Chapter 23
…
Author's note: I changed my username again, I swear it'll be the last time ;-; (I have an Ao3 and a Tumblr account under the same U/N now).
NEW TITLE: "I Ask You to Stay, but Still I Fade"
Lyrics are from the song Mauerbauertraurigkeit by Closure in Moscow (an absolute banger, 10/10 life changing)
Smolhauz, in reply to your comment about the title, I totally see where you're coming from. I'm gonna be completely honest with you, I had no idea where the heck this story was going when I originally started it; most of the huge plot twists happened on their own along the way. This fic looks insanely different from the original outline, and so I thought it fitting that I throw an updated title on, too. (Also your review was very kind, thank you!)
(Sorry for the lengthy A/N, onto the story now. This chapter is hella long since I made you guys wait so long for it. Enjoy!)
…
He felt like he was flying. The sensation would have been enjoyable if he weren't stricken with such overwhelming panic and grief. The beach was far behind him in a flash, his feet carrying him over the city so quickly that he hardly touched the ground. He turned his head as he ran, noting the faint pink glow of his afterimage dragging behind him, entirely unable to catch up to him in his retreat.
Pearl's gem felt like an iron weight in his grip, and he focused hard on not dropping her. It wouldn't do for her to go skidding across the landscape before he had a chance to decide what to do with her. As it was, he hardly had any idea where he was running to.
He had nowhere to go. He wasn't even sure why he had left in the first place, even though the frantic beat of his heart continued to urge him onward. The ground under his feet changed in a blink, and he found himself suddenly surrounded by dusty grey walls, hard stone cut through thousands of times with the silhouettes of countless gems flashing by.
Looking around, he couldn't remember the last time he had visited the Kindergarten. The place seemed as haunted as ever, and the looming figures of disused injectors overshadowing him from their perches above seemed more intimidating than usual. He stopped to catch his breath. It was a wasted effort; his body refused to stay still and he paced endlessly back and forth in the narrow passage.
The weight in his hand became impossible to ignore. Pearl. He seethed at the thought of her name, and he glared down into his palm. There she sat, innocently twinkling up at him in the sparse light. He wasn't sorry for poofing her, not after what she did. Not after she had snatched his entire life away from him over and over, thwarting his every attempt to be happy with the gem he had chosen.
He felt guilty for hurting Amethyst, but it only seemed like an added benefit that Pearl had been incapacitated too; he knew for a fact that there would have been some kind of struggle if she hadn't been, and he didn't trust himself to not shatter her.
He was shocked to find just how open he was to the idea, especially considering that not even a week ago he put Spinel's life at risk to avoid… he couldn't finish the thought. He didn't want to think about how Spinel had gotten shattered because of him and his stupid inability to face the truth. With an aggravated growl, he threw Pearl's gem away and sent it sliding across the rocky terrain, where it hit the wall opposite him with a faint clink.
He'd made a move to turn away from her when his eye caught a miniscule flash of light. At first he hoped he had imagined the sparkle, but from his position frozen in the middle of the passageway, he caught a clear glimpse of the light that began to envelop Pearl's gem. Since when did Pearl regenerate so quickly?
He was on the ground in a breath; throwing all caution to the wind, he dove on top of the stone, instantly sealing it inside of a deep pink bubble. He sat up with a sigh of relief, staring warily at the now-immobile gem in his arms.
What was he going to do?
The ache in his chest threatened to suffocate him. Spinel was shattered, his home destroyed, and everything he knew about himself had been a lie. To add further insult, it had all been caused by one of the people he trusted the most, born out of a jealous spite he never even had a chance to reconcile with.
He felt helpless.
Even so, he stood with a renewed energy born purely out of determination. Determination because, above everything else he had to contend with, he knew that he couldn't leave Spinel in the garden. After everything, he wouldn't do that to her; his heart gave another suffocating lurch just at the thought of her jagged shards, glittering in the starlight, slowly being swallowed up by the thick, grey dust that made up the landscape of her prison.
She wouldn't want that, and he wouldn't allow it.
He forced his mind to focus on the task at hand. Get Spinel, take her from the garden, and then…
He couldn't think about what would happen then.
