Fade Out

Chapter Five

…..

Their owner had been a Larimar, taken to the new planet as part of an Emerald's entourage. Matching sets were the newest craze from Almandine and Larimar saw no reason not to keep up with the trends. She ordered them in black and white, to match her own preferred colour palette.

She didn't do much with them once she had them; she mostly did what she'd seen Almandine do, put them in seated positions on opposite sides of the room and left them there. They didn't mind; with so little to do their spikes didn't bother them, and they could use gesture-speak freely as the lodgings were often empty. Even though they had never touched, they shared memory, thoughts, feelings with each other.

Gems who visited tended to touch Sweetness a lot more than Light; a black pearl was an unusual choice, popular thought was that such a bold colour on a pearl would be too harsh and clash with the surrounding décor, but it worked in contrast to Light. It only bothered Light because it bothered Sweetness; she did not like the attention, or the notion that Light was inferior to her because of it.

Towards the end, with the planet dying and the worker gems revolting, Larimar tried very hard to keep up appearances. The newest trend for pearls was a contrast palette, and as she could not go out and get new pearls to fit she decided to recolour the ones she had. She had just gotten the spray half-way through on Sweetness (she was supposed to be burgundy red, to Light's cobalt blue) when her door was broken down, her gem shattered and both pearls confiscated.

They were with other pearls now, all seized in similar circumstances, but they stuck together. They had never really been apart. When the Everlast chose one of them over the other, or lent them out to her followers, the pain of being away from each other was worse than anything Pyrite could do to them.

…..

For a brief moment after she was pulled off of the rig, Sweetness looked like she was floating in a sea of blazing white sand, a shadow suspended in the air. In the next breath, Light charged off of the rig herself and caught her wrists, Amethyst's whip wrapped around her waist and Garnet grabbed Amethyst, anchoring all of them to the rig with gritted teeth.

The scrap team on the other end revved their engines hard and pulled back towards the dunes, tugging on the cable as hard as they could. Courage swerved gently, hoping to knock them off track without risking the gems clinging to the rig, but they bounced back quickly.

Mercy had crawled under the seat and was stuck there, rocking back and forth, Gift's hands fluttered helplessly and her mouth opened and closed in panic. Steven would have done anything to help, but he had no idea what to do, and with no-one able to tell him he sat on the backseat in a daze. It all felt unreal, like a movie or some strange frenzied dream.

Treasure had gone to the front seat and been rummaging in the storage hull, and after what felt like forever (but was likely just a minute, maybe two) she emerged, grim-faced, with a long set of pliers. Steven watched her climb out of the window, over Garnet and Amethyst hanging on for dear life. He watched her inch her way across the whip to where it was wrapped around Light's waist, swing herself over to dangle on Sweetness' outstretched leg and turn over so she was hanging by her knees, working the pliers on the cable. If the situation hadn't been so dire, he would have been delighted to see such a thing. They were like a team of acrobats.

An order was barked from the Everlast's vehicle, he didn't hear it, but when he looked over he could see she was hunched forward on her plinth, gripping the side so hard it was cracking. Her army faltered, unsure. The cable car slowed, allowing the cable to slack, and the three pearls attached to it dropped dangerously close to the ground before they picked up speed again. Treasure was very nearly thrown onto a rocky outcropping, but managed to regain her balance just in time.

"Unspoiled, you slagoffs!" Pyrite roared at them. "I want them whole!"

Just as she finished berating her cowering forces, Treasure's pliers broke through the cable and they dropped again, but Amethyst and Garnet were ready. They both wrenched back so hard they tumbled across the floor of the rig, and the pearls tumbled after them, landing in a tangle of limbs.

Courage had been waiting for this moment with eerie patience. They had driven out of the dunes at some point and were now surrounded by jagged rocks. Courage weaved through them with so little effort it was clear she knew this place well. Their pursuers did not; some rigs crashed and exploded against the stones, others pulled back towards the dunes, unwilling to take the risk.

Finally, it was only the Everlast's truck in pursuit, thundering over and around the rocks with vicious determination. As the truck drew up close, Pyrite's splintered gem glowed and she pulled out a weapon as crude and misshapen as she herself was. It was some sort of grappling hook, with an edge the size of an anchor, and Steven's stomach dropped as it was aimed at Courage's head.

But just as suddenly, and with a furious snarl, Pyrite pulled it back. Treasure had clambered out of the window to perch on the rig's door, shielding Courage as best she could with her own spindly body. The other pearls leaned out of the window to hold her there, firm and unyielding.

The moment stretched out, Pyrite's weapon clutched in her fist, the pearls' unfaltering blockade, Garnet and Amethyst poised to defend them, the drivers of both vehicles fully focused on the trail...

...and then Pyrite grunted at her driver, a skinny ratlike creature with spiky yellow hair, and the truck pulled away, back towards the dune presumably to give new orders to her army. Treasure gasped out a held breath and the other pearls pulled her back inside. They huddled together on the back seat, staring blankly at the floor, not even moving their hands to talk to each other.

Garnet and Amethyst sprawled out on the front seat with a sigh and an exhausted groan, respectively. The tension was beginning to write itself into their faces, Steven had never seen them look so wrung out, not even when they had been searching for Malachite. He wondered distantly if his own face looked like that.

