Zircon had never met a Shadow Agate before, and if she ever got out of this, she wouldn't choose do it again. At first glance, she almost looked like a regular red agate. Dark red hair done up in a single, banded coil; white skin standing out starkly from her black uniform; the typical broad shoulders and gracious hips of a quartz. Her dark red gem, an upside-down teardrop, was placed squarely in the center of her forehead.
Scary, yes. But arrogant? Even more so. To say the least, Shadow Agate was infuriating.
"Blue Zircon, Facet 1, Cut 7EA," said Shadow, her black lips curling into a smile. The contrast was too harsh for that to be the natural color, and for a half-second Zircon wondered what poor gem had been ground up to paint Shadow Agate's lips.
"That would be me," she replied unsteadily.
No use in lying about it. Shadow Agate just grinned like Zircon had turned herself in...maybe she had.
"You're a brave one to try to escape my Harvester, you know," Shadow continued, taking a slow, but loud step forward. "Well…" She chuckled. "You're either brave, stupid, or suicidal. I can't tell."
At that, Zircon's shoulders relaxed minutely. Like she hadn't heard THAT like before. Shadow Agate was literally just spouting scare tactics that every low-grade interrogator learned in the Kindergarten. Blazes, she'd used that exact one in her earliest trials.
"Look," she weaseled into the opening, and began to craft yet another impromptu argument. She was definitely still terrified, but Shadow's verbatim intimidation quotes had lightened the mood enough for Zircon to be a little patronizing. "There's clearly been a grave misunderstanding. You see, while I WAS in fact assigned to defend the — the obvious traitor Rose Quartz, I never finished my defense; of course, I still had to cover defense of duress. And procedure requires that the prosecutor counters the defense before the defendant is summarily executed. You DO understand this —"
Shadow Agate's smile was gone. She did not seem to want to understand any of it. Her eyes narrowed. "You are here by the orders of both Yellow Diamond and Blue Diamond. Their orders are NOT subject to legal pedantics."
"Their orders are REQUIRED to submit to legal pedantics. Required not by me, but by THEIR laws, which they wrote!" Zircon was getting shaky, like she always did in the heat of arguments. "Th — there has to be a miscommunication. My client could not have been convicted without my presence, and without her conviction, I cannot be sentenced to harvesting! Without just cause, this — "
"Your sentence," Shadow cut in, "wasn't for losing a case. Your sentence was for high treason. I'm sure that erases any legal connections you had."
Those weren't even the proper terms. "But Rose Quartz — "
"Has already been dealt with." Shadow's smirk was back, and she examined her black fingernails. "Now there's nothing between you and your sentence, so you might as well surrender now."
At first, the response seemed all-encompassing, an immovable argument. But Shadow's voice was unsteady. This was an unmistakeable lie. Clearly, Zircon couldn't reason with this agate, which she'd half-expected...but then again, she was an agate. An agate, as Peridot 2F5L-8XI had said, exceptionally prone to monologuing.
Zircon sent out a silent thanks to 8XI (wherever she was) before asking Shadow, "How did you know I was here?"
Shadow chuckled — seriously, did she have to do that every time she was about to say something? "I have my ways. I may only be eight hundred years old, but I am the finest agate in my cut! Your silly little games were nothing for me. Oh, yes, don't think I didn't see what you did to those two peridots, or shapeshifting and running around the halls with your barrel of whatever."
Of course she did. By this point, Zircon wasn't even surprised. In fact, if she was surprised at all, it was because she was surprised that she wasn't surprised. "I must be really growing numb to this action-adventure sort of shenanigan," she thought to herself.
Shadow Agate just kept talking. She even had begun to dramatically pace, and wasn't even looking at Zircon anymore. Subtly, Zircon reached for the computer and turned it on.
"In fact," Shadow rambled, and stopped in her open doorway to be silhouetted by the light again, "by the time you found my office, I thought for sure that my little door trick would make you dissipate your form! It works on the peridots. Oh, they hate the sound of error messages that they can't seem to fix. If you had touched that panel at all, it wouldn't have let you in. Smart of you. Or stupid. Stars only know. Because now you're here, cornered in my office. Nowhere to run. I almost feel sorry for you, putting all that effort into your silly little escape plan, when all it's going to end with is me, crushing your gem in my fingers. I should have just cracked you through as soon as you showed your face past those silly barrels. Perhaps it would have been a small mercy. Now, I wonder how blue lipstick would look on me…"
The computer was locked with a password. Just wonderful. Frustrated, Zircon tried out "ShadowAgateIsGreat." Password denied. "TheAlmightyShadowAgate". Password denied. "ShadowAgateTheTerrifying." Password denied. "TheGreatAlmightyTerrifyingShadowAgate".
Ding. Password accepted.
