Epilogue.
"Nothing
in the world
is usual today.
This is
the first morning."
-Izumi Shikibu
It was too soon to think about returning to their houses, to their families - that much was evident. So Steven, of course, had jumped over himself to offer them a place to stay while they figured things out.
And things were hard to figure out. It was difficult to put into words what had happened - there had just been so much. It all seemed so vastly impossible to explain. To everyone else, no time had elapsed.
The morning passed, the afternoon wore on and, finally, evening threatened to spill out over the pleasant beachside.
Pearl went around, slowly turning the lights on in the beach house. When she returned to the kitchen, she poured and offered them some tea from a kettle that had just finished boiling, placing the cups on saucers in front of their silent guests with spoons, sugar, milk and cream arranged neatly before them - whatever they needed.
"Oh, it's okay, you don't have to drink," Steven offered sadly when neither looked overly enthused. "Pearl just likes to make tea."
"It's true," said Pearl, who had been unable to take her eyes off Connie so far. "I do thoroughly enjoy the process of making tea. I find the warm cup pleasant to hold, myself. You are under no obligation to drink it. I never do."
Connie belatedly nodded. She was hunched, lying over the dining room table. Lars sat awkwardly in the chair next to hers. The house, while delightful and open-plan, still felt tiny and oppressive around them, the smell of the tea so unusual and alien. Opposite was Steven, who couldn't take his eyes off either of them as they accepted their cups.
"Uh…" began Lars, but when he noticed the roomful of gems staring at him, whatever words he was going to say fled him and he sunk at the shoulders. "Thanks," he eventually said, pulling the cup of tea in closer with both hands and letting it sit there.
"It's good to know you can talk," said Amethyst, her patience beginning to fray. "Maybe now we can start making some plans, like, how are we going to get the old Connster and Donut Boy back!?" She glanced over at the fusion. "Garnet? Ideas?"
Steven looked over to see Garnet standing nearby, arms folded, quiet and stoic as ever. She tightened her lips in response to the question as she thought. Amethyst shortly turned back to the two pinked humans.
"She's thinking, I guess." Amethyst had her chin resting on her hand as she considered the two of them. "Well, at any rate, Donut Boy looks mostly the same. Still rockin' it, huh dude?" She shot finger guns at him. "If we can't undo anything, you've at least got it made. Nice gauges, by the way!"
"Fangs," he offered emotionlessly. "From a skull."
She nodded, unable to find anything wrong with his choice. "Yeah, uh-huh, I can appreciate that - bones are great! But. Connie, on the other hand… Wow."
Connie glanced up at Amethyst. Magenta eyes met indigo, and Amethyst backpedaled hard. "I didn't mean it like- It, it's a good look! It's just..." She hesitated and ran a hand through her own hair, quietly adding, "It's different, okay?"
Connie lowered her eyes back into the dark tea. Amethyst bit her lip and glanced back over at Pearl and Garnet who were talking quietly nearby. "We've got to help them, guys," she urged. "There has to be a way to undo this time shit, right?"
"You can't," Connie said flatly, gripping the cup handle tight. "There's no way."
"How long did you say it's been, again?" Pearl asked with a reluctance she felt deep in her gem.
"Didn't," muttered Connie.
"Five thousand, three hundred years."
The matter-of-fact manner in which Lars delivered this news caused a stiff silence to settle over the room. Steven's jaw hung open.
"Five thou- What?!" Amethyst was highly alarmed. "That's smack in the middle of the war! You're older than I am! What did you do for all that time!?"
"We waited," Lars said through grit teeth. "We wanted to fix it, but-" he purposefully shut his mouth, unable to bring himself to say more.
"But what?" asked Steven, at a loss at the way his buddy suddenly refused to even look at him. "Uh, Lars?"
"It's okay to talk," said Garnet, anticipating the problem. "The timeline is resolved. You no longer risk influencing events that have already transpired. There's nothing to break anymore."
Connie took a deep breath and expelled it wordlessly, causing Lars to reach over the short distance and pat her back. "This has been our whole lives," he said shakily.
"We understand," said Garnet. "Or, failing that, we'll try."
Steven scratched his head. "Wait, wait. So what happened? I saw you both with Moldavite. What happened to her? Where is she now?"
Connie glanced up at Lars, who nodded. His eyes lit up and he produced from his head the little glassy lump containing the gem. He placed it on the table in front of him, and Steven reached over to take it. The kid stared into it, dimly able to make out the slightly rectangular green stone within it amid the tens of centuries worth of patchwork and maintenance.
He glanced back up at his friends. They were both eagle-eyed, watching him turn it over in his hands. Steven, with a self-consciousness unfamiliar to him, carefully placed it back down on the table top.
