~Just so ya'll know, this chapter will be my last rewrite of a canon episode. From here on out, it's all my work (although the events of The Future will still happen to an extent). Hope you enjoy! :)~
"Lapis? Is everything all right?"
Someone touches your elbow. Your boyfriend's voice next to you is big, but the noise inside you is bigger: a dark, tumultuous, churning noise made by the ocean, as though it is both evaporating and freezing solid, a noise it has never had cause to make before.
"Lapis? Hello?" Dr. Drakken's face bends closer, his eyes worried as they grab at you in a way his hands are too respectful to do. "You good, girlfriend?"
What you would say if you were able to speak, you do not know. It turns out to not matter anyway, for an instant later even Drakken's buoy-words drift away as the ground beneath you begins to bounce, heavy footsteps beating the earth.
You turn your head, and although you move quickly, your motions feel slow and lethargic. The prodigious bulk of a figure lays its shadow across Little Homeworld.
"Cheese and crackers!" Drakken says. "What is that?"
Peridot says something indistinct in reply. You shoot your wings out and your body up, and in the sky with the clouds' vapor beading on your skin you have an unobstructed view.
It is a Corrupted Gem, although you have never seen one of this size or this variant. Her clawed feet stalk the beach, yet she is easily visible from Little Homeworld, looming over the lighthouse on the hill; its beam makes one last turn in the cold dawn and its light does not even graze her neck. She is made of thick, bright pink skin and ridged scales that suggest not the fish you know so well but slithering land-creatures still unfamiliar to you. A tail longer and broader than the largest Quartz lashes behind her like Amethyst's whip, the spikes on its sides throwing showers of sand into the air.
Your gaze skims her chest and shoulders, traveling up her massive neck. A horn juts from either side of her head, sharp and slight in curves of silver-pink, like the tines of the farm instrument that Greg's uncle holds in your picture of the barn. Beneath them, nearly buried under a folded forehead, you see her eyes, and grief pierces you.
From the transformations you were forced to watch from your glass prison, you know that a Gem's eyes are the last pieces of herself to surrender to the change; they hold on until there is no hope left. Hers yawn wide and dark and have begun to go wild, only thin rims of pink separating the black parts from the white, and yet in their centers you can still glimpse her soul: disconsolate and inconsolable.
You frown. The Corruption Bomb came down over five thousand years ago. How has she managed to retain a portion of herself for so long? How has she been able to stay hidden?
Bismuth settles Peridot into the bend of her arm and thrusts her other fist in the air, leaping through the sky and landing seconds later on the beach – an ability that all Era One Gems have. You do the same, taking time only to grab Drakken by the wrists first. You feel a twinge at your edges as your physical form shakes gravity from itself and tunnels through the air, a journey so brief you do not even see the land around you blur before you are close enough to the Corruption to feel her heated breath upon the air.
Drakken squeals in either delight or terror, or perhaps both, as you set him down on the sand. Peridot climbs from Bismuth's back and swings her trash can lid in front of her like a shield. You hover and squint, and through the displaced sand misting the air, you see Garnet.
She stands as straight and stately as you have ever seen her, but somehow her body seems brittle, as if a tap on the shoulder will crack her. You can picture the empty look on her face even before she turns to you, and when does you see you are right: she wears no expression, the tension gathered in the muscles of her jaw.
"Garnet! Thank goodness!" Drakken takes a staggering step forward, and only your hand on his arm prevents him from crashing to the sandy shore. "What's the sitch here?" he says, and in this moment you wish you were back in Middleton, watching Kim cover her eyes and groan as he tries to use her slang.
Garnet says nothing, but you know this silence; her components are quarreling over how to respond. You can almost hear Ruby's hoarse shout and Sapphire's cool murmur ringing through the stones on her palms.
Bismuth already has her fists doubled. "What are we waiting for?"
"Yeah, let's clobber that thing!" Peridot adds.
You cringe at the word thing. Do they not recognize she is one of your own?
"No!" Garnet barks. "Stand down!" It is an order upon which Ruby and Sapphire must agree, and yet her voice sounds as though it is caught on a fishing line, scarcely strong enough to leave her throat.
The Corruption drives one front foot into the hill, grass and soil caving under her claws. To you, however, she is nothing more than a distraction.
You scan the beach, and it does not take you long to locate Amethyst, standing with her arm wrapped around Greg, who looks no steadier than Drakken, and Pearl, holding her spear in front of her yet nowhere near the Corruption. The same meepmorp with one corner unpainted stares back at you, and dread spills down your back.
"Where's Steven?" you say.
