It took a few minutes for Zircon to peel open her eyes again, and once she did, it took longer to become un-blinded. Then she saw pink sky, bisected by a fuzzy grey column of smoke. The column, when she followed it with her eyes, stemmed from a black, charred husk about a mile away. Aircraft orbited the disaster scene.
Groaning, Zircon sat up and ran down a mental checklist — her gem was fine. No visible damage. Her physical form was a mess. Molten metal dripped from her scraped arms and back; her jumpsuit was shredded and she had lost one shoe. The remains of the other shoe fell off when she moved her foot, revealing badly blistered skin. Her jacket, tied around her waist, was charred and in pieces. Useless. Even her trusty headscarf had torn open, and her wiry white hair flopped in front of her eyes. Her monocle was shattered — the only thing that she couldn't regenerate until she was poofed. Wasn't that just great.
Her ears were still ringing...not that there was anything around to hear. She was in the middle of nowhere. "Nowhere" being a field of flat, shiny blue panels; a power plant. Nowadays, these fields were the only flat, uninhabited surfaces of Homeworld. She had landed on the edge of one blue panel, with debris and shards of glass all around her. Nearby panels displayed similar debris. The explosion, apparently, had been so violent that it crumbled black marble and hurled it in a half-mile radius — not to mention Zircon herself. No surprise that the power panel below her was dented.
More violent was the realization: she was not only a rebel. She was now a terrorist. A fugitive.
As far away from the scene as she was, it was only a matter of time before someone came looking for her. She had to move — again. She needed to hide so she could rest, maybe even regain enough energy to fix her appearance modifiers. Nothing said culprit of trinitrotoluene bombing like charred clothes and ash on her face.
Wincing against the blisters on her bare feet, Zircon shed the remains of her shield and stood up. Her ears were beginning to readjust. In the distance, there were sirens. The catwalks, forming a grid above the power panels, creaked and whistled in the cold wind.
She took to the catwalks. Every intersection met in a circular base, in the center of which was a small control booth, inside of which was nothing. There were hundreds of these booths — hundreds of hiding places.
After about an hour of walking along the catwalks (after which she looked over her shoulder and found aircraft circling the place near where she'd landed, yikes) Zircon found a control panel that had been deactivated. It had only last been used some time ago, judging by the rusting, peeling sign reading "OUT OF ORDER — PRIORITY 99997". Upon prying open the door to the control booth, the rusted tracks screamed in protest; dust fell into her hair. The inside was only large enough for her to extend her arms out. When Zircon tried to pull the door shut, the bar snapped off in her hands.
"I...guess I have a weapon now," she told herself haplessly. It was better than nothing.
She lowered the blinds over the windows and sank down in the hard chair, sighing mightily. She was aching, soaked in sweat, and crusting over with heat blisters and hardening steel. She'd tried to wipe the steel off, but the liquid metal just smeared on her hands and what was left of her jumpsuit. And honestly...she couldn't care. All she wanted was to lie down for hours, to close her eyes and escape from consciousness...but of course that was silly. Gems couldn't do anything of the sort.
"Well, I'm out," she whispered. "I'm not dead."
For now. No doubt, there would be patrols and robonoids crawling this area — likely all of Facet One — until her gem was found. The patrols would be unlikely to check every single control booth; they would be more likely to assume she was on the run. The robonoids were less predictable (she didn't want to think of exactly HOW unpredictable). So she was fine. Or at least, she was as close to fine as she could possibly be.
But what of Rose Quartz? Or the human specimen? Shadow Agate said they were both dead, but Zircon would trust that agate about as far as she could throw her. Zircon couldn't accept that Rose was gone. She needed answers. During the one-minute recess, Rose alluded to the fact that she couldn't remember Pink Diamond's shattering because she only had Rose Quartz's gem. Had she lost the ability to project a physical form? It would certainly explain her ridiculous disguise — if she was using it as a host, of course she couldn't change out of it.
But otherwise, it only opened up more questions. Did Rose Quartz's metamorphosis have anything to do with Pink Diamond? What else did Rose Quartz know? Did she remember any of the events leading up to Pink Diamond's shattering, or were ALL of her memories gone? If the Diamonds overruled evidence and deemed Rose Quartz guilty, why wasn't Rose Quartz's name right under her own in the Harvester records?
It became very clear to Zircon, very fast. There was no reasoning her way out of this one. There were too many unknown variables. Something had happened after Zircon had been poofed, and if she couldn't find Rose Quartz, or simply waltz up to the Diamonds and ask, there was only one other possible witness.
Yellow Zircon.
A sound snapped her out of her thoughts — a low, uncanny humming. A robonoid. Automatically, Zircon dropped to the floor between the chair and the control panel, gripping her pole tightly. All she could hope was that the control booth was so full of tech that it jumbled scanning signals.
For once (it felt), she was lucky. She was right.
Through the cracks in the window blinds, a red light glowed. Zircon began to wonder if this was how she died: curled up in an out-of-order power plant control booth, clutching the broken handle of a door, covered in steel from a sadist's wall decoration, quivering with the tattered remains of her appearance modifiers soaked in her own anxiety sweat.
Then the red light dimmed and the humming sound faded.
The robonoid left. Zircon stayed put. An hour later, just as she was thinking she was in the clear, another robonoid circled around.
Two hours later, there had been no more robonoids and Zircon dared to show her face above the control panels. When she peeked behind the window blinds, the power plant was deserted. The sky had darkened to a deep purple, and the column of smoke from her explosion was nearly gone. All around her, in every distance she looked to, city lights glittered on the horizon — Facet One being the slice of horizon to the north, Facets Two and Four making up the rest.
Just as they had done many times that day, four words repeated like a mantra:
You have to move.
During the claustrophobic, terrified wait, Zircon had picked most of the hardened metal off her skin and clothes, and regained enough energy to bring back her shoes. She was still far from presentable, and her suit was still practically falling off of her, and it would be a long time before she could get her jacket back, but at least most of her blisters and scrapes had healed. She could at least run. Or fight. Or whatever being a rebel and a runaway entailed.
Before she could convince herself to stay put, Zircon gripped her pole tightly and stepped out of the control booth. A cool breeze hit her face, pushing her pale blue curls across her eyes. She looked to Facet One and inhaled deeply.
"Whatever you're hiding, my Diamonds," she whispered, "I'll get to the bottom of it. Even if it's the last thing I do."
disclaimer: im taking some liberties with how much a gem's form can be "damaged" per se. i know it's just light, but im a slut for misery and wounds, so deal with it
here's an art i drew specifically for this chapter (take out spaces and parentheses)
equilateralwaffle. tumblr . com (/) post / 161570198650 /
please review thanks
