Epilogue
That night, Pearl tucked Steven into bed. She normally would have watched over him while he slept but tonight she had a lot to think about. She sighed. She still felt terrible despite Garnet's repeated assertions that she had done nothing wrong all those years ago, and that what she and Amethyst had done today was forgiven. She knew she had nothing more to feel guilty about, but she remembered how she would have been treated for such failures back on Homeworld and a shiver ran down her spine. When she was the servant of White Diamond she had been beaten mercilessly for far less serious offences, and that was for innocent mistakes. Peal trembled as she remembered the first time she had ever disobeyed a direct order.
Pearl was face down on the floor of the diamonds' throne room, beaten to a point that no human could have ever survived, her gem cracked. Her life was barely a flicker as her physical construct glitched uncontrollably. She sobbed desperately and begged her diamond for her life but she knew it was futile; there would be no mercy and she was going to be shattered. Anyone would have taken pity on the abject, terrified gem, and be appalled at the diamond's treatment of her had she been of any other type. But she was a pearl, a defective and disobedient one at that and didn't deserve to live, either in the eyes of her tormentors or in her own eyes. She turned to the other towering gems before her, knowing her only hope was if one of them was willing to buy her, but no one would ever want someone like her. To her immense surprise and relief, a member of Pink Diamond's court, a high- ranking rose quartz general, said she would take her.
Several thousand years later Pearl sat on the couch beneath Steven's room and relived everything. That old image of herself was burned into her mind and she couldn't help but believe that was the way she truly still was.
"Pearl?" a squeaky little voice asked. Steven climbed down the steps from his room. "Are you ok?" Pearl reassured him she was fine. She wiped the tears from her eyes and put the boy back to bed before leaving for her own room. She needed to see it all again, process it, look at it from the outside and somehow convince herself the gem she saw wasn't really her. In Pearl's mind, this would help, but in reality she had done this so many times before and it only tore her apart. She projected a hologram of the whole ordeal onto one of the water towers in her room, replaying the awful memory.
In the burning room, Garnet was forced to watch every bit of this through her future vision moments before Pearl played the memory on her makeshift screen. Garnet had no idea. She saw the look of fear and hatred on Pearl's face as she watched the projection of the Diamonds, and the undying gratitude she felt for Rose. The screen darkened briefly before an eerily similar scene from twelve years prior played out. Garnet tried to pull herself out of the vision, but she couldn't. Crushed with guilt, she had no choice but to relive her own worst memory and see just how much pain she had really inflicted. She was just like the Diamonds.
The movie ended and she heard Pearl speak to herself inside of the dark room. "You were just like them." she said, confirming Garnet's fears. "But somehow," she added "now you're more like Rose." Garnet couldn't believe her ears. "You're not the same gem. If you changed, maybe I'm really not the same as I was either." Garnet's heart shattered as Pearl choked out, and for the first time truly meaning it-"I forgive you."