Garnet's head twitches toward the Corruption. "That is Steven."
"What?" everyone around you yells. Possibly a similar cry comes from your own lips. All you are conscious of, though, are the words Steven sent to you before your connection closed:
I'm a monster!
You drag your eyes from the monster's face. The gemstone in the center of her stomach nearly disappears against her inflamed pink skin, but it shines circular and innocent, a perfect imitation of a Rose Quartz, and you know she is not a Corruption. She is not even a she.
His face, fitting perfectly within the mirror's borders. His face, older and stronger as he forgives you for being sent to break his planet.
The very core of your gem opens into a chasm and the life inhabiting it begins to shriek and writhe. It is the worst pain you have experienced without the promise of being poofed, and as it races out from your spine it ignites every artificial part of your body that it passes, burning and boiling and then, at last, going still. You are a wall of volcanic rock with waves striking you on all sides.
Eventually, the sea will wear you down and you will fall. For now you stand stoic, impenetrable.
"What's the plan?" you say.
Garnet turns away from you. You have not seen her look this helpless since the accident that first formed her, with the rest of Blue Diamond's court bearing down on her.
There is no plan, you understand. This is something not even she could have seen coming.
The air around you quivers and splits, and Steven's lion leaps through the hole with Connie astride his back. She grips his mane in one hand and her sword in the other, her hair turned under itself and her eyes red-edged from sleep. "I came as soon as I heard. What can I…" She breaks off, and when her eyes fall on Steven they redden further. "Oh, no."
Even in your hardened state, you almost feel an echo of an ache for her. You have only seen video footage of your boyfriend transforming into a monster and rampaging across his home planet, and that he did from a distance, with machines.
Bismuth's face sets. "We can't let him destroy the town."
"Does he want to destroy the town?" Dr. Drakken says, and in that moment you love him even more; what other human could ask that with an utter absence of censure in their voice?
Garnet shakes her head, though the motion seems meant not to answer his question but to raise another one. "I don't know what he wants. I don't think he knows what he wants."
As if he has heard you discussing him, the monster – Steven – turns toward you. The tip of his tail barely hits the hill, yet it still shakes and spews earth in all directions. The lighthouse is going to topple into the sea if this keeps happening, and everything else could be right behind it. You try not to envision it: Beach City stripped bare, all the places Steven spent his childhood protecting ravaged by his own claws.
"We have to get him someplace where he can't hurt anybody," you say.
Those words seem to prompt Garnet back to herself. You watch her chest rise and fall, and her arms loosen at her sides. "Peridot, you and Drakken try to lure Steven into the ocean. Once he's there, Lapis – we'll need you to restrain him."
You know what she means. She means chains.
Drakken's hand shakes as he gives Garnet a human salute, and Peridot rolls her shoulders back. You feel nothing but the chill that keeps you upright as you look back at Garnet and nod.
Peridot climbs onto her trash can lid, and you take a moment to pluck Drakken from the ground before you take flight again. The sun's light peeks over the horizon, warming the world in shades of pale gold, but inside you all is night.
"Hey, Steven!" Peridot calls brightly from in front of him. He turns in her direction, and she motions to him with one hand. "Come on! Let's go over here!"
The trash can lid shoots forward. Steven's head follows in its wake, and then his great lumbering body lurches after her like he is chasing prey. He does not snarl or snap his teeth at her, but you see no sign that he recognizes the small green Gem who only knows how to laugh and live because of him, the Gem who is not taunting him but inviting him to play.
It is a thought that will dismantle you if you dwell on it, and you push it from your head with as much force as you water-punched Jasper that day on the boat.
Peridot leads Steven across the beach, into the surf, and farther into the open ocean where the water is deep enough to reach halfway to his knees and submerge his feet. She looks at you and turns her thumb up.
It is your cue. You swoop in closer to Steven, and the night within you darkens, becoming the night he and his friends pursued the stolen ocean, the only time you faced Steven as an adversary. That night, however, you were frantic and damaged, and while you did not unleash the full strength of your powers, your most vivid instinct was to protect yourself. Today, you are calm, your gemstone whole, your mind anchored to a far richer Purpose: that no harm should come to him.
You slip a wave over his head so he does not see you coming. He grunts and lifts one foot as though to rub off the spray, and you pull it tight around his ankle, cinching it as the links unfold one by one and disappear beneath the surface of the water. The leg is bound.
You flit forward and do the same to the other three limbs. Cold burns behind your eyes, and it is impossible not to remember Jasper's harsh sharp laugh reaching for you and recall how you wondered if you were being crueler than you needed to be, yet you remind yourself that these chains, too, are meant to save Steven.