His feet carried him through the kindergarten, leaping up onto the platform which held the seldom-used warp pad. With Pearl's bubble tucked securely under his arm, he summoned the beam of light that would carry him back to Spinel.
…
Ruby stared after the three gems as they disappeared in the distance. Sapphire's fingers dug into her forearm, surprisingly firm for their delicate build, as the gut-wrenching cry was suddenly cut short. The air rang with receding echoes of pain, and then all was still.
In the shocked silence, she heard Sapphire gasp. Before she could even turn to face her, she was being dragged away.
"Wha-?!"
"We need to hurry, come!"
She was unceremoniously ushered into their office and thrown against the couch as Sapphire closed the door and latched it. In the next moment, her face was taken up between two freezing palms.
"We need to fuse, now."
She had just enough time to take in a single gasp of air before cool lips were pressed to hers. Sapphire was teeming with urgent energy as she led Ruby back against the cushioned arm of the couch, pinning her with an alarming show of force. Ruby's mind went completely blank against the new sensations overwhelming her.
She broke away just as Sapphire's fingers grazed the nape of her neck, sending a shiver down her arms.
"Who's rushing now?" She tried to chuckle, but her voice betrayed her anxiety.
Sapphire didn't seem to find any levity in the situation as her mouth turned down with the utmost solemnity. Ruby's nervous half-smile faded almost the moment it formed.
"This is serious. I need you to trust me, Ruby."
Ruby blinked in confusion, wondering whether they'd had a misunderstanding somewhere.
"I already do trust you." With the brush of her fingers, Sapphire's hair was moved aside, and Ruby was once again pierced by startling blue. How could it be that her eyes, the color of ice, could hold so much warmth? In a breath, she admitted what she thought they both already knew, "I trust you with my life, Sapphire."
That was all that needed to be said. She knew then that Sapphire had looked into their future as she moved in to kiss her again. There was no way she hadn't; it seemed like she knew exactly what to do to make Ruby melt against her, though the red gem found that she didn't feel upset by that fact at all. Every movement still felt organic, natural; her hands mapped Ruby's body with comfortable familiarity instead of strict foresight.
Against the heat blazing from her own body, Ruby hardly noticed her gem glowing and searing into Sapphire's skin. She felt the smallest pit of apprehension form in her stomach as she realized that they were actually about to fuse.
Before her anxiety had a chance to take root, she was gone; hers and Sapphire's minds were melded together into a cozy in-between space as their bodies burned away in a flash of light that filled the office like an explosion.
To their mutual dismay, their body didn't reform; the amorphous beam of light wavered and split, seeming to form in two directions at once. Ruby didn't know much about fusion, but she knew this wasn't what was supposed to happen. Were they not compatible?
"No, that's not it. You and I are more than compatible."
Sapphire's disembodied voice rang in their half-formed mindscape, and Ruby audibly sighed in relief. The clarity of her voice reinforced the fact that they weren't unfusing, but as their body still struggled to form, she silently asked why.
"We don't have much time. I didn't mean to look, but now you need to understand. They need us."
With that, Sapphire's mind moved impossibly nearer, until she couldn't tell the difference between their thoughts anymore; everywhere she looked, she found contradictions. Hot and cold, all-knowing and forever clueless, angry and calm. They shouldn't be able to exist as one, and yet Ruby knew that they did. The two extremes not only existed together, but cooperated to mellow them out into something perfectly… understandable.
They were a paradox. A walking contradiction. Yet, as Garnet opened her eyes, all felt right.
That was, until she realized what had just occurred. Her mind replayed the hazy swirl of realization and self-realization that brought her back.
Sapphire had accidentally caught a flash of their future, a flash of what she'd regain once she and Ruby were fused, and she latched onto it. She'd flung herself into her lover's arms as she frantically looked ahead, retrieving herself in tiny bits until she was whole again. The shock of what had happened to them froze her, literally, but then she remembered Steven.
From there, she knew that they needed Garnet back as quickly as possible. She knew that they'd be needed, but even her future vision couldn't have prepared her for what came next. In that moment, Pearl made the almost impossibly improbable decision to come back. Against one-in-ten-thousand odds, she came back, and the effect was immediate.
