im posting from my fucking phone guys this is weied and glitchy
For the first time in what felt like forever, things were going okay.
After making up, Zircon and Raspberry Quartz trained for several hours before resting. Zircon managed to master the first few basic sequences, only hitting herself on the head twice. The third time she almost hit herself, a bubble popped into existence around her head and stayed there for a good half hour — cueing, of course, Raspberry laughing at her for the whole half hour.
It was as if, after accidentally uncovering the gift once, it spun out of control and began appearing everywhere. The only upside to spontaneous bubble-creation was that it gave Zircon more opportunities to learn how to control it. By the end of the training period, she could almost reliably dismiss the bubbles by smacking them really hard with her palm. The downside, among others, was that Raspberry started calling her "Bubblehead". Zircon told her that she was bad at nicknames. Raspberry didn't care.
As soon as Zircon returned to the terminal, Yellow intercepted her and used her shoulder as an armrest.
"So, force fields, huh?" she asked.
Zircon gave her a look. Yellow cringed and stepped back, clearly understanding its meaning.
"Sorry for almost running you over with a transport?" Yellow tried.
Oh well. Zircon sighed and, weary from her training, slumped to the ground against a wall. "Better. Though I don't want to ask why you were involved."
Gingerly, Yellow sat next to her. "In my defense, it was fun before the brakes failed. And before we realized you and the quartz were in that tunnel. What were you two doing, anyway?"
"That's private."
Probably not the wisest answer. Yellow raised a quizzical eyebrow.
"Yellow, no."
The raised eyebrow pulled into a grin.
"YELLOW."
The grin spread wider, and Yellow leaned against Zircon's shoulder again, making some very suggestive noises that didn't warrant description. Zircon's cheeks began to heat up. They were still nearby gems — Aqua Pearl had paused her argument with Bismuth to glance over, and 5XU was staring as she ran a brush through her hair. And Raspberry Quartz had her back to the Zircons, but she was in earshot. Yellow didn't seem to care. "How long has this been going on, hmm? You knew her before, right? Oooohhh...does Cranberry know?"
At that, Raspberry turned around, if only for a second. The curious look might as well have punched Zircon in the stomach. "S — shut UP!" she squealed, elbowing Yellow hard in the side. Yellow just laughed.
"You two are so weird," called Raspberry before walking away. The resulting glare Yellow got from Zircon could have cracked a gem.
"That's not what's going on, Yellow."
The suggestive smirk never left. "I know. I just like giving you a hard time with everything."
As if that wasn't obvious. But Zircon let her stay, and even allowed her to lay her head on Zircon's shoulder until she abruptly sat up.
"Look at the time; I completely forgot. I promised Heliodor I would help her with a legal question; I hope my Libra account hasn't been terminated yet…"
A realization occured to Zircon. "Yellow," she exclaimed, "you're making friends!"
"What? No I'm not!" Yellow blustered, scrambling to her feet. "Zircons don't have friends, and you know it!"
But as she stormed off, she passed through the light and gave Zircon a full view of her jacket. There was a pattern on the back that hadn't been before — a half star draping down from her collar, just like the one on the back of Zircon's vest. When reforming, Zircon hadn't even thought to create the design, but Yellow had clearly been inspired by SOMEBODY. Didn't have friends...psh.
That was life in the terminals. Largely rest, lasting a few hours at a time, where Zircon would talk with Yellow or Black Cherry Ruby. And later, as days passed, with Heliodor, with Aqua Pearl, with Bismuth and the second ruby who always hung off her arm (and later with their fusion, Tiger's Eye), even with the shady hematite and the two vicious little peridots. During that time, Cranberry and Raspberry usually disappeared. Once, they brought back a tiny, terrified calcite, who never spoke, just sat in corners and stared at everyone.
But for the most part, when they returned, Raspberry would lead the rebels to the warehouse and begin combat training again. They would train until they were sweating and collapsing on the floor, and then they would return to the terminal and rest again. It was a schedule — something Zircon could fall into. A rhythm.
And as the rhythm continued, it became easier to play along. The other rebels were no longer strangers. With the addition of Calcite, the zircons were no longer newbies. Even the peridots stopped wanting to shatter Zircon, though sometimes one would make a very morbid joke that made Zircon on edge again.