He lifts his top legs and thrashes, but there is no way he or anyone else on Earth can be stronger than the ocean.
"Are we good?" Drakken asks as he dangles from your arms. They are the first sounds he has made that have formed themselves into words since you flew him over.
"Not even close," you say. "But he's stuck."
Steven's spiked, scaled neck bulges, and as he swings to look straight at you for the first time, you understand why he did not snap his teeth at Peridot; his mouth is wide and fearsome but toothless. You recognize his short stubby nose, unsettlingly cute in the grotesque face of the monster. His eyes are both his and not his: the black parts of them are shaped like diamonds and ridged with pink. They have, you realize, become the eyes of his mother's first form, and they are as confused and threatened as hers would undoubtedly be if she could come back to find herself in this body – as though the people and things around him are familiar to him yet perpetually out of focus, as though he cannot place them, cannot do anything except seethe with despair. Those broken eyes don't beg for help; they believe themselves beyond that.
You are frozen solid, and yet somehow you pull away, moving Dr. Drakken back with you.
But Drakken has no interest in staying out of Steven's reach. He leans forward, grunting and muttering before he is able to say, "Here – let me try something."
A vine slides out of his neck and closes the distance to Steven. While you watch, bewildered, the lavender flower at the end, a few shades deeper than Amethyst's hair, wedges beneath Steven's chin and begins to wiggle back and forth. "Coochy-coochy-coo," Drakken says.
You don't know what he is trying to do, but whatever it is, it does not work.
Steven roars, and you are relieved to hear nothing of the boy you love in it. Everything that has changed about him strikes against the wall you have become, but only the things which are the same have any chance of cracking it. He clamps his lips around the vine and bites down hard. Rather than the vine being clipped in two as you expected, it thickens and takes on additional layers, and thorns rip through its surface, spreading from the end in Steven's mouth toward the end in Drakken's neck.
This time, Dr. Drakken lets you tug him backward. The vine falls from Steven's mouth and lies limp in the air. Drakken strokes it with one slender finger and grunts and mutters to it, soothing it until the thorns crumble apart even as his own breaths come in jagged gasps.
"Well, so much for that plan," he says at last.
You peer down at him. "What was that plan?"
"Operation Tickle Monster," Drakken says, his charming grin desperate and embarrassed. "I thought it might cheer him up a little. Or it might get him laughing too hard to fight us. Kim Possible's sidekick –"
"Ron," you supply.
"Yes, Ron – you know, he once completely incapacitated me just by attacking all the most ticklish places on my body. Otherwise, the whole scheme where I put mind-control nano-bots in Halloween candy and passed them out to the unsuspecting populace just might have worked! Although it's probably for the better that it didn't, but I could have done without the embarrassment. Shego did not let me live that down for a long time…"
You half-listen to his earnest explanation and hope there will be time to smile about it later.
"Listen, Lapis, I hate to bother you," Drakken says, his buoy-words twisting in the tide, "but I think I would feel a whole lot better if I wasn't dangling in midair right now."
"Gotcha." You flap your wings and move Drakken toward shore and away from the creature that used to be Steven, even as you wish the chains strong enough to hold. The monster lets out another roar, another sound that reminds you of the pointed end of his mother's gem, concealed from everyone, even himself.
"I do have another plan, though," Dr. Drakken says.
"What's that?"
"Well, in the old days – you know, back when I was a villain – after a scheme went south, nothing cheered me up like karaoke night!"
You frown. Karaoke is a word you have heard before, but its meaning has been muddied and lost by now. "Karaoke? That's legal, right?"
"Oh, yes, quite legal! Though sometimes a little tricky to pull together on such short notice," Drakken says. Lion stands in the shallows, staring at the monster with wide inscrutable eyes, and you drop Drakken onto his back next to Connie. Undaunted, he turns to her and waves one arm in the air. "We'll need a boom box, and I don't know where – Oh! Greg! I bet he has a boom box!"
You do not allow your eyes to linger on him, although he is the one light that can chase away the night within you. You don't know how a box that booms will help, and right now you have centered your attention on the creature you have imprisoned in the water. He flails against the chains, the spines on his tail striking your ocean, and though it holds firm you are nearly certain you can hear it crying.
The chains need to be pulled tighter, but before you do it you draw more water to them, widening them to lessen the pain.
In the interim between Steven's snarls and thrashes, Peridot flies up to you on her trash can lid. "How is this possible?" she says. "Is he Corrupted? Did he Corrupt himself somehow? I thought only Diamonds could Corrupt other Gems…except, of course! Steven is the descendent of a Diamond! Or perhaps it is a shapeshifting accident like the one he had on his birthday the year I became a Crystal Gem. He made himself grow a neck, and –"
"Peridot," you interrupt her, "that really doesn't matter right now."