In a flurry of action too adrenaline-packed to be properly recalled, they had saved Lapis, Bismuth, and Peridot from warping into the collapsing beach house. Sapphire's urgency increased a thousandfold, then, and as she and Ruby finally fused, she shared the pieces of herself that she had regained, as well as enough reminders of their life together to heave Ruby back as well.
This recollection lasted all of ten seconds as Garnet caught her breath on the office floor, all three of her eyes staring out of the window at the darkening sky. She didn't bother conjuring a visor over her face as she scrambled up and leapt for the door, the beach in front of her now-destroyed home the first stop in her mind.
…
Perhaps it was because Steven knew that there wasn't anyone waiting for him this time, but the garden felt different. It felt like the events that had transpired there had seeped into the stone, tainting every inch like a disease. The memory of what used to be here for him, for them, was as distant as the Earth was. All that remained in the dust and debris were the markers of their twisted history, one that made it almost unbearable to exist there.
He couldn't pinpoint the exact moment when the transformation had occurred, but it was undeniable as he stepped off of the warp and into a landscape that silently screamed out their loss. At every corner his mind played through memories of the life that had been stolen from them, tinged bitterly with the fact that that version of their garden was long gone, and all that remained was the latest change.
From a prison to a crypt.
His heart led him where he needed to be, where she needed him to be. Straight across the path from the stinking fountain, he found it.
A heavy, cracked brick sat discarded next to an almost invisible scrape in the pavement. If he hadn't already known that it would be there, he would've missed it entirely. He tried to ignore the pounding in his head as he dropped to his knees in front of the marks, searching for the glittering remains of his … he wasn't even sure what exactly Spinel was to him anymore.
He told himself that it didn't really matter just then and redirected his attention to finding her shards. Next to the brick, scattered around the whitened scratch in the ground, he caught sight of a few tiny fragments of what looked like pink glass, far too small to make up even a fraction of the heart-shaped gem. He felt the realization like a heavy thud in his gut; of course Pearl hadn't just left her shards there for him to find. She would have known that Steven would come back for her.
He stopped breathing; his eyes squeezed shut and his lips trembled against the wave of anguished fury that threatened to explode out from him again. He could feel his skin radiating heat as his form grew outward, glowing so brightly that he could see the pink light through his eyelids.
His body acted of its own accord; the bubble in his arms dropped to the ground as his fingers grasped the brick. With a sharp intake of breath, it was thrown away from him, spinning wildly out of reach of the garden's manufactured gravity.
His breath left him in a cry as his fist came back down against the pavement. He heard the stone crackling dryly as he hung his head down, completely at a loss for what to do. What if he couldn't find her? What would he do then? She'd be alone.
He couldn't bear the helplessness. His righteous anger melted away as his fear and guilt overwhelmed him, and he finally broke. He let his forehead drop to the ground.
For a while he was numb. He could've been asleep for all that he could tell, or dead. He was empty, drained of everything that he was, and he felt nothing.
He suddenly became aware of an intrusive coolness spreading down his elbow and into the fabric of his jeans. His head jerked up from the ground at the fetid smell that suddenly assaulted him, and he found himself sitting in the path of a small stream. The crack in the ground had gone farther than he'd thought, creating a trench in the stone that stretched and split up the short wall of the fountain. From that fissure the water leaked in a steady pulse, rolling across the pavement and sweeping away the dust there.
The stream carried the dust on its surface like a thousand tiny pallbearers, holding it aloft as it trudged along and forged a path around Steven's knee. He could only watch with detached fascination as the contaminated water trickled past him; he tracked the larger bits of the dust, following until they fell into the swirling pool at the end of their path, then his eyes wandered and found another piece. Beneath the fuzzy coating of dust he almost didn't notice a speck of crystal tumbling along.
A frown creased his face as he watched the shard roll over and over itself, faintly sparkling in the spaces between patches of dust. It fell against his knee, ignoring the sharp left turn that the rest of the water took and instead opting to wedge itself between his jeans and the ground below. He recognized the color.
