem magic. Maybe shattered gems can be brought back, too. Whether we exist or not, she'll still be like this."

Lars held the hourglass up in between his thumb and forefinger. "So. Right now, if you're asking me? I think we should smash this thing and be done with it. Why should we care if she builds another? We tried, we failed. We should be used to that by now."

It was an enticing prospect, to embrace oblivion. Even Connie gave it a lingering consideration. An escape from all this.

"But then… our entire lives would have been more meaningless than we thought," he added, lifting his eyes to stare up at the Earth, which always hung right there in the black sky above the dome. "And maybe despite everything, we'll still exist like this again anyway, because it all happened again, some other time. Some other place."

Connie sucked on her teeth. "Now that we've interfered with her plan, maybe she changes her mind about using you and me. She could use others, normal humans who just die because they're not pink."

"Lion?"

"No." She shook her head once and took a couple of pacing steps as she thought. "Lion's too smart for her. She could wipe out the entire town, though, easy. And when she gets to the past, when she wants to go back again..."

She hesitated before turning to him. "Lars. The only reason we could do anything about her was because we knew her enough to strike up a conversation. If she doesn't have us to talk to, if it's just a hundred or so nameless, faceless, random people... she'll kill them all! And, five years later when she wants to go back again, she'll just be multiplying herself over and over as she happily wipes out all organic life!"

Lars swallowed, eyes wide and puffy. "You're right. She only needs warm bodies, and she didn't have to be picky when she picked you and me."

"That was her being considerate!" Connie spat bitterly.

This was turning into a headache. Lars pinched the bridge of his nose as he attempted to help game it out. "Nngh. It could've been anyone. But nothing we ever did mattered anyway, so how are we gonna stop her!?"

Moldavite's desperate face, seconds from poofing for the first time, flashed into Lars' mind. Connie heard the fire in her tone as she told them, clear as day, of her true intentions. This was always going to happen, no matter the exact circumstances.

Now they knew it.

Connie scratched her head. "We could go with her ourselves... But."

"Paradox."

"This horrible universe should be aflame from the amount of paradoxes we should have caused," she admitted, her brow furrowed. "Even if there's no paradox, it's at least unsustainable."

The Earth gazed upon them from the eternal night sky beyond the dome as Connie exhaled.

"No. Listen," she said. "We either smash this thing, die, and allow Moldavite to begin a brand new cycle... Or," she said with a sigh, "In related news, we already destroyed it. We already beat her. Remember? About five thousand three hundred years ago."

Lars stared into the cold uncaring void for a long second. "Huh. Well, at any rate," he said slowly, "it's still nice to get a final talk in, right?"

"H'yeah," she admitted, her face every bit as exhausted as she felt. "It's really nice. How are you doing?"

"Not great," he replied in a monotone. "I just have this one massive problem. What about you?

She smiled without humor with her arms folded across her chest. "Same. Actually, I can't think of how to get around this, Lars. Whether it happens tomorrow, next week, or hundreds of years from now, she can try again. We're the only ones who will ever know about any of this."

"Hello?" Moldavite called up from below. "What's it going to be?"

Lars grit his teeth at the gem's voice before responding quietly to his friend. "So it's us who don't trust her. But we say it's okay. We let it happen."

Connie looked at him, earnest. Wide-eyed. "I'm sorry. This is the only-"

"It's not your fault," Lars said. "It's hers."

Unblinking, they watched as their younger selves interacted with Moldavite. Connie, dark-skinned, raven-black hair and a few inches shorter asked a question, but they didn't bother lipreading. There was no reason to. They knew what was happening.

Lars, the sides of his head shaved but still as pink as he'd always been, shrugged and nodded.

Sure, he said. No biggie.

We'll help you get home, added Connie, adjusting the backpack she had slung over her shoulder.

Moldavite smiled, a long thin thing that snaked across her face. Her eyes, wide and troubled, fixed upon them.

Thank you, she said, a deep relief on her face.

She produced the hourglass and held it aloft as the gem in her forehead began to glow bright.

In the flickering projection, Lars and Connie's expressions turned quickly to confusion as the hourglass began to glow as well. Lars took a step back. Connie dropped the backpack, but it was too late to run or fight.

Outside of the projection, Lars and Connie watched as the light grew rapidly, engulfing all three of them.

As is often the case with enormously devastating events, it was over remarkably fast.

The light blinked out and they were gone. All that was left of them was an abandoned backpack and footprints in sand.

Lars ran a hand through his hair. Connie wrung hers in front of her. Despite a sudden glitch they caught sight of movement over at the beach house, and their eyes darted over to see Steven.

The boy looked concerned. With raised eyebrows and clenched fists, he barrelled his way through the door. Then after jumping from the deck of the house, he soared through the air in exactly the manner the laws of physics would otherwise dictate against if he didn't happen to be the son of a diamond.

Steven landed on his feet right in front of them, and it hit Lars and Connie that the boy had seen what had happened through a window of his house.

They stared blankly as the kid looked around. Confused, he called out for them. At a loss, he scuffed his flip-flop in the sand where they'd just been.

Lars and Connie knew they were looking at something they'd never expected to see, a moment they never anticipated participating in.