They seemed placated by this, if barely. But it only raised more questions from Pearl and Amethyst - questions quickly interrupted by a sudden ringing tone from the backpack Steven had brought in from the beach and placed on the table. Connie couldn't recall dropping it in the sand all those millennia ago and, simultaneously, earlier that day. She had refused to be curious about it at all.
She recoiled from it as it screamed. Steven rushed in to help, unzipping the bag and pulling out a mobile device. He held it out for her, only to end up turning it off himself when she didn't make a move for it.
"It's one of your alarms," he said in the ensuing silence. "Your seven-thirty reminder to start studying." He placed it down on the table top and sunk further into himself. "You were starting later than usual because we were supposed to hang out today."
"S-Steven," croaked Connie. His eyes widened, only for the moment to be cut off by Lars pulling something from his head.
It was his own phone that had been missing ever since their first moments in prehistory. Now that it existed once more in a dimension with cell service, it started vibrating in his hand. He frowned at it and tapped at the screen. When it did nothing, Steven leaned across the table and hit a button on the side of it for him. The screen sprang to life.
The phone was catching up with itself, listing new messages on the lockscreen as it went. He was unable to rip his eyes away as blurbs from each of the messages listed themselves on the screen.
There was one from Rhodonite, asking where to meet.
A second, Rhodonite again, asking where he was.
One from Sadie, apologetic about something.
Three more from Rhodonite becoming progressively more anxious. One from Blue Lace, something about a cake.
And suddenly, out of nowhere, a call that was coming in in real-time.
HOME
The word sprang up on his screen accompanied with an icon of two happy, smiling people he could barely recognize. He hadn't once gone hunting for them in the light of the projection. It would have been too painful. It would have made it harder to think about carrying out their task.
He froze, and despite this found himself the center of attention in the otherwise silent room. Letting the call ring out, he placed it down on the table and pushed it with a finger as far away from himself as he could comfortably get it.
"I can talk to your parents later if you want me to," said Steven, trying to be helpful, failing to not still be reeling from all this. "I get it? It's too soon."
But Lars wasn't done. Connie watched with mounting interest as he pulled a kettle from his head, then a lighter. His work apron, his secret cookbook, his wallet, keys, a gaming console and more - all his belongings that he'd once stored away in there for easy access. All these artifacts from his life before. He'd thought they were gone forever. Now, they littered the table.
"What are you doing?" asked Pearl, since this mess was her nightmare.
Connie blinked hard, surprised for a different reason. "How did you-"
I don't know, he signed emphatically, nervous suddenly. It's all just... there.
"Uh, what?" asked Amethyst.
When they continued to appear reluctant to answer, Garnet came over and, sitting on a chair opposite them, spoke up. "It's okay to talk," she gently reminded them.
"It's been dark in there," Connie said eventually. "Pitch black. None of this stuff existed, he thought it was just gone." She ran fingers through her hair, trying to understand. "Rose never used Lion's mane as a way of finding us."
"There was only ever Lion's tree in there," confirmed Steven. "Until Lars…"
"Has it been waiting for the timeline to resolve? Is it bright in there again?" Lars wondered.
"I can check," Steven offered, and moments later he pulled his head out of Lars' much longer hair to find everyone staring at him.
"It's fine," Steven said, stunned. "It looks the same in there. Bright and breezy. Except-"
Tears rolled down his face as he stared up at Connie.
"There are three trees, now."
A silence fell over all gathered. Steven wiped his eyes with a sleeve and clenched his teeth. "So," he began, studying the faces of the three gems in turn. "How do we fix this?"
"Steven," cautioned Pearl.
He was insistent. "But this is unfair! And more than that, it's a gem thing. There's always a solution to gem things, right?"
"I know you're upset. Garnet is trying-"
Steven whipped his head around to face Garnet. "Garnet! How's that going? Well!?"
Garnet was silent for a moment. "Not well," she said finally.
In the middle of all this, Amethyst motioned to Lars and Connie. They didn't seem all that interested in the tea, so Amethyst herded them both out the door.
"We'll just… give them a moment," she told them as they went. "Too emotional, right?"
Her suggestion was met with nods and the wiping of tears on sleeves.
Together the three of them stood outside on the deck, watching the waves move restlessly under the darkening sky. The only light was from the few stars that peeked out from behind the clouds when they could. That, and the light from the outdoor porch lamp.
"So… you guys remember history, huh?" Amethyst asked after a while. When she noticed them staring, she shrugged up at them. "Well, didn't it suck? Being alone like that? For so long?"