"Yes, it does! I have to understand something!"
Her small foot stamps; her chin trembles. Her world has been consumed by irregularity and uncertainty.
Steven's head jerks around, and one of the curved horns catches the trash can lid, sending Peridot spinning. She clutches the underside of the lid and tries to scowl.
An instant later, a fierce wind bats at your cheeks and scrambles your hair, but it does not resonate in your gem; it is not from the sea. You glance down and then up when you see that the shade across the water has broadened beyond the monster's parameters, the Crystal System's sun eclipsed by something even larger than he.
The flatness inside you quickens as the Diamonds' ship positions itself to land on its lengthy pink legs. It wobbles precariously next to the lighthouse, but the blue and yellow arms spread and balance, and you watch its movements stabilize.
A door hisses open. Without flinching, you brace yourself for White Diamond's wrath. Steven almost shattered her; she would be within all rights to have him punished. You are flat, you are numb, and yet you remain in the air, hovering in front of the monster – you will not abandon Steven this time.
But the faces that appear as the ship opens do not belong to the Diamonds who still at times manifest in the worst of your dreams. Blue's eyelashes are wet, yet although your eyes burn they do not flood, and the deep pall that once accompanied her grief doesn't descend over you and your fellow Gems. The stern creases around Yellow's mouth have turned to something like sun-softened gold. The dawn's light finds White's head and shines around its edges, her pure colorless skin ablaze with concern.
They are an impossibility, soothing and frightening all at one, how the sea must seem to those who cannot bond with it.
"Steven! Yoo-hoo!" White Diamond calls. "Sorry to barge in on you like this, but we were worried –"
You anticipate the moment when she sees the monster and, as you predicted, seconds later her words end in a gasp. Still you do not flinch, even when she says, "Oh my – what is that?"
"Who is that?" Blue Diamond corrects her. Only then do you notice that Spinel stands on her shoulder, wide-eyed and unsmiling.
Pearl is the bravest; she is able to answer first. "It's Steven."
You turn away from the Diamonds. You do not want to see their reactions. It is hard enough to hear Blue Diamond say, in a voice thicker than water, "Steven? How can that be? We didn't do this somehow, did we?"
"No," says Amethyst, not bothering to hide the tears streaming down her cheeks. "He got back all right, yelled at us, and ran off to Little Homeworld for the night. When he got back, he was all mixed up and screaming all this nonsense about broken anvils and plant monsters. First he keeps saying he's fine, and then he decides that he's a wreck, and he says he's a monster, and then bang! He turns into –" she gestures to the chained form – "that."
"Oh, stars," Yellow Diamond says.
"Okay, so we didn't break 'im," Spinel says. "But maaaaybe we can fix 'im?"
She looks at Yellow Diamond as she says this, and distantly you recall something Spinel shared with Dr. Drakken in one of their video conferences: that Yellow Diamond can now heal Gems, repairing shattered pieces and clearing away the stains of Corruption. Though it seems an odd power for someone who has brought so much destruction to both planets you have loved, you find yourself watching her, too, even as you straighten your back against the wave of hope that wants to strike you.
"Well, of course we can," Yellow Diamond says, her voice still brusque but nearly too unsteady to be hers.
She steps into the ocean and wades out to the monster who is as large as she is. The air quiets as Pearl's sobs, melded with the tide as a natural noise of the landscape, pause.
Yellow Diamond extends her arm, spreading fingers longer than your body. You tense, almost expecting the crackling Destabilizing energy to leap from her fingertips, yet the energy in her palm forms with a low hum instead, and it flows gently from her into the monster as she touches his shoulder. Her eyes narrow; her brow bulges. You know where she is aiming – at the devastation within him, the splits in his mind and soul.
You focus on the smooth muscles in Yellow Diamond's arms while she works. They pull harder and stand out sharper until the moment they slacken and her arms fall to her sides. She says what you already know: "I can't do it. Whatever it is that's hurting him so bad, it doesn't respond to my powers."
"So it's not Corruption." Peridot says this with finality, but when you glance back at her you see no satisfaction on her face.
The monster makes a gurgling, draining noise, and when you feel the chains clench, you are forced to look at him. There is no change in him, no sign that Yellow Diamond's healing has impacted him in the slightest. He lunges toward her, the rising sun brilliant against his horns, and she stumbles backward.