Courage, however, looked the same as she had from the start. For all he could see on her face, she might have been a marble statue.

…..

He woke from a deep sleep as the rig ground to a halt, nearly tumbling off of the back seat onto the floor. The three suns were diminished, the biggest one had dropped off of the horizon at last and the two smaller ones were sinking fast. This, then, was when Courage felt it was safe to stop.

Garnet and Amethyst were speaking in low tones to each other again, and sourly Steven shrugged them off when they tried to call him over to them. Courage was checking the rig's new injuries, and the pearls were in their little clutch behind the rig. He went to them instead, hoping they'd be willing to talk to him.

They were gathered around Sweetness, as Gift was gently trying to pry the hook off of her ankle. Steven had thought it only wrapped around her, but as he drew nearer he could see that it was actually embedded in her mass. It seemed stuck there, and what passed for flesh on a gem body oozed greenish blood in the space around it.

Gift tugged on the hook hard enough to make Steven wince just watching her, but Sweetness herself didn't even flinch. Light was on her left side with her arm wrapped around her, stroking her head, and Mercy was on her other side holding her hand. Treasure was holding her leg still, frowning almost imperceptibly. None of them looked up as he sat gingerly beside them, and he didn't try to talk to them. Not yet, anyway.

Finally the hook came loose, and Gift lobbed it over the rocks as hard as she could. The other pearls sighed in unison, out of relief or sympathy was anyone's guess.

"Um," Steven stuttered awkwardly. "I can help with that, if you want..."

The pearls' eyes swiveled towards him in a way that might have been considered creepy in any other circumstances. He knew now it was just curiosity.

"I have healing spit," he explained with a forced laugh. "I mean, that looks like it hurts...so if you want to I can fix it so it doesn't anymore..."

He really wished they would talk more. The unblinking stares just made him nervous.

"...it usually works pretty good..." he continued with more forced laughter to fill in the silence. "I usually use it on gems but it probably works on mass too but I never get to try it out so I don't know...and it worked on my friend, she's not a gem..."

He trailed off as Sweetness pointed her ripped ankle in his general direction. Under their watchful gaze, he licked his palm and gently wrapped it around the injury, praying that it would work this time. The mass rippled under his fingers and reformed, smooth and whole and only a little lighter in tone than the rest of her mass. The other pearls inspected the reformed flesh curiously.

"Thank you," Sweetness said.

He hadn't heard her speak before, and had sort of assumed she was mute. Her voice was softer than Treasure's and lower than Gift's, and about a million times quieter than Pearl's. It was nice to hear her say something.

"No prob, Bob!" he shrugged, grinning.

Ah, there was that look again, the head-tilted-what-is-up-with-this-thing-look. It was weird how they all managed to do it in unison.

"Steven!" Amethyst called to him from the other side of the rig.

"Coming!" he called back. He was still a little angry with her and Garnet, although he couldn't quite explain why, but it gave him an easy excuse to get away from the pearls' scrutiny.

"How you holding up, Steve-O?" she bantered as he made his way to her. She was sprawled across a flat rock, looking up at the darkening sky.

"I'm okay," he told her, sick and tired as he was. "I healed Sweetness' ankle, it was torn up pretty bad."

"You actually named them?" she snorted down at him.

"No," he retorted. "They already had their names..."

He trailed off, remembering what Gift had told him about their names.

The Everlast named us when she smashed our owners. We hate our names.

"Don't hang around them too much," Amethyst told him, mockingly stern. "They're kinda creepy. Almost makes me think our Pearl isn't so bad."

"I think everything on this planet is creepy," he admitted.

"Yeah, you're probably right," she sighed. "They don't act like any gems we've ever seen before, it must be this place. Good news is Garnet thinks she should get her future vision back if we keep going that way for another few miles."

It was so typically Amethyst to want to reassure him but have to bury it under a heap of casual mockery. It took a moment for the good news to sink in properly.

"Really?" he yelled, a good bit louder than he meant to.

"Yup," she smiled, satisfied. "She told me a few minutes ago. Then we might be able to find a way out of this dump."

Already in his mind he was making plans to drag Courage and the pearls with them when they did go home. Wherever they were trying to get to, they would probably be safer on Earth, and there was plenty of room for them there, they'd probably be happy to go...he was just visualizing introducing the pearls to Connie when Courage sauntered over to them.

"We need your pearl to regenerate," she told Amethyst, as her movements alerted the other gems that they might soon be driving off again. "We need to check the complete map."

Amethyst shrugged and reached into her shirt's inside pocket. A creeping dread washed over Steven as the colour dropped from Amethyst's face and her hand grasped at nothing.

"No, no, no, no, no..." she muttered, pitching higher as she realized. "Oh, no..."

"What is it?" Garnet asked quietly, though the colour had drained from her own face. She already knew.

"She fell out," Amethyst said, a high note of panic cutting through the atmosphere. "I dropped her."

The pearls' hands flew to their mouths in silent horror. Garnet gripped her own head and turned away. Amethyst trembled, staring off at the endless expanse of rock and sand.

And most frightening, Courage's mask of indifference had fallen. Her eyes were screwed shut, her jaw clenched in fury. She took a hard breath.

"Okay," she said.