"It's nobody's fault but hers."

Out in the desert the sky was so much clearer. There were no light barriers from the cities and the coast, none of the streetlamps clogging up the clouds in hazy grays, nothing from the horizon to dull the bite of the mountains as they cut into the tail of the Milky Way. Out in the desert Pearl could take Connie and they could be away from the panic of the other Gems.

"Where is he, Pearl?"

Fortunately the stars had literally aligned. As they sat on the warp pad, Pearl pointed upwards, towards a certain cluster in the sky.

"Right about thirty degrees," she said, "towards the west from us."

"I… I should have done something more. I should have fought, like I fought Blue Diamond back at the wedding, like… I should have fought like he meant something to me."

One week ago, they had been expelled from Homeworld, and they had been stranded on Earth without space components. Even if they had the ability to become airborne they had been warned, warned that no attempt should be made to take Pink Diamond - to take Steven - away again. And in an instant, in a forcefully nauseating wave of space-time distortion, they were careening towards Earth again.

Amethyst had been frozen for the first time in a while. Garnet had immediately questioned how they could get back and get a ship working again, and while Pearl had done her best to placate her, there was no viable option, nothing left for them to do right now.

Pearl remembered the panic escalating, and then the sight of Connie on the floor of the spaceship oblivious to the lights and sounds around her. The girl's lips moved, and Pearl read them with the clarity of someone who had said the same words in the same way with the same broken realization.

I can't do this again.

The desert was completely still, dropping rapidly into icy temperatures despite the warmth of the previous day. Connie wrapped her jacket around herself and wiped her face on her sleeve.

"You did nothing wrong," Pearl reassured. "We were overwhelmed, all of us. I was fighting Homeworld for decades, but things have changed, and even I know that you would have been hurt. They would have killed you without a second thought."

Connie nodded and shivered. "He's alone up there."

"He's made it before. And White Diamond doesn't want to hurt him."

Probably.

"I - I don't care, I just want to be there for him, just once, I want to be able to keep my promise that I'll be there. Why do we always get - Why do they have to take him from - "

Her voice had been wavering, and it shattered like crystal as the girl leaned against Pearl and let all her tears go. The Gem held Connie in her arms, weighing her against the numbness of her own panic. Maybe it hadn't set in yet. Maybe she truly believed in Steven up there. But Connie needed something else right now, something not even the Gems could give her. She needed Steven back.

"It's not your fault."

Connie let out all her stresses and all her aching breaths, sobbing softly as the endless hours of panic ebbed out. It wasn't going to fade, not until she could see him again. Pearl looked up to that wretched star and wondered where Steven was, what he was thinking about, what plans were stewing to bring himself back to his planet.

She already could picture Steven on the cushions, laded with opulence and tended to at all hours, with the curtain drawn as he cried into his sheets. She could picture his question, and her heart broke as she heard the boy across galaxies:

"Is it my fault?"