It had sucked, so much so that the words to describe just how profoundly it sucked eluded both of them in this moment. But that was okay - Amethyst had over the course of the day become somewhat accustomed to talking to a couple of brick walls.
"You know you could have come and hung out with us, right?" she continued. "Me, Garnet, Pearl, Rose, we all went through it too." She frowned. "Thousands of years, stranded on this planet with no one else like us, watching humans live and die..." She hesitated, a bitterness rising within her. "Watching Rose keep her secrets."
"Amethyst, the secret was ours, not hers to give," started Connie, but the little purple gem spun on them, interrupting.
"You guys might not know this, but I was alone for a few hundred years before they found me. Meeting them turned my whole life around!"
They knew this fact about her. They remembered seeing her down in the bleak pit of the kindergarten - a lonely blank slate, with nothing to cling to but the rocks and the dirt of the canyon floor.
"Yeah, okay," she continued. "Maybe you're about to tell me how impossible that would have been. Maybe it would have messed up how great everything turned out, but... we could have been that for you! We could have helped you! I dunno, we… We're the Crystal Gems, y'know? We always find a way. Because we have to."
Lars and Connie both recalled with guilty hearts wanting beyond want to help her, too.
And Amethyst found herself tearing up under those overwhelmed stares. She wiped her eyes. "Huh. Guess I'm emotional now, too. It just." She exhaled. "It hurts. It hurts that we've been trying so hard to protect the Earth and everything on it, only to find that we couldn't even protect you guys. Especially 'cause, like, we know you guys. We like you guys. You're Steven's best friends."
Before either of them had a chance to respond, she pointed up at Lars. "It was only thanks to you that he was able to escape Homeworld after he gave himself up." Then, her cheeks burning a deep purple, she pointed at Connie. "And you put him back together when White Diamond ripped out his entire gem! He should be dead! He would be, if not for you guys!"
She dabbed the wetness from her eyes. "That's insane. You were both there for Steven - you both saved him, when none of us could do anything. Why wouldn't Rose tell us more?"
"Rose didn't know we were his friends," said Lars, quietly. "We weren't always careful, but we were about that."
"We barely told her anything about us," agreed Connie.
It was little consolation. Amethyst turned and leaned against the deck railing. Half her face hid in her folded arms as she glared out towards the horizon.
"Still," she muttered. "We could have saved you, y'know? You were right there." She turned her eyes to the spot where their younger selves had disappeared that morning, still marked by their footprints in the dying light.
"Right under our stupid noses."
"Lars," began Garnet after he, Connie and Amethyst had returned to the warmth inside. "When Steven first told us what happened to you in space, the three of us had a conversation."
Lars was surprised. "Huh?"
"He has a pink pet Lion who is about two hundred years old," explained Pearl.
"They know already," said Steven in a tired monotone from where he was sitting on the bottom of the staircase.
"Yes, well…" Pearl said quietly.
Garnet continued. "We thought, if you shared Lion's longevity, that it was potentially you who Rose had spoken of. So we kept an eye out. Then the dismantling of the empire, Spinel, the biopoison, rebuilding the- We didn't know what we were looking for. I'm so sorry. I couldn't see it."
"It's not your fault!" Connie stammered. "We told Rose not to say anything to you for a reason. We knew- We thought we could fix it ourselves. We never thought we'd have to still be here, doing-" She waved her arms around, as if trying to indicate the whole situation. "This!"
Steven watched wide-eyed as Lars reached towards her.
"Connie," the pink dude said. "Sidebar?"
She shook her head - both at him, and in general. "But we couldn't do it. And now… here we are." She dropped her eyes to her hands. "Like this. Forever."
"Oh," began Pearl, wringing her hands in distress. "Connie, sweetheart, you don't know that."
"It's already been thousands of years, ma'am," Connie said simply. "I do know that."
"Well, you said earlier how you guys tried to 'fix' it," said Amethyst, gazing between the two of them from where she sat at the table. "Why couldn't you?"
Lars sat with his head in his hands. When Connie glanced at him, he sighed. "We were too single-minded."
When it became evident that that made no sense to them, Connie elaborated. "We thought we'd be able to stop her and that it would stick. Then we saw her eyes. She was going to try again, with worse consequences. If we were gone, no one would know."
"Why on Earth would Moldavite do all that?" asked Pearl, glancing back at the contained gemstone that still sat amid the piles of Lars' gear on the dining table. "For… what? To get back to the past? Not just the past, but the war?"
Steven stared as they spoke, their words not really registering. This was yet another bad thing a gem did - not to him or the Earth (for once), but to a couple of people he loved with every little piece of his big dumb heart. It was worse than if it had happened to him. He could have handled that, he thought.