Without feeling, without hesitation, you push another wave over his head to disorient him and reinforce the chains with another layer of water. You anchor them more tightly to the ocean's surface, weaving the threads of them deeper into its texture.
"Sorry, buddy. I need you to stay here." You imagine your words will be as flat as your body feels, and you are surprised to hear a current of warmth, meager but true, running through them, talking to the boy within the monster.
Pearl is crying again, but she holds her spear in determined shaking fingers.
Yellow Diamond climbs ashore and snaps the water from her physical form. She puts one hand on Blue Diamond's shoulder as she passes her, the way you have seen Gems do in baseball games to release their position at bat to a teammate.
Atop Blue Diamond's other shoulder, Spinel balances on her hands, heels tapping in the air. "Well, okay, that didn't work. But you can fix him! You can make him happy again!" She lets go and lands on her feet again. "Can't ya?"
"Well, I'll certainly try, Spinel," Blue Diamond says. Her eyes are heavy and honest, and although she does not assail you with it, her grief nevertheless presses against the wall you have become.
It seems both wrong and right to watch Blue Diamond taking a breath necessary only for cleansing, lifting her arms, and rotating her hands until a small cloud a few shades darker than Dr. Drakken's skin appears between them. She forms it with the grace you remember and none of the malice you wish you could forget, and a facet of you, still unfeeling, believes that she can accomplish this; she can save him.
Blue Diamond flicks the cloud away from her with a soft puff, and you follow it with your eyes as it sails over the ocean. It hits the monster directly above his gem and then, with a fierce swerve, it rushes back to the party on the beach, where it slams into Yellow Diamond and bursts, droplets of mist cool even against your cheeks.
Yellow Diamond throws her head back and begins to laugh, free, uncontrolled. It is a sound you have never heard before and you wish you were not hearing it now.
"Oh, Blue," she says between chuckles, her face puckered in mirth you know she does not feel. "Your new power doesn't work on him, either! He…he's just strong enough and just sad enough to resist! We really can't do a thing about it!" She slaps her knees and turns to White Diamond. "Looks like it's all up to you, White!"
Your eyes are dry and abyssally cold even though Blue Diamond cries. The cloud won against Yellow Diamond yet lost to the monster; it ricocheted off something inside Steven, something unknowable to you.
You glance down at the monster again, looking somewhere to the side of his scaled form. In your head, you hear some of Drakken's words to you, that first week you met each other: The human body has a remarkable capacity to heal. He is correct, you have seen now, and a Gem's capacity to heal should be greater still.
But the monster who was once your friend has always been both, and now he is behaving like neither.
White Diamond gazes out at the sea and nods, and on her stark contrasting features you see pain and confusion and something else, something even more foreign to a Diamond's face. With a jolt that you feel only in your wings, you picture Spinel on Drakken's screen less than an Earth-day ago, telling him about White Diamond's new power – to host another Gem's spirit inside her body rather than forcing her spirit into theirs. It is a terrifying ability, a terrifying thought, even without the memory of what Steven almost did with it before. You don't want her to use it, but if it can help determine what is happening inside him, you will not oppose her.
The monster turns to her, and you wait anxiously for the moment when their gazes will connect, but the wild look in the monster's eyes does not change when he sees White Diamond. In the thrall of his own pain, perhaps he doesn't even recognize her.
White Diamond lifts her arms and whispers his name. You have seen her use her powers to drain before, and it seems fitting that this would look like the opposite: a charging, a swelling, a giving. Color surges into her cheeks, her teeth press against each other, and her eyes go as blank as a reflecting Lapis's. The diamond on her forehead, large enough for you to crawl into, brightens to fill with pink, the borders alone remaining white.
For a moment, you feel the pressure hanging heavier in the sky than the dissipating morning mist as their powers land against one another, unrestrained. The moment ends when White Diamond screams.
It is the same scream you heard ring through another galaxy from Dr. Drakken's computer: his scream and hers converging. While it is not as fearful as the one Spinel ran to investigate, pain gushes from it like steam from an ocean vent. You flick a glance at the monster, but your chains still hold him in place.
White Diamond stumbles back as if she has taken a cracking blow. Her legs bow in different directions, and only the net Blue and Yellow Diamond create with their arms keeps her from falling to the ground. You silently thank them; Beach City might not have survived that collision.
Her eyes open and refocus, the pink ebbing from her gemstone, her gasp like wind over the sea. "That isn't Steven in there anymore!"
She is lying, but you decide to let her. It will be easier for her if she can believe this.
The monster does nothing but growl beneath his breath, his tail flicking and his toes scrabbling. He appears to have forgotten her already, and you realize in that moment that the rage and the loathing in his eyes were never for her.