His heart gave a pained lurch immediately, but his mind took longer to catch up. His eyes wandered to his side, where the glittering, powdered remains of Spinel sat, untouched by the water. His frown deepened.
Water continued to flow towards him, carrying two more pebble-sized chunks of a pink gem. He picked them up idly, cradling them in his palm.
Realization flashed upon him like lightning, and he jumped to his feet. The fountain was under him in two strides, and without another moment of hesitation, he blasted the wall away in one swift kick. Cold water rushed over his feet as he stepped in, his eyes and hands raking the detritus. There, and there!
He felt dizzy with relief as he scooped up the bits of Spinel and held them in the bowed front of his shirt. His nails combed through the rotted plants and slimy algae until they had been picked clean.
Back on dry ground, he dropped to his knees and stared down at the shards cradled in the soaked fabric of his shirt. From what he could see, it looked like all of her. He didn't know what else to do; he leaned over and began fitting the pieces back together. They clinked and slid against each other agonizingly with each connection he made.
She was almost entirely reassembled when he realized that a piece was missing. A pretty large chunk by the looks of it; he returned to the drained fountain and scanned through the muck once again. Despair settled in the pit of his stomach. He'd been very thorough the first time through.
The last piece wasn't here.
He stumbled numbly back to the half-formed heart, dropping once again to his knees. Even the dust and pebbles had been swept up and held close or fitted into the gem, and yet she wasn't complete. His fingers found the edge where her facets dropped off in a sharp decline, a jarring interruption of the two smooth arches that were supposed to meet at the bottom. It wasn't, in reality, that big of a piece, just the last half-inch or so of the point of the heart; but considering how unstable gems became when they were simply cracked, Steven didn't want to see how Spinel would struggle with such a big piece of her core missing.
If he could get her to come back at all.
The tears he had struggled to reign in finally broke out, streaming unbidden down his cheeks. In a desperate bid for any kind of help at all, he let the tears fall across the gem cradled in his palms. Surely, with their history, his tears had to mean something.
He'd seen it in a thousand movies, read it in a hundred books. This was the moment that his tears would bring her back to life, solve every problem, then boom, Happily Ever After. Hell, he was Pink Diamond! Even if he couldn't heal her through the power of love, he was supposed to have healing powers! So why wasn't she healing?
Her gem winked at him in the dim starlight, almost mocking him through the film of his tears. Well, tears had never worked for him anyways. He gasped in a stuttering breath and wet his lips before pressing them against the spider web of cracks across her face.
He knew it wouldn't work; that didn't stop him from trying. Over and over he pressed his mouth against the shattered crystal, willing it to fuse back together. It refused time after time. His eyes blurred and ached as he realized the futility of his efforts, but he couldn't stop. He needed her to come back. She had to come back.
Sobs wracked his body as he curled in on himself, raising Spinel between his palms to rest against his forehead.
"Please…please come back," he whispered to her, hoping that she could hear, "Please…"
He held her too firmly; she fell apart. The grainy remains of her shattered heart dusted his palms, and he screamed.
He screamed because the gem he'd loved, the one he'd failed to protect six thousand years ago, was dead. All that was left of her lay in a heap in his fingers, and he couldn't fix her. He couldn't help her. He couldn't save her.
He screamed because she had lived through hell both for and because of him, and because she had died because of him.
He screamed, and it was a raw sound. The ground didn't shudder or crack beneath him, no sonic blast freed the garden from its dusted blanket, and no power sang from beneath his skin. In that moment he was just Steven, lost and alone and helpless.
Pieces of her tumbled out of his grasp, tinkling melodically against the pavement.
His lungs gave out, then. They struggled to pull in any air at all as he coaxed the shards back into his palms.
"I'm sorry," he called to the air, his voice a breathy and hoarse whisper, "I'm so sorry. Please, please come back…"
With that prayer on his lips, he bubbled her.
She glittered up at him, playful as always, a laughing constellation within her rose-colored prison.
…
His arms were barely long enough to carry both bubbles, but he only had to manage for a short distance. With just a moment's consideration he'd made his choice.