He felt tired, which wasn't new. He often spent these strange Era Three days tired. But this was a whole new level of tiredness and strangeness that leeched him dry of feeling, and he was smart enough to anticipate that this might not even be the worst of it.
Unless, perfect world, everything magically went back to normal by morning.
It was stupid, but it was all he had to cling to. These people before him now were mere shadows of Lars and Connie, confused and lost, grappling with an eventuality they ultimately couldn't do anything about. He felt useless. Powerless...
He remembered a conversation was going on without him and made the effort to tune back in.
"Garnet," Connie said, somewhat more openly now. She had the undivided attention of the entire room, except for Lars, who had his brow furrowed as he stared purposefully at the woodgrain of the table. She squeezed his shoulder briefly before continuing.
"Please tell us - if you can - did we ever do anything right?" Connie entreated the seer as she stood up from her chair. "I know it's too late, but could we have done more? Or better? Is there any way we could have saved ourselves?"
"You lived your long lives confused and fearful," Garnet eventually replied. "But… you did everything you could be expected to. You did the best you could figure out how to do."
"That's not an answer," said Lars, tears dripping into the hardwood.
Garnet stood, gathering the attention of the room. Lars turned in his chair to regard her.
"Lars. Connie."
They cringed at the sound of another saying their names aloud.
"There is no answer for a question like this," Garnet continued as she spread her hands out towards them. "Not really. Only a myriad of nebulous futures that rip apart like supernovas, only to reshuffle with every move you make. Only artifacts from doomed timelines, glimpses of potential that repel sense. It was for that reason that the Glass of Time was hidden away, and how it came to be destroyed when we went searching for it."
They both looked on tearfully as she spoke. Steven hung to the side, tired eyes wide open, watching as Garnet removed her visor and blinked down at his lost friends.
"No human has ever had to endure what you have," she continued, voice gentle. "No gem either, for that matter. You were given strange abilities and forced to play a delicate game. A sick game, where there were no right moves, no possible way to win."
She placed a hand on Lars' head and the other one on Connie's shoulder.
"What happened, happened. I know it doesn't feel like it. Maybe it won't, not for a long time, but now... both of you, you're free."
Under everything else, every little fancy that had ever taken them, despite pushing it down and away for so long, this was what they'd wanted most of all.
The chance to be a real part of this vast and beautiful planet again.
Now there was no other choice.
The morning was bright and calm. The nice thing about the Earth was that even in the wake of a sudden tragedy, it could still put on a beautiful sunrise. The waves could still lap at the sand on the beach below. The gulls could still soar and swoop on the gentle ocean breeze.
Steven watched the colors light up the sky from the base of the lighthouse on top of the cliff. He hadn't been able to sleep very well - or at all, he suspected - so he'd risen early to get out of the house.
Today was the day he knew he was going to help them break the news to their families. The gems would be there to help as well, they'd promised. They'd really pulled together for this one. All three had sat up with him for as long as he could tolerate trying to be awake the night before. And the four of them had just… talked. They recommended he take time off from the running of Little Homeschool. They told him they were there for him, whatever he needed. That his feelings were valid.
It was loss. He was sure of it. Some kind of bizarre loss that was difficult to grapple with, with a heaping helping of guilt thrown in there as well. How dare he feel loss when they were both still here? How dare he feel loss when his friends had lost so much more?
He didn't even know the half of what they'd been through, he reminded himself, sinking at the shoulders.
His phone lay in the grass beside him. In the back of his mind, he was waiting for his friend to appear in video chat, giggling and smiling and blushing and brushing black hair from her face. Asking how he'd been. Apologizing for not being able to come hang the day before. He'd say it's okay, and she'd promise to come see him later. Maybe they could have lunch on the beach, or go for a longer walk, or a drive and say hi to Lars.
Lars would be at work, but only until 2pm because it was Sunday. Perhaps they could convince him to come hang too. He'd half-heartedly pretend like it was a huge deal, but would eventually gather up some of the unsold pastries and go with them anyway. They could have a late lunch down by the waterfront and they'd all laugh and razz him over the weird and crazy sad nightmare he'd just woken up from...
And the daydream vanished at the familiar sound of a portal opening behind him. Spinning around, he cast a glance further down the sloping hill.
There was Connie. An immortal adult woman he knew next to nothing about anymore.
Her portal disappeared and she looked around. She hadn't come here for him, he realized - otherwise she probably would have noticed him. No, she was looking for something else, something on the ground.
And guilt kicked back in. This time it was the guilt of watching her, unnoticed. He moved his phone from the grass to his pocket, rose to his feet and began to walk over.