Heliodor, a four-foot-tall fairy with a bulbous gold gown and a pile of glittering hair, was kind of like Yellow Zircon. Another loyal yellow upper crust dragged into rebellion by external factors. Two thousand years ago, one of her quartz guards dropped a heavy crate on her foot and chipped a corner off her gem. Enraged, she ordered the quartz to be taken away and repurposed, told everyone that she was fine, and continued on with her duties. Then she forgot what happened to her gem. She forgot dates. She forgot appointments. She forgot her own servants. Very soon, her memory was so spotty that she was forced to write her entire life on screens in order to escape notice that something was wrong. But inevitably, someone did notice, and she was sentenced to a merciful shattering. Then she was here. She had forgotten to write down how she had gotten here.
Bismuth and her ruby were pretty closed off about their personal lives. The only thing that Zircon knew about them was that they were obsessed with each other, and that it was impossible to stop Tiger's Eye from forming, despite the fact that she was twenty feet tall and the ceiling of the terminal base was twelve. Tiger's Eye, then, would just lay on her stomach.
Calcite never said much, or anything, for that matter; only Cherry Ruby claimed to have heard her speak before. When standing, she only came up to Zircon's knee. Not that she came up to Zircon at all, though. Cranberry mentioned that they had picked her up from a street corner in the upper Underworld, and that she had a problem with keeping a steady form. In her brief meetings with Calcite, Zircon tried to keep an eye out for that, and suspected to had caught it once. When Calcite moved suddenly, she glitched, leaving little particles of light behind. Sometimes her gem was over her left ear. Sometimes it was over her right. One time, it was on the back of her neck. It explained why Raspberry never pushed her to train with the others, and why the only thing she did was sit and stare.
Hematite was mysterious. Tall, dark, thin, brooding, with a ridiculous hat and a skintight black suit. Edgy. Which...was kind of the point of hematites to begin with, but still. After a while, Zircon realized that they had actually met before — Hematite was the court-appointed bounty hunter Zircon had defended in her second most famous case, Hematite vs. the Court of Blue Diamond. Hematite had shattered one target without permission, but only out of self-defense. She was found innocent that time.
"So why are you here now?" Zircon had asked out of morbid curiosity. Maybe a mistake.
"Shattered someone else," Hematite just shrugged.
"In self-defense?"
"No," she said matter-of-factly. "Selfishly. She cut in line at a warp pad."
Zircon's mouth fell open. "So you shattered her?"
"We had history before that," said Hematite, as if that excused anything.
Even still, she wasn't the weirdest of the rebels. That honor fell to Aqua Pearl. While Hematite was just callous without a cause, ignorant of sociopolitical forces, Aqua Pearl was vengeful. Zircon could never really understand her story. From what scraps she could get, she understood that Pearl had been horrifically abused by her owner, leading her to poof her owner and flee to the Underworld.
But whoever her owner had been, she must have been prestigious — Aqua Pearl knew more about the inner workings of Homeworld than Zircon herself. Almost every day, Zircon found herself listening to Aqua Pearl preach, ranting for hours about corruption, scandals, propaganda, and systematic oppression until Pearl's training kicked in and clapped her hand over her mouth. But she was getting better at circumventing the gag. She would avoid names and dates. She would use code words for things she couldn't describe. Once, she had Hematite pin her hands behind her back, yelling over the urge to bite off her own tongue. Whenever Zircon met her eyes, she saw a starving fire, unhinged, greedy for chaos, whispering of the day she would see the Diamonds on their knees.
Zircon wondered who would tell her that they WEREN'T planning a full scale revolt against the oligarchy.
There was one person who Zircon wondered about, but hardly saw at all. Strawberry Quartz, the elusive fusion of Cranberry and Raspberry. According to the older rebels, Strawberry was normally a frequent face around the underground, especially in the warehouse during training. Some of them wondered if the two had gotten in a fight. But Zircon sometimes stumbled upon Raspberry and Cranberry when they thought they were alone, cuddling or speaking quietly with their hands intertwined. So they weren't fighting. That wasn't it.
Then, about twenty days after that first training, Zircon left the transport station for fresh air. And later, part of her would wonder if it was worth it.