They are for himself.
The ocean pulsates, and you keep a firm grip on the chains. Steven would not want you to let him dismantle Beach City.
"Hey, hey, hey, everybody!" someone calls.
You look up to see Drakken and Peridot crowded onto a larger trash can lid she must have found somewhere and which she now rushes toward you. Under his arm, Drakken holds a black square object that you remember is called a radio. You wonder briefly if this is what a "boom box" is.
Drakken raises the voice-amplifying stick to his lips. The fact that Dr. Drakken needs to amplify his voice chills you further.
"Hello, ladies and germs, Diamonds, lions, and monster-Stevens of all ages!" Drakken continues. "We're here live right outside Beach City at…" He squints at the timepiece on his wrist. "…a little after 7:00 AM. Which means it is. . . KARAOKE TIME! Our first song selection goes to the man of the hour, the big pink guy himself! Steven Universe, what song best describes how you're feeling right now? Me, I'd usually pick something by the Oh Boyz, but you're calling the shots today, pal!"
You think you have heard Drakken mention the Oh Boyz before.
Drakken leans forward, stretching the stick closer to the monster's mouth, which hangs open, empty and black. One of his front feet juts forward. It does not break the chain but it does not need to; Drakken and Peridot are, as usual, far too close to the danger before them.
The earth splits and shivers, wads of dirt flying from a nearby corner of the beach, where sand meets soil. Out of the ground crawls an arm the size of the Diamonds' ships, knotted with colors and bent into a contortion that belongs on no Gem. You have never seen it before yourself, but you know it can only be the Cluster.
It pushes the trash can lid back to shore, and Garnet plucks the amplifying-stick from Drakken's frail fingers, which look even frailer with nothing to clutch. "He would have eaten it," she tells him in a voice more Sapphire's than Ruby's. "And if he ever turns back into a human, that would cause a lot of problems."
Her choice of words screams inside you even as you toughen yourself against them. Even Garnet does not see how this will end.
The giant knotted arm encircles the monster, trying to pat him. He slaps it away with his tail.
"He's even stronger than the Cluster!" Amethyst cries.
"How did this happen?" Peridot says, and you know she is not asking as a scientist this time.
Drakken makes a small chirping sound.
"I can't believe I'm suggesting this." It is Bismuth, who has been strangely quiet since Garnet told her who the monster is. "But if we poof him, maybe he'll come back as himself?"
You say nothing. A geyser shoots up in the water beyond you, and you force it back down.
"No!" Spinel yowls at her. "Steven doesn't poof! His body just takes a whole lot of damage, and then it heals itself. I found…found that out the day I stuck 'im with the Rejuvenator." Her lower lip shakes, and she plunges her face into the palms of her hands. "This is all my fault, isn't it? I came down here and tried to kill Earth and messed up his happily ever after!"
Her sobs are as loud and exaggerated as you would expect from her, but they fall with the force of hailstones, pounding the very ground that she poisoned and Steven healed. It is a sound as far from comical as almost any you have heard and it strikes against your wall, threatening to weaken it.
"No, if anything, we're the ones responsible!" Tears sing in Pearl's voice. "We lived in the same house with him, every day, and somehow we didn't see this coming! How could we have been so blind that we didn't notice what he was going through?"
You search your hollow places for guilt, once a companion inseparable from the use of your powers, but if it is there, it has nested down with your other emotions. It is bubbled; it will keep.
"I was the one who made him watch the Camp Pining Hearts reboot!" Peridot says. "And when it was so bad, I tried to force him to fix in it his dreams! I caused him so much additional stress over a television program!"
Dr. Drakken falls across the beach, catching himself on his hands and knees. "I spent an afternoon with him earlier this week, and all I did was talk about myself the whole time!"
Patches of sand turn darker, wetted by what appear to be massive raindrops tumbling from the sky, though they do not respond to you and the clouds are too thin for rain. You understand almost at once, but you can scarcely believe you are seeing it happen.
White Diamond is crying.
"No, stop it, all of you! This is all my fault!" White Diamond shoves her hands to her face, the droplets cascading between her black fingernails. "All of it! If I had just listened to Pink…Whatever any of you did or didn't do…none of it would have happened if not for me."
This, you think, is true, but you are not cruel enough to say so.
From farther ashore, you hear a whistle: a small sound, thin and stern amidst the roaring and rampaging, but the monster's head swivels toward it, and yours does as well. Connie stands atop Lion, whose claws grip the deck, the wood planks bent where the monster must have run across them.
