32. Who Lives, and Who Dies
"Well?" White Diamond held him a little closer, so Steven shook his head and tried to answer the question.
Right. Diamonds don't like to ask twice.
"Um, y-yes, I remember." Her eyes narrowed, causing him to wince. "My Diamond." He managed a feeble salute and quickly let his arms drop; he may be suspended in the bubble, but moving too much still brought on waves of stabbing pains that radiated out from his gemstone. Steven sighed, wondering how much longer this could go on – it felt like he would certainly die soon at this rate, the ghostly figure of White Diamond holding him like a toy without a trace of urgency. So Steven was resigned to just float and listen, doing his best to answer her questions.
For all the attention White minded the others, they might as well have been alone in the Kindergarten once again. It was like they were having their own private conversation, although it was just as one-sided as always. And considering she had literally just destroyed Yellow Diamond and poofed, cracked, and bubbled Blue Diamond, she was frighteningly calm, which only made her more terrifying.
"Then you must see now how important you are. It is as I said - you are not like other Rose Quartzes. Your… human half," the word soured her face, as if the idea sickened her. Judging by the way Homeworld gems generally react to him, Steven guessed that it probably did.
"Interacts with your gemstone. The inherited powers of your vein of Quartz are changed and reconditioned to accompany your biological needs, your chemical composition. Don't you see? Steven, you do not simply mend as they do. You restore. You alone have the ability to grow new life, to reverse death, to create again from near nothing."
But he didn't see – what was she talking about? Reverse death? If she wasn't the physical proof of that, he would never have believed her. But he saw her shattered, and now, she was here, carrying him, lecturing him…
Even in the weightless comfort of the bubble, he was still very cold, so he used a sudden shiver as an excuse to curl in on himself, to avert his eyes. Steven felt like he was about to lose his nerve from the intensity of her glowing eyes, her overwhelming presence, her cold detachment, so he looked away and tried to gather enough moxie to speak. In fact, once he got past the devastating stabbing sensation that threatened to stop his heart, he felt a lot more comfortable in this position.
"Um – well, how? I, er, I'm sorry, m-my Diamond – I just don't understand. I'm glad you're not… dead… but what you're saying, it…?" His voice trailed off when he looked up at her, his breath freezing in his chest.
Usually stoic, severe, or intimidating, it was even more alarming when White Diamond smiled at him. "I am glad I am not dead, too, Steven. It's all about cellular growth. Consider for a moment the origin of your power - lachrymation, you are familiar with it, yes?"
Steven remembered Homeworld Peridot saying the word when he would cry and gather his tears, and Pearl had used it several times to refer to his mom's healing tears, so he nodded.
"It regulates nociception, a trait our species share. For nearly all gems, lachrymation purely functional – you could say its purpose is similar to when you learned how to address me properly. You did not like being hurt, but it was effective." Steven did not like the memory, and he especially did not like how casually she brought up torturing him, but he said nothing.
Pacing again, White Diamond continued, her voice thoughtful and deliberate. "The design of my subjects is founded in pragmatism; their physical forms only possess the capacity for lachrymation because it serves to benefit them. The ability to respond and process pain is only as useful as it can train a gem to abstain from behaviors that might harm them, or to appreciate how best to dominate their enemy. We are a colonizing race, so there are occasions when understanding emotional pain can be advantageous. I have designed all veins of our kind to be able to know how it feels to be hurt, so they can then better strategize how to hurt. Sometimes, emotional pain can be as or even more effective a tool than physical pain. And, you've seen that yourself, haven't you?" She flashed her eyes at him in the bubble, and he shrank under her gaze. Steven was confused and disturbed, but enormously curious, so he responded in the only way he could image she would want.
"Um, yes, my Diamond."
The glowing, autocratic keeper gave him a swift nod and proceeded in her explanation, absently inspecting the tops of the canyon walls each time she cleared the length of the valley.
"When you disobeyed my command, I punished you, and you learned – it is a similar design for most gems. Then there is the Rose Quartz gemstone – the exception. Their vein – your vein – is similar to the human design that produces psychic lachrymation. A specific arrangement of molecules grants – or, granted – Rose Quartz the ability to produce tears from sympathy and empathy; for humans, it is the chemical reaction encephalin that triggers such tears. It is this variation that gave your mother her 'healing powers,' as you once put it."
Steven didn't want to push his luck, but that was almost an entirely unhelpful explanation. How do you tell a matriarch that's thousands of years old – who also happens to be a ruthless executioner, alien, and intergalactic tyrant – that you're literally just not smart enough to understand? How do you press her for more information when you're already lost?
Sadly, Steven glanced over the side of her hand, thinking of Pearl below… she had taught him almost everything he knows, she probably understood every word of White Diamond's explanation. In another life, she could have explained it all to him.