The moment might have been humorous, if Shadow Agate hadn't turned around at the noise. "And don't bother making a clever escape or hacking my password!" she smiled, stalking slowly towards Zircon. "Our records are clean. It's only you who was given the mercy of shattering. Your Rose Quartz is gone and the human is dead. The Earth is barren. At long last, there will be no treason left to speak of on our radiant Homeworld…"
Her pale eyes flicked up, and her face darkened. Suddenly, as the agate came closer, Zircon realized something very unsettling — Zircon couldn't focus her gaze on her at all. Like trying to draw the shape of a heat mirage. And for the first time since before Shadow Agate had opened her mouth, Zircon felt a flicker of real, pure fear.
"Except you."
Without warning, Shadow raised her fist and shot forward. Yelping, Zircon ducked. Shadow's fist crashed into the back of the chair — just where Zircon's head had been.
Zircon scrambled away from Shadow Agate, away from the desk, until her back bumped against something hard and cold. It was one of the metal wall decorations, each a little smaller than she was, carved with eerie glinting eyes and claws — except that, upon closer examination, they weren't just tapestries. They were shields. With no time to think, as Shadow Agate jumped down from the dais with force that made the office shake, Zircon pulled one of the heavy shields from the wall and dove behind it. The only way she could hold it was on thick leather straps that a quartz could probably carry on one arm, but which could probably fit around Zircon's whole body.
Then she heard Shadow Agate laughing. A sarcastic laugh. "Do you really think you're going anywhere with that thing? You can't even pick it up!" Shadow crowed.
Gripping the straps tight, Zircon braced herself for impact, but nothing came. Finally, she dared to peek out.
Shadow Agate stood with her back to Zircon, partly obscured by the light filtering in from the ceiling — but as Shadow reached up, a new light bloomed in front of her, silhouetting her powerful form. When she turned around, she held a tall, flaming black scythe, and her eyes glinted amber in the flickering light.
"Well, that's not tacky at all," Zircon murmured, before Shadow swung the scythe and Zircon ducked behind the shield.
When the scythe met the shield, the metal shrieked as it tore. The heat seared Zircon's exposed face and arms even as she hid. Her brain thought of this as an excellent time to reflect on the irony of her fight less than an hour previously, with the clumsy little peridots, and how easy that had seemed. Of course it was easy. Olivines weren't made for combat; quartzes were. Agates were no exception.
"I'm going to die," she murmured to herself, half-aware of what she was saying, and definitely not concerned about grammar — "I'm going to die so bad."
She had to move. That was the only thing that cut through the numbness of so much fear that she couldn't feel anything at all.
She tried to lift with her arms and it didn't work. The strap slipped down her right arm, and then she got an idea and pulled her arm through the other strap, and hefted the shield on her back like some very strange, heavy, backpack. When she turned, Shadow Agate was raising her scythe again, so Zircon whirled back around and braced for impact.
Two long seconds later the blade clanged against the shield. Zircon was thrown back against the wall again...but she was three feet away from where she'd been before. Shadow struck again, and Zircon stumbled, scraping her face against the wall. But the shield protected her — if she had known about Earth animals, she might have even likened the shield to the shell of a turtle.
There. She was indestructible...so long as she kept moving, she kept Shadow behind her, and Shadow kept using that scythe…
Except Shadow did not keep using her scythe. Suddenly, Zircon found herself being pulled painfully by the straps under her arms, her feet free of the ground. On either side of the shield-shell, Shadow's fingers gripped the metal hard enough to bend it, and she lifted Zircon into the air —
Shadow threw her, shield and all, across the room. The shield bounced on its rim, sending a vibration through the metal that knocked her head, and the crashing sounds were deafening to the point of jarring her teeth, and the next thing Zircon knew she was groaning and staring up at the skylight, rocking back and forth on the shield. Her limp hand bumped against something hot — the barrel of liquid explosive.
Shadow summoned her scythe again, and the white flames raced up onto the blade. Like the final piece to a winning case, it clicked. The only possible solution.
This is probably going to kill me.
Grinning, Shadow drew back the flaming scythe, her expression unhinged, her manic eyes tracking Zircon's every move. When Zircon rolled over and struggled to her feet, Shadow adjusted the angle of her weapon and swung. A slow swing, but right towards Zircon. Right towards the barrel.
It took all her strength and then some but she did it. Zircon turned and jumped onto the barrel lid, her hands over her gem. Then she jumped again, and tilted her body backwards. Shadow's scythe met the barrel of explosive.
Zircon's feet had just left the barrel when a great light ripped through Shadow Agate's office.
The explosion threw her up, and suddenly there was pain. So, so much pain. In her legs, all across her body as she hit resistance, in the depths of her head as the light blinded her and the sound deafened her. She broke through the glass skylight, and then through something even harder that was above that, and suddenly she was falling. Blissfully falling.
She landed on her back, on the shield. She was winded and the shield was half-melted (she could literally hear the sizzle of molten metal against photomatter). Her body hurt everywhere. She wasn't sure if she could open her eyes, she heard nothing but a terrible ringing, she could comprehend even less.
But there was one thing she knew: she was out of the Harvester. Wherever she was now, in whatever condition — she was no longer doomed to die.
the ao3 version of this had the first paragraph of my immortal rewritten to fit Shadow Agate but i felt like just plopping that in the author's note here might be a joke lost, just because of the different reader demographics
anyway please review