"It doesn't matter whose fault it is! We're not gonna be able to fix this by finding the right person to blame!" Connie says. She tosses her sword to the side in a gesture that looks nothing like acquiescence. "The point is that we've all messed up, big-time, and when we did, Steven was always there for us. He was, like, the one constant thing in any of our lives. He was our Steven – and right now we need to be his."
You turn and for the first time look directly into the monster's eyes, and in them you see not a brute but someone you recognize: tumbling out of a mirror, wounded and wingless, into a world at once both foreign and all too familiar. You wait for the wall you have built of yourself to either strengthen or weaken, yet instead it crystallizes, leaving you with a clean view of the creature who thrashes about. The back of your throat pinches sharply, as though a Ruby holds her knife against it.
The monster bellows again and lashes his tail toward the Cluster's arm, and you throw another wave over him. This time, however, the ocean knows to let a few droplets linger on his brow, his horns, his heavy jaw – now as comforts instead of weapons.
Heads bob in Connie's direction. Only Garnet's remains still, her face smooth as Ruby and Sapphire pelt suggestions back and forth within her. When her lips relax, you do not need her future vision to tell what she will say next:
"I have an idea." She turns to the weeping Diamonds. "Yellow Diamond – can you make me as big as he is?"
Yellow Diamond nods, her tears lapsing as the hard-hewn lines you remember overtake her face once more. She places her hand on Garnet's head and her power inflates Garnet as a brisk wind inflates a sail, until Garnet's shoulders are level with hers.
Garnet dips her chin in silent thanks and plunges her lengthened legs into the water, pushing herself up to Steven. You feel the ocean's uncertainty as if it is your own, which it just may be.
"Steven," Garnet says. Do the monster's eyes flicker with recognition? You cannot be sure. "Steven, I know you're tired. I know you're scared. You think you're different now; you think you're not even worthy of being Steven anymore. But you are the same person you have always been. You have fought for all of us so hard, for so long, and it's exhausted you. So now all of us are going to be here for you. Because we love you…so very much."
It is the most you have heard Garnet say at one time.
She puts her arms around the monster, her fingers not even attempting to meet as they brush the scales on his back. Her head rests below the curved horns and she holds him in a lifeguard's grip.
The monster stares at her, and then he opens his mouth and makes a noise, not a beastly snarl but the groan of a boy pleading with his family to let him help what he believed at the time to be no more than a talking mirror. How ironic that after the battering cold waves you have fought off, it is only this – the first faint currents of warmth – that breach your wall.
You fly up beside him and Garnet. "Is it working?" you ask. "Can he hear us?" Your eyes grow wet; your cheeks grow wet.
Without waiting for a response, you hurl yourself onto him and bury your face in his neck, between the rows of spikes that grow there. Indistinctly, you hear Dr. Drakken gasp, but you are not afraid. You could never be afraid.
This is Steven.
He smells of the night and the agitated waves, and his skin is rough, too cold and too moist, but beneath it you can hear an unsteady pounding rhythm that you know is the beat of his heart. He still has one.
The Cluster's arm crawls to the shore, and Amethyst, Pearl, Lion, Connie, Drakken, and Greg do not hesitate to climb on and let it tow them out to the spot where the monster stands, still chained but now still. He stares down at them with dull, pleading eyes.
"Steven," Amethyst says, "I know what it's like to hate a part of yourself. A part you can't even help, a part that has to do with how you were made. But you always knew that where we came from didn't haveta make us who we are."
Her voice overlaps with Pearl's, which flows toward him in ripples of tears: "I know what it's like to have a secret you can't tell anyone. It's a burden you think you have to carry for the sake of the greater good – until someone finds a way to tell you don't have to carry it all by yourself."
Steven's neck begins to shake. You cling tighter to him and close your eyes.
"Steven," you whisper, your words meant solely for him, "I know what it's like to think you're a monster. To have so much power and be so afraid of hurting someone…but to also kind of want to hurt someone." You remember the feel of Peridot's tape recorder crushed between your fingers, the feel of Jasper writhing on the other end of chains you wrapped around her hard enough to pain you both, the feel of the water-spear solidifying in your grasp above the shocked faces of your fellow Lapises.
"And there was this really nice little boy," you continue. "Who never judged me for it, never got mad at me about it. He just wanted to know how he could help.
"So…how can I help?"
Your physical form rises and falls with his breathing, which comes faster and faster, his pulse throbbing against your bare stomach. You hold on and let the anguish, the fear, and the hope tear through you, scattering the pieces of your wall as if they are Pebbles. Tears slide from the end of your nose and join the saltwater that still spots his neck.