But not in this life – in this life, he was in the palm of White Diamond's hand, and she was locked in a green cage at the base of a Homeworld Kindergarten with the rest of the people he loved, completely at his Diamond's mercy.
Whoa. That was… weird.
His Diamond?The thought had come so naturally that it scared him. Did he really… belong to her? Before it had been an act, a show, so as not to be punished, but that was…
White Diamond released him for a moment, letting him floating above the canyons, and pulled a mound of dirt from the ground. It took Steven a moment to realize it contained Dani's shards.
"Your tears… alone, they are not strong enough to heal in the same way your mother might have. The functionality of lachrymation is corrupted by your organic needs. But, you make up for it in other ways…" She bubbled whatever was left of Dani and held the orb close to her white, dangerous visage.
She paused her lecture, examining the tiny broken mementos of Danburite, the death he was most recently responsible for. White Diamond's mouth was drawn tight, but she didn't really seem to be inspecting the bubble. Her gaze was distant, seeing something beyond the shards, something far away from the conversation, beyond the cavernous darkness, something greater than the pale cloud that enveloped them all.
Abruptly, she turned back to his own glimmering enclosure as he drifted lightly through the air. Her voice was flat, face inscrutable. "Your arm must hurt. Will you show it to me?"
That was one of the last thing he would have expected her to say, and though it was phrased like a question, it felt more like a command. Steven took a deep breath and braced himself as he tentatively extended his stained wrist, straightening his arm to fully display the haunting reminders of three Diamond's wrath, but she frowned at him before the motion was complete.
"No, Steven, your other arm." Her face shifted ever so slightly to his right side, eyes studying the bandage wrapped around his elbow.
"Oh, this?" It did hurt, but he had stopped noticing such fleeting pains when he had cracked. Comparatively, this was nothing.
He paused, screwing up his face in concentration as he started to switch the arms in front of him when he was caught in a sudden fit of coughing. It sent him backwards violently through the weightless space.
The sensation was as quick as a snapping wire, but he felt each millimeter of pain overwhelm him as the fissure across the Rose Quartz gemstone widened. His lungs constricted painfully, all the air exiting his body for an infinitesimal moment in time. The overwhelming feeling was, in a word, agony, like a star had exploded inside of his mind, all of the color and life leaving his body just long enough for something to change. Something… but he couldn't tell what. Everything had gone white and radiant in his vision, and then it was over, the devastation leaving nothing visible behind besides a stream of tears across his face.
Steven had to blink several times once it had ended, his lungs and heart not prepared for the chill that swept over him. It had turned even colder – or, maybe that was just him? He couldn't really tell – dying really, really hurt.
With a quick jerk, Steven extended his right arm in front of him, and he used his other hand to unbandage it carefully.
White Diamond studied the unsightly exit mark of the needle under his badly bruised skin, but Steven did not mind. He was too busy turning over his own brain, wondering, noticing something felt... wrong. It was as abrupt as it was undeniable – something within him was thrown off-balance in response to the delicate fissure that threatened to stop his heart. All of his emotions felt foreign, his ability to reason felt slower, his convictions felt shaken… he was pretty sure it was all still there, bubbling under the surface, but he couldn't reach them. It wasn't like he had gone mute, not exactly, because he knew he could open his mouth and speak if he wanted to… but he just didn't want to. Everything felt… detached.
Absently, his eyes had wandered over the edge of her long fingers once again. He could see the Crystal Gems looking up at him, but he was too far away to tell who was who, so he just stared at them blankly until White Diamond talked at him again.
White Diamond's voice disturbed his meditation, so he flicked his attention back to her.
"Steven, the chemical within you, EGF, is much more potent than the powers that linger in your inherited psychic lachrymation. It is a natural byproduct of your salivary glands, but it is even more concentrated and abundant when taken straight from the plasma in your blood stream," she paused, tilting her head as she studied his pallor face.
His pain was evident, the struggle behind his blank expression not going unnoticed by White. It had been written all over his face the moment she studied his weak body over the cliff-face, before she had cared to bubble him – the child was cracked. But it did not matter to her if he was cracked, battered, or hurting; as long as his power could continue to be reaped, she had little concern for his quality of life.
Holding him very closely to her face, she spoke in a low voice. "Your gemstone."
Delicately, Steven lifted up the tattered ends of the shirt she had given him, just enough that the Rose Quartz was exposed.
The crack started on the left side of the face and extended about halfway across; the origin lines were two thin rivers, meeting in the center where a tiny crater had started to wither away. He would be fine, for now.
She nodded brusquely and Steven released his shirt, letting his arm fall to his side.