It was a difficult concept to grapple with - the idea that they could partake in the world again, without worry for the things that had already been. That they could interact with someone again. The lack of need for secrets. No reason to stay absent and hidden, on the sidelines of the world.

Steven's head snapped around, surprised to see a portal open in front of him. Two figures skidded out to stop abruptly, sending sand up into the air around them. Steven's surprise gave way to relief as he recognized one of them.

"Lars?" He placed a hand over his racing heart. "Lars! What the heck happened? Was that Moldavite? Where is she? Where's Connie?" he asked as he glanced up at Connie, whose breath caught in her throat at the question.

The kid frowned, confused. "Who are you?"

Steven shut his mouth long enough to realize Lars wasn't talking. Instead, his friend stared down at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes.

Steven frowned up at him and waved a little. "Hello? Earth to Lars?" Then, "What's with the long hair? Is that a wig?"

"Uh-" Lars found himself thoroughly unprepared for any of this.

The kid smiled cheerfully. "You look great!"

And Connie stared down at her teenage sweetheart of so long ago. He didn't recognize her, and she was surprised at how surprised she was about that. Had he not noticed her absence this whole time? Had he not wondered about her, the way that she had him? Worried about her? At all?

Why was he staring at her like this?

The logical part of her knew the answers to all of these questions. But the emotional part of her was breaking down, losing control.

"Where's Connie?" Steven asked again.

Lars noticed the tears as they began. He reached over for her. He fought all his instincts. They hadn't told anyone their names in thousands of years, but after a long moment, he said it.

"This is Connie."

Steven's eyes widened. His jaw dropped. He glanced between the two a moment before taking a step backward.

"Connie!?"

Connie gasped as Lars cast one last baleful glance at Steven before bringing his foot down. The boy gaped at the unfamiliar method of portal-summoning and watched as the two fell through.

"Wait, what!? Wait!"

He threw himself forward to follow, but thudded into sand instead.

They stumbled out of the portal at the top of Mount Everest. Connie, almost bursting with hideous emotion, gaped wide-eyed.

"Aaah-" croaked Lars, at a loss.

By the light of this clear early evening, they found it visited by people. A handful of them in fact, clinging to ropes, slowly hauling themselves closer to the summit. A couple on the summit itself was busy taking photos of each other, red-faced from the cold, exhausted from the climb yet smiling.

They were all wrapped in extreme cold-weather gear, laden with masks, oxygen tanks and backpacks full of practical mountain climbing tools.

There were some gems, too - easily distinguishable by the fact that they had no need to be so encumbered.

Under the looks of hard surprise from everyone nearby, the situation quickly overwhelmed them. Their reliable old getaway and sparring ground was no more. It had been buried under a stupid tourist attraction.

Lars brought a foot down to thud weakly into frozen snow. It was just enough for a portal, and they fell through.

Stonehenge in the mid-afternoon had always been a pleasant sight. The way it cast long shadows over the ground, growing longer as the sun dropped lower. The structure had fallen at some point, as they had expected, but it had been rebuilt a few different times over by various groups of local humans. They knew because they'd visited a handful of times over the millennia to get their fill of nostalgia. Though they had built it, its existence confused them. Despite that, they were kind of attached to the place.

Now, it was filled with people. They'd never seen anything like it before. Tourists overwhelmed the place - posing, taking photos. There was even a carpark nearby that was filled with cars and busses, glinting in the sunlight. Lars and Connie stared uncomprehending as one of the tourists nearby turned and took a photo of the two of them.

They didn't smile.

Nearby, a tour guide caught their attention.

"These ancient stones represent an enormous investment of labor and time," the lean bespectacled woman loudly informed her tour group. "Great amounts of organization and effort were required to transport each of them more than one hundred and fifty miles from their origin in the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, west Wales. Only a sophisticated society could have assembled a large enough workforce to transport the stones over such a distance and, not only that, shape them with such precision and raise them..."

Lars and Connie quickly tuned out. This was a nightmare. Connie grabbed Lars by his shirt sleeve and backed up into one of the stones, pulling him along with her. At a loss for what else to do, she slammed a hand into the weathered rock and they tumbled backward into a portal.

The portal blinked out, leaving them at the Galaxy Warp. It was no better here because the tiny island was thronging with gems. Some paused to regard them in mild surprise as they appeared, but every single one of them had seen stranger and much worse things happen. The bystanding gems soon turned back to whatever it was they were doing.

Gems were coming and going in this early evening, using the facility's many warp pads to get to where they needed to be. The Homeworld warp pad seemed to be experiencing the heaviest traffic, and there were greeters available to help those that were arriving to get their bearings.

"Welcome to Earth!" a greeter - a horned uncorrupted amethyst - cried out as she approached them exuberantly. "How did you get over there? You guys are quick!"

"Uhhh," started Connie, but let's be honest. She had nothing.

"So!" the amethyst continued. "What brings you to Earth today? Where would you like to-" Suddenly, she looked surprised. "Wait. Lars?" She raised an eyebrow. "Sorry, forgive me, I thought you were a gem!" She smiled suddenly. "I've never seen you here before! What are you doin' here? And what did you do with your hair?" She gasped and smacked her hands to her cheeks, absolutely gobsmacked. "Can you shapeshift?"

