The benefit to being Diamonds' Pearls is that no one even thinks to wonder why they are walking together or why they are headed in precisely the opposite direction they should be. No one bothers to question them until they are all the way to the docking bay, and then they just stammer out important-sounding lies like they're good Pearls. Simple.
The bay is deserted, several ships waiting for their next deployment, and Yellow is quick to point out the one they will be taking. It's not a war ship, just a transport vessel, but it has the standard set of weaponry attached and it's designed to be secure enough for elite gems to travel in. It suits their needs, because they know they will be drawing attention no matter what, and Homeworld will not lose anything important with this ship. If they can execute their plan properly, the incident will be big enough to cause embarrassment but small enough to cover up with a few select words.
No one would want to admit it was a couple of mere Pearls that caused the ruckus, and so there would be no significant retaliation. The Diamonds would know, but they would not be willing to break the status quo for something like this. The other Pearls will have to be careful, but they are used to that, and they will be safe.
The two of them make their way over to the ship, not breaking character for even a second. They are very nearly there when a loud voice stops them in their tracks.
"What are you doing here?" the large Quartz demands—a Jasper, Yellow notes, furious with herself for not moving just a little bit faster. They had almost made it. She lowers her eyes, all too aware of the destabilizer on the Jasper's belt as she continues. "Blue Diamond has been asking for her Pearl, and we've been looking everywhere!"
Blue slips easily back into her role, head lowered, hands clasped. "I'm sorry, Yellow Diamond requested that we complete this task—"
"Well, you don't belong to Yellow Diamond, do you?" she snarls.
Blue flinches, and that much might be natural. It's not like she could say no to any Diamond if it really were the situation, no matter who she was made for. "I'm sorry," she repeats meekly.
"And you!" she says, turning on Yellow. "Don't think I won't be speaking to your Diamond about this!"
Yellow goes rigid, seeing the strike coming before it hits—hard, sharp on her face. She stumbles back, falling to the ground as she's expected to, but a small and bitter part of her thinks it would have been all too easy to avoid. Not that it mattered—it wasn't aimed anywhere near her gem, and she knew everyone was careful not to get caught breaking a Diamond's property.
"Now come on," the Jasper says, roughly hauling Blue away by the wrist. "Let's get you back to Blue Diamond."
Blue lowers her head in obedience, though Yellow can see her fingers dance at her side inconspicuously. Wait.
She wonders for what and can't help but think their hastily concocted plan is a waste after all. Even if she makes it to the ship, she doesn't stand a chance on her own. And if by some miracle she did, she refuses to even consider letting Blue get dragged back to her Diamond again to wait and wait and wait.
But then she sees what Blue is going to do, just a second before she does it.
She lags behind a little, twists around so fast the Quartz holding her doesn't have time to react before her own destabilizer is being shoved into her spine.
The Jasper barely manages a scream before she is gone.
It's almost too easy, she thinks, but then again, no gem would ever be on guard when she's just with a couple of Pearls.
The gem drops to the ground with a clink and she stares as Blue switches the destabilizer off and collapses it.
"What—" An alarm starts blaring overhead.
"We need to get out of here." Blue grabs her arm and drags her over to the ship.
They reach the door just as half a dozen other gems are running in to see what's happened. "Stop them!" one shouts when they see the destabilizer clutched in Blue's hand.
The two of them exchange one tiny glance before they throw themselves into the ship, diving to either side so that they're not easy targets.
Yellow finds the control panel and slams her hand over it, closing them off. "Let's go!" she urges Blue. "We need to get to the helm!"
They rush along the hallways to the control room, already hearing the electric whir of weapons being powered up and aimed at the ship, trying to disable it before it even gets off the ground.
She is infinitely glad she memorized these blueprints.
They barely hesitate at all before throwing themselves into the seat that should hold an elite gem—not a Diamond, but certainly someone of a much higher status than a Pearl.
Yellow activates the ship's controls immediately, eyes flashing over the various screens. "Shields rising, rerouting power, controls accessible via alternative—"
A blast shakes the entire ship, and she's thrown sideways out of the chair as nearly a quarter of the room goes up in smoke.
"Are you okay?" Blue gasps, picking herself up and then hauling Yellow off the floor as well.
"Yes, yes, we just need to get out of this gem-forsaken room before they blow us to pieces!" Yellow hurriedly taps one of the screens hovering next to the chair and then pulls Blue back out the way they came, more blasts already rattling the abandoned control room. "The escape pod is this way; I've rewired the controls so I should be able to access everything from there."
