A/N: I am a huge believer in communication, and that your interpersonal relationships will fall apart without it.
When Sapphire comes to, she is of course back in her quarters. It's impossible to say how long she's been recouping, but she's willing to bet it's been a couple of days. The Diamond Authority is not going to be happy with her, oh no. There again, Sapphire's not very happy with herself. She prides herself on keeping her composure, but pushing Ruby to the point of seeing red (no pun intended) for the sake of maybe creating some kind of equilibrium in her own head was anything but. What had she been thinking, really? What is she trying to prove, and to whom?
And, surprise! It didn't even work. If anything, Sapphire feels even more tangled up now. Instead of being mad at Ruby and whoever's giving her orders, Sapphire's just furious with herself.
She's managed to make one friend in this underground hellhole, and what does she do? She tries to mangle the poor gem, and in the process forces her into the kind of berserker rage that could have easily destroyed one or both of them. Brilliant, just brilliant! Way to use that future vision, huh? And she likes to call herself intelligent!
"Hey, give us corundums some credit. Our hardness is pretty high up there on the Mohs scale. It takes a lot more than a few kicks and punches to shatter us."
Sapphire freezes, but a part of her honestly isn't surprised to hear Ruby's voice. "How long have you been here?" she asks, turning around to face her handler.
"Ever since I cooled down three days ago," Ruby says. She's sitting in the chair at Sapphire's communication console, fiddling with the controls without turning them on. She scratches her cheek now. She isn't meeting Sapphire's eyes. "I have to hand it to you: I can't remember the last time I lost it like that."
"Why?"
"Because I put a couple decades into anger management a while back, and since then haven't put much effort into mucking around in the past. The memories fade, once you stop looking at them so much."
"No, that's not what I mean." Sapphire waits until her handler finally looks up to gesture to the fact that Ruby has obviously made herself comfortable. "Why have you been here the whole time?"
"You aren't curious about why you haven't already been transferred out?"
"Not as much, no."
"Well, in case you're never going to ask, I covered for you. Made something up about you getting lost in a vision and honestly mistaking me for an enemy, which I took personally before I realized what was actually going on and subdued you." Ruby leans on her elbow and brings one foot up to the edge of the chair. The other she swings casually, just above the metal floor. "Of course, now I've been taken off of the regular work roster to watch you all day, every day, to make sure you're subdued if a vision like that ever takes over again."
"Orders, then," Sapphire says, dropping to the floor and letting her skirts pillow up around her. She should have known. "I still don't even know who you're taking them from."
"It's a collaboration between the highest level supervisors of Containment Unit 6 and one of the Diamonds. Blue, probably. If I show that I can do this job, then I'll be allowed to join the general, symmetrical populous. The experiment is all about seeing whether or not unstable gems can be rehabilitated." Ruby gives her a funny look, her leg pausing in its swinging. "I thought you figured that part out."
She closes her eyes and leans her head against the wall. "I knew you were sent to be a handler, to keep me from turning another Containment Unit upside down. I didn't know anything else."
"Is that why you were so upset?" asks Ruby. "Because honestly? I'm still scratching my head over how this whole fight started. Usually, with us, it's pretty easy to tell."
"It's not really the fact that I didn't know about the experiment."
"Then why were you so eager to spar?"
Sapphire doesn't respond for a moment, and then she lets out a breath and sits up to look across the room at Ruby directly. "You already know so much about me. I can only assume that you were briefed on my history in the other Containment Units when you were put on this job." Then, after Ruby's somewhat apologetic hum of agreement, "After nearly a century, you'd think I would be able to tell, but I can never figure out whether we're friends or just…"
"Well," Ruby says after a heavy pause. Her foot falls from the chair. "You said we were friends earlier, before you realized I was here."
"I know what I said. I just don't know if it's true."
Ruby blinks. "It bothers you that much?"
"Would it be a problem if I said yes?"
Once more, Ruby takes a moment before speaking. Sapphire doesn't think she's ever seen the red gem so introspective. What is that supposed to mean?
"Honestly, I thought you already knew." Ruby leaves the chair and squats down next to her. The violent counterpart to this moment flashes through Sapphire's mind, but beyond their physical positions there is nothing else those two moments share. Ruby offers a small, crooked smile. "I've wanted to be your friend for years now, Sapphire. I always thought you tolerated me because it was better than being alone."
Sapphire laughs. She laughs so hard that tears come streaming down her cheeks, laughs until Ruby braces her arms on her powerful thighs and shifts her weight uncomfortably.
"Um, what's so funny?"
"This!" Sapphire gasps, swiping tears out from under her bangs. "This is hilarious! Don't you see? We could have avoided this entire debacle if I had just asked where you stood. If I had talked to you about this, instead of bottling everything up, we wouldn't be here!"
Sapphire laughs some more, but Ruby doesn't look any more placated.
She waits until Sapphire has quieted down before finally sitting next to her. "I think this was worth it," she says quietly.
"But you were crying."
"Oh, you saw that?" Ruby looks down. It's hard to say whether or not she is embarrassed. "Yeah, I was, but I still think it was worth it."
"How? I forced you to do and become something you clearly didn't want to be. How is that okay anyway?"
"Because there are things you can only learn about someone else when you spar with them. And," she says when Sapphire starts to say that that isn't a proper justification. "I don't think we would be here, having a conversation like this, if that hadn't happened."
When you put it the way that Ruby does, Sapphire can almost start to agree.
"I'm still sorry. You didn't deserve to be pushed that way. I shouldn't have noticed that you didn't want to spar and respected that."
"Eh, who cares about that?" Ruby waves it off with her gem free hand. She is smiling. "It's over now, and something good actually came of it. It was worth it."
After a pause Sapphire gives in (for now), and asks, "Do you ever miss sunlight?"