Before he could manage to croak out a response, the amethyst turned to Connie. "Who are you?"

Connie, eyes wide and burning, faintly recalled this amethyst. They knew each other. She'd played against this one in a game of volleyball once in a Long Ago that may as well have been as recent as a week prior. Her breath caught in her throat. The unrecognizable Connie clutched at Lars.

That was the cue. He barked a portal up over the water. They took a stumbling, running leap through as the amethyst and some other quartzes who had been standing nearby looked on, deeply confused.

Steven spoke breathlessly with Garnet, Pearl and Amethyst on the beach. Their concerned faces flickered in and out, betraying the fact that they weren't really there with them in the silent observation chamber on the moon.

-Except Lars called her Connie, and then they took a portal somewhere, and-

You're saying they were both pink? asked Pearl, her brow furrowed.

Steven nodded, the corners of his eyes beginning to brim with tears as he wrung his hands in confusion.

Amethyst scratched her head and glanced up at Garnet. The fusion, arms folded, appeared to be having an internal debate...

Lars and Connie watched. They tried at different times to say something - anything - but words weren't coming.

They hadn't expected to see the other side of the moment they'd been waiting millennia for, so this was a surprise. A joke. A blasted, wrenching shame that there were no words for nor comfort from. Their lives had long since been ruined and despite everything they'd been banking on, everyone else could begin to feel that pain.

Starting with their old friend, Steven.

"What do we do?" she asked in a shaking whisper. "How do we fix this?"

"We could stay here," came his flat reply. "We don't have to go back. We don't even have to watch this."

But they couldn't rip their eyes away from the bemused discussion that had been waiting more than five thousand years to take place.

The longer they stood here in this mire of quandary, the worse they felt. The walls unseen around them felt like they were closing in to choke the life out of them - all this, despite the sunny beach scene playing out before them. The open sky above was all proven false in the oft-glitching light.

"Could we?" she rasped.

Despite it all, the room was oppressive and heavy. It had never felt like this before.

They knew what they were looking at was real, somewhere else.

At last, Connie did the honors. She took a deep breath and scream-sobbed a portal into existence.

The portal's exit burst to life in the projection - its sudden appearance caused the gems and Steven to turn towards it, tense.

They're coming back, said Pearl.

It's about fifty/fifty, corrected Garnet.

The illusion promptly disappeared and the room went dark again as Lars, shaking, turned the orb off.

He turned and put a hand on Connie's shoulder, but he wasn't feeling much better than she was. Teary eye met teary eye, and they begrudgingly began to move toward the portal.

The portal blinked out of existence in their wake and they stood, side by side, in front of a group of people neither of them had been face to face with in thousands of years.

A silence lay over the stunned assembly before Steven spoke up.

"Lars?" he asked, his voice heavy and choked. "Connie?"

The way his friends stared hollowly down at him unnerved Steven to his very core. He gazed imploringly up at them and motioned back toward the gems.

"They're telling me you were... what? Stuck in time?" The poor kid gripped his head, attempting to comprehend it. "But I talked to you both last night! I saw you right here just now!"

Connie caught his eye once more. Why was she pink? Why was she old? Why were neither of them talking? Why was this happening? Why had the gems been saying those things?

"You died?" he asked after a short yet awkward silence took place, his eyes welling with tears. "Connie, what happened to you? You were right here," he said, motioning at where the footprints had ended in the sand.

Connie inhaled briefly. She glanced up at Lars, but her companion was fixated on Steven's hunt for answers. Neither knew what to say. But at least one of them must have had a questioning look on their face because at last, one of the gems stepped in.

It was Pearl. She stood next to Steven and placed an arm around his shoulders. She took a breath, but instead of keeping it together like she'd told herself she would, tears budded at her eyes.

"Connie. Lars. I-"

"Pearl, let me." Garnet stepped forward to place a hand on her shoulder. But Pearl shrugged her off.

"Rose-" breathed Pearl, earning Lars and Connie's immediate attention. Pearl noted the look in their eyes. There was no question that they both had known her personally, just as she feared.

Pearl continued. "Rose told us, the night before Steven was born, that there were humans, friends of hers who visited her sometimes. They never stayed long. She said she eventually found that they'd been trapped, thrown backwards in time."

Lars' eyes widened. Connie gasped slightly. And in a trembling voice, Pearl continued.

"She didn't know their- your names to tell us. She didn't know when it would happen, or what would cause it. She didn't know if we'd be able to prevent whatever it was that happened, but... One of the last things she asked was if we were ever to meet you, that we should try to help you."

Together they stood, dazed and speechless while others spoke at them in voices they hadn't heard in thousands of years.

Voices they had never expected to hear again.

The first of many.

"We... we were told it's been thousands of years for you?" Pearl continued, voice cracking. "Please. Connie-" Her breath caught in her throat as she stared into the deep magenta eyes of the ageless woman who had, not long ago, been her young pupil.

"Please. Tell me that's not true."

Connie opened her mouth to say something, but no words would come.