She froze as she saw him, which made him recall how she and Lars had fled the morning previous. He stumbled to a halt in his tracks, not wanting a repeat of that.
"Connie," he said carefully, trying and failing to delete the quiver from his voice. "Hi…"
"Steven." She wrung her hands awkwardly. "Nice morning?" came the deliberate small talk when she couldn't think of anything else to say.
He felt new tears burning behind his eyes. "I mean, I can go if you-"
"Stay," she said with a hint of uncertainty. "If you want."
"I do."
He tried to forget that his best friend had known his mother personally and racked his brain for something to say. "What are you doing here?" was all he came up with.
Connie hesitated. She needed the pause to remind herself that she could talk freely. She pointed at the top of the hill, where the lighthouse was. "I used to live here."
He followed her finger, and then glanced back at her. "In the lighthouse?"
"Before the lighthouse."
"Oh?" he started, surprised. Then he realized. "Oh."
She frowned and glanced away. "I'm just looking for something."
"You can talk to me, you know?" he said, the words cracking a little as he said them. "Like, you remember me, don't you? We were friends. We were-"
"Jam buds," she said quietly with a nod as she stared down at the ground. "I remember. I tried not to… but I do."
She took a few steps downhill. He jerked forward to follow.
"Ah, w-what are you looking for?"
"I made something once, when I was young, to remind me of you."
His mind boggled. "Wha?" Casting a glance around, he saw that the hillside was the same as it had always been, an empty field. "Connie, whatever you lost here - I'm sorry, but it's long gone."
"No," she said. "It's still here."
There should have been no way to find it so easily. Not only was the hill big but, back when she buried it, it had been covered in forest. Any point of reference she could have used to find it again had disappeared long ago.
Despite this Connie chose a spot. After pulling a shovel out of her head, she dug and found it anyway.
Suddenly she was back there.
In a crashing wave, she was able to recall intimately the way this chunk of stone once looked in much darker hands, its weight, the texture it held before she'd begun the careful process of chipping away at it, smoothing it down. How she'd slowly coaxed the star shape from it over time, during quiet moments by the light of ancient fires.
The campsite had long ago been roughly where the lighthouse now stood, she guessed after she'd accounted somewhat for erosion of the cliffside - not far away, anyway. The shack-come-cabin was of course long since gone, its base elements having returned to the earth, she supposed. The firepit they tended to was gone, the calendar she'd carved into multiple trees, no more. Perhaps atoms from it remained deep within the earth, but she'd never know for sure.
Countless arguments, endless breathless apologies, and innumerable noises of both understanding and nonsense between herself and Lars once rang out clear as a bell upon ancient breezes. She could still make some of it out in some sense beyond that of hearing.
The day they were finally forced to leave by the encroaching and oblivious Crystal Gems, coerced by the ever-present fear of changing the course of future events.
The deep guilt they carried from doing so.
She remembered the ever-changing, foolish inklings she used to have of what she was in for, the longer their ordeal went on, the more time had started to get away from them. How she'd never truly understood the magnitude of it all, even as the centuries wore on and on, dragging them undertow, billowing them aloft, right up until this very moment.
How many lifetimes had it been since the girl she once was buried this object? How much of herself had she lost since then?
She stared at the trinket from the late stone age in her hands and felt the tears roll down her face. Raising her eyes up from it, she saw Steven's face flowing with tears as well.
He didn't understand. How could he when she couldn't even explain? Perhaps in time she might be able to, but not right now.
She held the star out for him and he took it.
And in the passing of this tiny, fleeting present she wondered...
Thousands of years from now, in the clear light of some brighter sun, on the other side of yet another long and difficult future - perhaps on this very ground swept clean - would she someday dig up the long-buried artifacts of this new life as well?
Would it also seem like yesterday?
AUTHOR'S NOTE
THANK YOU FOR READING. I really hope you liked this.
Credit goes to EchoFour for beta reading and all the help he's provided!
It's probably not the ending a lot of people were expecting, but the idea of characters experiencing a Large Amount of Time in what others perceive as a small amount of time interests me a lot - but when shows do this, it never sticks (and for good reason!). I wanted to write something where it sticks.
This story was actually completed back in April 2020 on my AO3 account (same username/story title) where it exists with pictures. I would have loved to include the pictures here, but alas. said no.
My intention is to continue the story of this Lars and Connie - the next story will have a focus on moving on and healing. Not sure when! Life stuff, you know. Feel free to follow so you can keep an eye out. (I'll be honest though - AO3 is easier for me to wrap my head around, so I'm more active over there)
Stay safe out there!