"Should be?"
"Well, I did get interrupted," she snaps. "Come on, hurry!"
The ship's intercom blares out a message above them. "Attention. Attention. This is the Yellow Diamond control room. You are ordered to stop immediately. Surrender yourselves."
"Oh, be quiet," Yellow snarls. Ridiculous Peridots, always acting so superior, even when they're the ones that have to play a Pearl's part in her absence.
Blue skids to a stop at the nearest communication link and activates it. "Control room, status update: We're not taking orders." An angry flurry of words comes back in response, and she looks immensely satisfied.
"Oh my stars, are you trying to get us killed faster?" Yellow demands, impatiently dragging her the rest of the short distance to the escape pod. "Get in, quick."
They throw themselves into the pod, which looks something like a miniature version of the control room they were just in, though thankfully more intact.
"You do actually know how to pilot a ship, right?" Blue asks, and it strikes Yellow as strange all at once—the two of them speaking at a normal volume, alone.
Nervous pride swells in her chest and she imagines the scandalized and shocked looks of the gems she's had to work with for years. A Pearl, piloting one of their ships. "Of course I do," she replies haughtily, allowing a wide, smug smile onto her face. She strides over to the pilot's seat, sits down, and activates it with no trouble whatsoever. More benefits to being a Diamond's Pearl—they don't have to worry about being denied access to anything here.
"Good," Blue says. She walks over to the communication panel, still buzzing with incoming messages, and rips it out of the wall. It falls to the ground, breaks and splinters and goes silent. "Let's go."
Yellow's hands skim over the controls rapidly, with practiced ease a Pearl should not have. She checks the shields—fully raised and deflecting all of the attempts to stop them now—and starts undocking so quickly that they're nearly out of the bay before anyone can even board another vessel to try and intercept them. She steadies her hands. "Hold on tight."
Blue grabs the edge of the control panel in front of her just as the ship accelerates. Yellow maneuvers around the other ships and the projectile weapons being fired at them—useless ones, because they don't want to risk damaging the station—with skill even she hadn't been fully aware she possessed. She jabs a finger into the panel that activates light speed travel and they're both flung backwards, Yellow's back slammed against a seat that's too big for her and Blue's fingers leaving small dents in the panel she's grabbed.
They're flying.
A laugh bubbles out of their throats, almost synchronized, and they lock eyes, wild with the rush of freedom they feel with Homeworld at their backs.
"We did it!" Blue yells, letting go of the panel just as the stabilizers kick in and tumbling backwards to land beside the pilot's seat, hair a flyaway mess that Blue Diamond would never have allowed.
"Could you hold off on celebrating until we've lost these clods?" Yellow shoots back, though she is just as giddy. "I'm trying to fly this thing."
Blue gasps in delight at the derogatory language neither of them would have dared to use before. "Can I help?"
"I could use a navigator."
"At your service," she says with a mock Diamond salute.
Stars, they're both insane to be doing this, and it's wonderful.
There's a total of two ships coming after them—just two, because they're a couple of renegade Pearls and they can't possibly put up much of a fight.
Well, Yellow thinks with a smirk, she'll show them exactly how mistaken they are. "Slide that over here," she says, pointing to a screen just out of her reach. Blue slings it her way with slender, darting fingers. She catches it on her fingertips and navigates through the menu, which is unfamiliar but easy enough to figure out. "You take the controls," she says, slowing the ship down before passing them off to Blue. She drags the navigation screen over to hover beside the one she's already holding.
"I don't know how to—whoa!" Blue exclaims as they careen off to one side.
"Just hold it steady!" she yelps, rearranging Blue's fingers onto the right controls. "It's not that hard to go in a straight line." She turns back to the weapons screen and powers up the lasers to the highest possible setting, small vibrations shaking the engines with the power. "Firing."
Lasers shoot out behind them, pinpoint shots that hit the control rooms and engines of both ships. Yellow swipes her finger sideways for good measure, a spectacular light show slicing through their pursuers' vessels and cutting them in half.
"Oh my stars," Blue breathes, staring at the debris shown on the screen.
Yellow sits, frozen, hardly believing that she just destroyed two ships with gems much stronger and more experienced at the helm. She's only jerked out of her daze when the stars on screen seem to begin spinning in a slow counter-clockwise motion.
"Give that back!" she says, snatching the controls away from Blue. "I didn't get rid of them just so you could send us crashing into the nearest planetoid!" She rights the ship and steadies it.