"You see, Steven, the relationship between your powers and your organic body… well, you could say the product is something that one might call growth. From nothing but a single shard, your powers can act as the perfect replicator for any extracellular compounds conceivable on the face of any gemstone, so long as it has something to bond to. Iron, oxygen, silicon, carbon… not only does your ability bind any available pieces back together, you can restore the crystalline structure without any of the usual conditions that are necessary when a gem first rises from the dirt. The more EGF present, the faster the regeneration."
White Diamond paused, holding Steven in her cupped hands as she faced away from the rest of her prisoners. "Do you understand now?"
To be honest, he didn't really understand, but he got the gist – his spit and his… plasma, those were the important parts. They're not like healing tears, which it sounds like he didn't have anyways… They have something that the tears lack – EGF? The Homeworld Peridot had mentioned it to him once or twice, so he knew it was familiar. From the sounds of her explanation, it acts as a sort of amplifier to his powers? The first time White Diamond had brought him to the Kindergarten, she had told him how Rose Quartz gems "repair" each piece of a gem, stretching the bonds that already existed. Now, she made it sound like he didn't repair or stretch anything, but healed things from the inside out.
The boy nodded his head carefully, and White Diamond closed her eyes. It was a strange thing for her to do, an action Steven typically associated with calming or exasperation, but her face showed neither emotion. He could only guess what she might be thinking about.
After a minute of silence, White Diamond turned around to the others, locked mutely in the green cage far below.
She had not forgotten about them, but she had been bidding her time as a means to consider her options. With the prisoners, the anarchy… matters became less clear. To White, impartial justice was as crucial a component of sovereign rule as any military, any spire, or any depository of resources, but…
Her tone disinterested, White spoke to her subjects. "Pearl, Heliodor, you are dismissed for now. Do not go too far."
She lowered his bubble all the way to the ground, letting the child hover only feet away from the lutetium container.
"Steven, there is one more thing you should know."
This was the closest he had come to the others since he had attacked Pearl and Lapis, but his eyes still followed White Diamond as she walked around to the other side of her entrapment, like the Crystal Gems were an exhibition in a museum, an accolade of her accomplishments, a trophy from a war. Her face was unreadable, but her eyes were hard.
Inside the terrarium, the raging storm had died down to a drizzle, washing them all with conflicted, worn emotions. Sapphire sat on the floor with Pearl, both dealing with very different, but very real, sorts of strain. Their eyes looked tired, worn, extinguished, and they weren't looking at him, either.
Connie and Lapis had their hands pressed up against the wall that was nearest to him, their eyes gleaming but cheeks dry while Amethyst leaned against the opposite wall, looking down at the ground. Ruby was kneeling next to Sapphire and had been trying to calm her, but she paused, keeping her suspicious eyes on White Diamond as she circled them.
It dawned on him for the first time that Peridot was not with them, but maybe they had left her behind in Beach City – someone needed to be protecting Earth, right?
The chilly specter came to a stop next to Steven after a second or third time stalking around the prisoners, her voice calculating.
"The reason I am telling you all of this – I have no intention of letting you leave."
Steven thought, given recent revelations, that was not at all a surprise. Immortality, gem regeneration? Literally, being able to recover an army of her dead? Of course she wasn't going to let him go.
"I believe Yellow and Blue… underestimated you. You're more clever than you realize, and now, you've put me in a difficult position. How did you put it the first time we met? Just someone with a hard decision to make?"
She sounded anticipative, expecting some sort of answer as she towered over all of them, so Steven forced himself to speak.
"Yes, My Diamond." He sounded dead, which, given the situation, was more-or-less appropriate.
Resting a cheek in her hand, White pondered aloud. "Treason, insubordination, disobedience… they are all grounds for shattering under my authority, at minimum. I don't need to tell you how your cohort measures up in that regard," she bent down and examined them like a zookeeper might inspect animals in a cage. A few of the Gems met her gaze fiercely, the rest continuing to look away, their nerves tattered and frayed from the stress, the loss, the defeat.
"But they are not the problem. No, once again, that is you." She leered over him, her voice forged from iron.
"Your mother will never face her fate, as much as it displeases me, but I still must have justice. So, in her place should be you… but your capabilities surpassed even my expectations, and now you are too valuable to die. You will not be killed, though it is the punishment you deserve."
Nearly all of them, even delicate Sapphire, had shaken the spell of frustration that settled over them as White Diamond continued, standing close to the green alloy. Many banged fists, placed pleading hands against the wall, or spoke unintelligible words to him. Pearl was the only one who stayed away; she was standing now, but she was motionless, her head turned upwards as she stared at the Diamond with dangerous eyes.