"Schtewball, I'm here. And I'm so sorry." Greg's clear, humble voice is in ruins, a shipwreck. "I'm sorry I didn't let you have a normal life growing up. I'm sorry you didn't have school and summer break and doctor's appointments like all the other kids. I was so busy trying to be everything my parents weren't that I didn't ask what you wanted. I'm sorry I couldn't protect you from this."
Peridot places a hand on one pink chained foot and peers up at Steven with eyes glossed and sincere. "Steven!" she shrieks. "You never gave up on me for some reason that I don't understand! So if you think I'm gonna give up on you now, you're crazier than I ever was! So there! And please come back!"
You do not laugh, not yet. Not even when you spot Dr. Drakken next to Peridot, his face ringed by delicate yellow petals, his words as earnest and buoyant as ever, struggling to remain afloat as he tosses them to Steven. "Steven, I – ggh, okay – I haven't had a lot of experience being there for people! But you've done such a good job being there for Lapis – and for me – and so – so – so it's only right for me to try! You've come to mean a great deal more to me than I probably ever let you know!"
Bismuth stalks forward and touches Steven's knee; she is the only one in the Cluster's hand who is tall enough to reach it. "Steven, I'd still be bubbled if it weren't for you. You gave me a second chance when I didn't deserve it. Wherever you need me to be, I'm there."
You hear heavy splashes as the Diamonds step from the shore to Steven's side. They embrace him as well, their arms looping above and below you, and you can feel their strength, always so intimidating, though now they are the ones whose fingers tremble. The morning floods with the sound of them: Blue Diamond murmuring like gentle rainfall that he is the best thing that has ever happened to them, White Diamond's harsh sigh as she confesses that they can never make up for everything they have taken from him, Yellow Diamond's uncompromising tone as she tells him he is never alone.
"All right, c'mon, everybody – group hug!" Spinel's voice blares from the shadow of Blue Diamond's cloak, reminding you of the array of musical instruments in the barn, all thrown to the floor at once. The black streaks below her eyes are slick as wet ink, and she stretches her arms to nothing more than threads and wraps them around the whole of the gathering, tying each of you in place. Your face presses deeper into the monster's skin, rough yet slippery, and you are still not afraid.
For moments measurable only by Steven's heartbeats, all of you circle and stay there, a pod of dolphins singing to an injured member.
The only one who moves is Connie. She springs from Lion's back to Garnet's hip and begins to climb Garnet's waist as though it is a mountain's face. Connie is taller and more assured than when she first approached you and demanded the ocean back, but it is her dedication alone that makes her agile as she works her way up, seemingly unnoticed by Garnet, who remains motionless, her head still resting near the monster's horns.
Connie digs her hands into Garnet's elbow and hoists herself up onto the long, limber surface of Garnet's inner arm. With movements sidelong and crablike, she crawls down Garnet's forearm, across her hand, and out onto the tips of Garnet's fingers. To your surprise, she doesn't stop there. She steps onto her boyfriend's snout, looking just as secure as she does when she climbs astride Lion.
"Steven," she says. "It's me. I'm here. No matter what."
She leans forward and places a kiss in the wide space between his eyes.
He cries out, and his head lowers and lurches as though the sun has blinded him, although its light is still pale and fresh. You hold on and give him the words you have been privileged to learn. "I love you, Steven."
An enormous shudder moves through the monstrous body, though you feel it for only an instant before your senses are overtaken with something else. You feel the strenuous, creaking effort of someone turning a rusted hatch valve; the opening of a canal, allowing ships to pass through; the whisper across the edges of your gem.
"Lapis?"
Your powers understand before the rest of your consciousness, and the ocean releases the chains. Salt water softens the neck to which you cling, and then his body gives way and you hug only air.
Your wings are still out, but you do not engage them. You let yourself drop into the Cluster's open palm, your attention fixed on the figure in its center: marginally taller than you, black hair curling and spilling across a forehead where stabbing horns once grew, skin the color of the dawn, of Pearl's hair.
Steven.
Connie takes his hand in hers and wipes a tear from his thick, dark eyelashes. You hear Dr. Drakken's breaths beside you, quick with giddiness; you hear the tide, unchangeable as ever.
Steven's eyes open, round, dark, and intrinsically warm. Any trace of pink has fled, as has the false cheer he has tried to hold there for so long. They move as though confused over those gathered in front of him with their shaking lips and their crimped foreheads and their streaming eyes.
You do not bother to dry your cheeks. You take a step closer, you smile, and you say to him what he has said to each of the Gems he has found the means to heal.
"Welcome back."