"Let me get this straight," Amethyst said. "Rose Quartz, leader of the Crystal Gems, Tammo's mom, was actually Pink Diamond?"
"Yeah," said Tammo. "She faked her own shattering. She was pretending to be Rose the whole time."
"Pink Diamond's final command to me was that no one could know," Pearl said. "But now that Tammo knows, I can finally tell you all everything!"
Amethyst was surprised, but not upset in the least. "Huh, if you told me Rose invented cotton candy, I'd believe it. Right, Garnet? Uh, Garnet?"
Everyone looked at Garnet. To Tammo's shock, Garnet was shaking uncontrollably. It seemed she couldn't process this new information. Garnet struggled to speak, but couldn't form a complete sentence. "Rose... She... She... Ughh... Ahh!" Abruptly she unfused back into Ruby and Sapphire!
"Sapphire..." Ruby began.
"She lied to us! She lied about everything!" Sapphire shouted.
"Who did?" Tammo asked.
Sapphire looked up at him, her single eye dripping tears of fury. "Rose Quartz. On the day we first met her, she held our hands, looked us right in the eyes, and told us to never question who we are as Garnet. We never questioned ourselves, or her!"
"We couldn't have known!" Ruby said.
Sapphire turned on Ruby. "No, you couldn't have known. You never know what's going on. That's what I'm for!"
Ruby was hurt. Sapphire had never talked to her like that before.
"But I never looked into her," Sapphire went on. "I trusted her. I let her make fools of us all!" She whirled around and stomped off, back towards Salamandastron.
"Sapphire, wait!" Ruby called after her. "Please! We can just stay calm and talk about this, right? Let's just... talk..."
"Talk about what?" Sapphire retorted, without looking back at Ruby. "How our relationship is based on a lie? What else is there to say?"
Ruby dropped to her knees and began to cry as Sapphire disappeared inside the mountain.
"Ruby, I am so sorry," Pearl said, putting a hand on Ruby's shoulder.
"Come on, Pearl," Tammo said. "Help me explain everything to Sapphire."
"Right," said Pearl. "Sit tight, Ruby. We'll go and get her."
"Okay," Ruby sniffled.
Tammo and Pearl went back inside the mountain to look for Sapphire. They found her in the bedroom that had been allotted to the Crystal Gems during their stay. "Sapphire!" Tammo called when he saw her, but she jumped up from her bed and shot a blast of ice at them from her hands.
"Everything we were running from, she was right there all along. Using us for her little war. Smiling at us with those knowing eyes. Making me believe in a better future that I couldn't see, because it wasn't real. And now here we are. Of course she was a Diamond. What a long road she took, to torture us like this."
"It wasn't like that, wot!" said Tammo. "You know she jolly well didn't want anyone to get hurt."
"I don't know that," said Sapphire. "I clearly don't know anything."
"You deserve to know everything," said Pearl. "I was given to Pink Diamond a few thousand years before she was given the earth. She was loyal to the other Diamonds until one day she realized that they were taking all the other life from the world, just to create more Gems and leave nothing behind."
"Why didn't she stop them, if she was a Diamond too?" Tammo asked.
"She tried," said Pearl. "She pleaded with the other Diamonds to leave the rest of the universe alone for years, trying all sorts of approaches, only for them to fail. She was the lowest ranked Diamond and her status meant nothing to Blue, Yellow, and White. Convinced that her fellow Diamonds didn't respect her, she decided to start a rebellion using the alias of Rose Quartz. At first, she just wanted to scare all Gems away from Earth, but that changed when she met Sapphire and Ruby."
Sapphire frowned. "What do you mean?"
Pearl explained. "When she saw the two of you fused together into Garnet, she was amazed. She'd never seen a fusion of two different types of Gems before. She knew the other Diamonds would never accept you. You'd never be happy up on Homeworld, but here on Earth, you could be. That was when she decided to make Earth a sanctuary for the downtrodden, discontent, and outcast Gems of Homeworld. Rose wanted to fight for you. She wanted to fight for Gems! And maybe she was foolish, and maybe even selfish! But she was..."
"Following us," Sapphire said.
"What?" said Pearl.
"This whole time, we thought we were following her, but she was following us." Then suddenly Sapphire looked ashamed. "Oh no! Ruby! I shouldn't have said those awful things to her!"
"Well, you can go down and apologize to her, wot?" said Tammo.
They went back out to the beach, but Ruby wasn't there anymore! And there was a note lying on the sand where she had been.
Sapphire picked it up and read it. "Sapphire, you were right. I need some time to think, so I am running away. Ruby."