"And to make matters more complicated, now I am indebted to you – you have done Homeworld a great service, Steven. You brought the remainder of the rebels out of hiding, back to Homeworld so they may face their punishment; you elicited the foolishness of my fellow Diamonds, so I could judge their misgivings appropriately and holistically; and, perhaps most valuable of all, your powers now provide Homeworld with unbridled potential. You returned me to life with your powers, and that is only the beginning of what you could do. Corruption, artificial fusions, fallen heroes and shattered enemies…" She had raised her head from her cheek, and now she was peering down at him. Both of her brows were raised skeptically, measuring Steven's reaction.
"You know, for as unnatural a creature as you are, Steven, your sense of duty seems to come quite naturally."
He didn't really know how to feel about that.
"So, the way I see it, you must live, but a prisoner you shall remain. Then I ask myself – if you must live, then what shall those conditions look like? I would rather you not resist every time I have need of you. You could be a valuable asset to my rule, Steven; we need not go on existing in constant strife. Think about it – you, a motherless child, and I, a childless mother – we could complement each other, making up for the failures of our families. In the spirit of moving on, then, I suggest we make a… deal of sorts."
The life that had drained from inside the green box resurged with unexpected fervor as her lips curled into a tiny, wicked smile. It did not take a genius to understand where this was going.
"Steven, let me be clear." He frowned and looked up at her, his brain still dragging behind. None of this felt real, her words absorbing into his skin like the punches against the inside of the lutetium chamber – hard and painful, but accomplishing nothing.
"I am not like Blue; I have nothing to gain by tricking you into some false sense of security. I have every intention of killing them, all of them – but I will give you the opportunity to choose who shall be the one to bloody their hands: I could kill them, and they shall face the fullest extent of their punishment as planned… or, you could kill them, in any way that you see fit. It could be as painless as you choose, but you must be the one to decide. Once you reach a decision, I'm afraid there will be no going back."
White Diamond's features softened just a tiny bit as her gaze wandered to their right, and she added a final thought.
"It would be understandable if you choose not to do it; is not an easy thing to do, to strike down the ones we care for, even if it is for the best. I would know." Her eyes lingered on the pile of yellow shards next to the palanquin of the same color.
Then a crushing silence fell over all of them, even those within the green box. Steven looked at the people that he loved more than anything… Lapis, Pearl, Sapphire, Ruby, Amethyst, Connie, and then he looked up to the white terror to his right. And finally, he looked down at his hands, shaking at the proposition.
Clenching and unclenching his fists, Steven let his eyes flicker over each one of his friends. Lapis looked like she was going to come apart, grabbing her hair madly, her eyes filled with tears. To her left was Connie, one hand placed against the green veil while the other gripped his mom's sword. Ruby and Sapphire were holding each other, Ruby whispering something and Sapphire watching him with a hand over her mouth. Amethyst and Pearl were standing together, a plump hand locked with a thin one, one looking down at the ground while the other was still frozen, looking up at White Diamond.
So… he was here again, the life of his friends in his hands, and he really was out of things to bargain with. White Diamond had been clear – they will suffer and be killed slowly, or you will suffer by killing them quickly. There was no room for discussion, no alternatives, nothing he could do. Either scenario ended with him staying on Homeworld, White Diamond's prisoner, his friends and family dying.
If he refused White Diamond's offer… Steven cringed when he thought of the suffering he had been made to endure, the waves of horrible pain that crept up and clenched his heart again and again while here. He couldn't make them live through that.
But then, could he really… kill them? He could take his time, say good-bye, and he could make it painless.
Steven's eyes lingered over Connie's pretty face for a long moment, his eyes welling with warm tears when he thought about the life they could have had. He wondered if Pearl told her about what he said in the dream… it would be so hard, so so hard to hurt her, but would it be better than making her feel the burning, the hopelessness, the hunger and the emptiness he had felt?
And White Diamond was right, as much as it hurt to admit. It was his fault they had ended up here, his captivity forcing them away from the safety of Earth to try to rescue him. Dully, his eyes shifted to Pearl, thinking about the dream. If only he had been clearer, told her what was at stake… but that chance had passed.
Sighing heavily, Steven looked from his scarred arm to his wounded one, thinking. He had shattered, led his friends straight into a trap, been lied to and fooled. He was the paradox, the key, the half-human, the half-gem. He was half of Stevonnie, Smoky Quartz, and Opalite. He was the son of the rebel Rose Quartz. He had been here before, deciding who lives, and who dies.
He was Steven, and he made deals with Diamonds.
Finally, Steven looked up, his voice cold enough to match the Diamond's own.
"I'll do it."
**Author's Note:
I typically do not leave notes on chapters that are not in denominations of 0 and 5, but it was brought to my attention that some of you must be impacted by the recent storms by a loyal reader, Indyboo102, who is in the direct path of Hurricane Irma. I wanted to use this moment to send warm wishes to all of those who have been or may be afflicted by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Readers, friends, and anyone who may see this message - stay safe.