Stranded is the only word for it, really.
Pearl can settle down on the rise of a green hill and wait for this system's single sun to set - and she does, every evening - then stretch out her arms towards the countless still, frozen lights sprinkled across the night sky, moving as if to run her fingers over them, or perhaps brush them away. They look cold and dead and so very, very distant - nothing like what she had come to know the stars and being among them to be like. The longer she looks at them, the less she wants to see them hanging above her, openly mocking, reminding her of places she will never visit again, and of wonders she has forever forfeited seeing.
Traded, rather - she thinks as she relaxes her limbs and lets her hands fall into her lap - for something equally wondrous, if not even more so.
Rose lifts her eyes, looks at her knowingly (she always, always knows), and smiles brighter than any spectacular comet tail Pearl has ever had to creep out of crowded cargo holds to gaze at. She remembers the way the searing blue-purple flashes of the ion storms off the side of the Zircon Cluster burned into the backs of her projected form's eyes, and the way she stood transfixed until a fellow pearl took her by the arm to drag her away from the viewport. She has been through enough atmospheric reentries and faulty, failing inertial dampeners to be intimately familiar with the jolting and dizzy sensation of falling.
Pearl can explain in great detail the exact equations behind it, the way the play of forces becomes a delicate balance of expressions and figures that tips to one side or the other before again pouring into the physical world, but all Rose Quartz has to do is curl her lips and tilt her head, a veritable waterfall of pink locks following her every movement, and extend a welcoming hand, always carefully kept just warm and soft enough.
"A dance, my Pearl?"
It is, she supposes, a kind of gravity as well - it is certainly inexorable and irresistible enough.
Theirs is not an elaborate or flashy choreography, but its simplicity has a beauty and elegance all its own. Rose holds her close all the while, and Pearl feels awareness itch in the back of her mind, of how she went from being one of many (but never quite the way she was supposed to be, or the way they wanted her to be) to being just one - then growing into being one and one of two, all at once. It is an arrangement that settles her into the purest feeling of calm rightness and belonging the universe has so far offered her.
We can never go home- the words spoken long ago still surface every so often to rattle around Pearl's busy mind and bury deeply distressing icy claws into her spine.
It's alright, she thinks, when they are like this, as together as it is possible to be. All she wants and needs of home can be within her, or between them, or both, and the stars feel far less unforgivingly distant when looked at through new eyes.