"That was amazing," Blue says breathlessly, barely listening. She throws her head back, brushing her bangs completely out of her face for the first time. Her eyes are bright and alive and Yellow has never seen anything so stunning.
She shakes her head, mind racing. They probably only have minutes now before reinforcements arrive. "We need to blow this ship upimmediately."
"Wait," Blue says suddenly, "we can't, not yet." She reopens the doors that connect them to the ship. "The equipment—we can take it with us, maybe we can use it. At the very least, we're going to need weapons, and destabilizers are better than nothing." She rushes out before Yellow can even begin to protest and runs down the hall to a main computer terminal.
It only takes her a few seconds to tell the ship to deliver a full supply of equipment to her location, and she gathers it precariously into her arms.
Yellow sets the controls on auto-pilot and runs over to help. Together they manage to transport it back to the pod quickly, dumping the box onto the floor. "Now can we get out of here?" she asks.
"Ready when you are," Blue agrees. She straps herself into the second seat and pulls up the navigation screen again.
"Initiating emergency protocol. Commencing detachment." Yellow flicks through various screens again. "I'm going to turn off everything that safeguards the main engine's power source; hopefully the explosion will make it seem like a result of external stimuli."
"Will we be far enough away from the blast? This pod has shields, but…"
"We're going to take off right as it detonates," she replies, switching to the pilot controls. "I'll make it jump to the highest possible speed, so make sure the course is laid in properly."
Blue checks it over again and nods. "It's locked in. We're good."
"Okay, brace yourself." Yellow quickly adjusts her own straps to make sure she doesn't go flying. "Three, two, one—now!"
There's an earsplitting explosion and Yellow slams her hand onto the controls, slinging them away from the blast just in the nick of time. With any luck, no one will even notice the residual trail the pod leaves; the debris and radiation from the main ship should hide it.
It takes a few moments for the pod to adjust to the rapid-fire acceleration it's not really built for, but soon they are slumped safely in their seats, unyielding straps likely the only thing keeping them upright.
"Did we…just…" Blue pulls her hair to one side, searching out Yellow's eyes. "Did that work?"
Yellow nods, speechless.
"It worked!" She laughs, hands excited and restless and everywhere. "It worked."
"We're going to Earth," Yellow says, staring at the screen in awe.
"We are!" Blue deactivates the straps, leaps up from her seat, and runs over to Yellow, taking her hands and clasping them tightly between them. "Thank you."
"It's—You're welcome," she says weakly, still a little stunned that they aren't dead.
"Thank you," she says again. She lets go and stands beside her, tall and strong and absolutely certain. There's a flash of light a moment later, and she sees Blue's meticulously styled outfit replaced with a practical, near-exact copy of the renegade Pearl's clothes. It remains all blue, but has a brightness and vibrancy to it now that matches her eyes. "How does it look?" Blue asks, overflowing with nervous energy, though it is easy to see she has been thinking about this for some time.
"It looks right," Yellow says, and she undoes her straps and stands up as well, with the sudden urge to do something just as rebellious and drastic and daring. She phases off the uniform she has worn her whole life and replaces it with the same simple design Blue is in. She nearly paints herself in yellow—she always has, after all—but she stops, hesitates. She is different now. So instead she makes it a pale, dull gray—so bland no one would ever choose for their Pearl to wear it. It's strange, and it's perfect, and she wonders at the impossibility of everything they have done.
"You too," Blue replies, and she seems like such a different Pearl than the one who used to stand silently beside her at meetings. But she is familiar and reassuring, even when they are both shaken and exhilarated by this newfound freedom.
She could easily make a detailed list in her head of each and every rule they have broken, but she does not regret any of it. Homeworld is behind them, and that gives her a sharp, uncertain clarity she has never known. Because Homeworld is wrong, and it is time for change.
It is time for things like rebellions and swords and renegade Pearls.
Yellow looks down at herself and tugs lightly on the fluttery piece of fabric around her waist, so different to what she has always worn.
She looks at Blue, who is calm and fierce and still, staring at the stars and touching the gem on her chest like she is pledging her loyalty to them.
They are no one's Pearls now.
There's something that feels wrong about this, to both of them, because they still cannot shake just a Pearl, but they have already done so much and they cannot stop now. So they stand together. So they cry and laugh and scream because there is no one to tell them not to and they have the whole universe at their fingertips, even though they know exactly where they will go.
They are Pearls, and they are Crystal Gems, and they have chosen their purpose.