Using his recovered memories as a guide, he found himself standing in front of a small, wiry tree. Nestled in its thin branches sat a single flower, as black as velvet and twice as delicate. He paid it no more than a passing glance before throwing the hatch open, and in another breath he was standing in a dimly-lit hallway.
His heart fluttered as he twisted his arm awkwardly around Spinel's bubble to lay his palm flat against the door. Just as he knew it would, it lit up in a frame of brilliant pink light that he couldn't find the energy to cringe away from. With a loud grinding noise, the stone shifted to the side.
So much had happened in this room, and even more had happened since he and Spinel had left it; even so, he hadn't the capacity to feel past the numbness. Without much more than a glance at the objects and features of the room, simply a categorical linking of each one with its corresponding events, he moved inside.
Of course, there were the once-snapped, once-hacked, and finally-cut roots protruding haphazardly in the very center of the chamber. Small bits of glass still glittered all around them, the fragmentary remains of the bottle that he and Spinel had dropped in unison after she'd tried to fuse with him. To his left he found a black, cloud shaped stain in the stone, evidence of his mad dash for freedom, going as far as to cut his own palm down to the tendons in his panic. He didn't let his eyes stray to the handprint crushed into the wall, nor his mind to wander in that direction. None of it mattered unless he was able to get Spinel back.
He hadn't intended the irony; he had only placed Pearl's bubbled gem atop the nest of broken roots to keep it from rolling into the corner on the admittedly uneven ground. Then, without another glance or thought in any direction at all, he wandered back outside.
As he crawled out of the hatch on a millennia-old ladder embedded in the wall, he caught sight of a cardboard box half-covered by a slumped burlap bag. He carried on until he found the warp pad once again. His feet felt particularly heavy as he stepped up onto its glittering surface. Ignoring the painful memories that echoed through him at the action, he turned and gave the garden one last glance.
It was empty.
Not at all in the gloomy way Steven had braced himself to reconcile with; as he looked down at the bubbled gem nestled against his chest, he understood.
The garden was empty because the only thing that ever truly mattered within its low walls was there with him. It was empty because, after so, so long, they were finally leaving together.
What a romantic, twisted fate they shared.
Not so much as a speck of dust was misplaced as the warp pad carried them away, and as that flash of light receded into the vast reaches of space, the garden returned to complete and utter stillness.
…
He was back on Earth and he wasn't sure why. The walls of the kindergarten pressed in on him again, not half as imposing as they had been just a bit ago. Not that he was paying them any attention; he only had eyes for the bubble resting in his arms.
He cast around in his mind, desperately trying to come up with something, anything, to fix Spinel. Crying over her gem back in the garden had awoken a new hope in him, one that he wasn't willing to let go. There had to be a way to help her. He was going to find it.
That task proved harder than he'd hoped. Four times he'd come up with the same idea, simply using super glue to hold the shards together, before he threw his head back and sighed in exasperation. The sound echoed away from him and down the various trenches carved into the cliffside, startling him. He looked around, suddenly feeling very small.
What if he never found her final piece? Even if he did, how would he get her to go back together? He'd healed many, many cracked gems over the years, but never a shattered one. From an analytical viewpoint, it should've been possible. He had seen fragments of gems form their corresponding body parts in those awful fusion experiments Yellow had created, so he couldn't see how, with almost all of her pieces, he couldn't get Spinel to come back. Maybe he could go to Yellow for help?
The thought sent a shiver of disgust down his spine. What if she was able to get Spinel back, but she was horribly damaged? He could imagine her as a mangled mess of misplaced limbs, unable to move or think properly like one of Yellow's experiments. Would she even want to come back if that were the case? Would that hurt her?
There was really only one way to find out. He would do anything to bring her back, to fix this mess, but he would only do it if it was the best option for her.
He was already on the warp pad, ready to go, but he stopped short. Something had suddenly occurred to him, something horrible that made his stomach drop to his feet. Maybe it was that he finally noticed how dark it had become, maybe his shock at the situation was finally wearing off. The reasoning didn't really matter; all that he knew was that he had destroyed his home, poofed Amethyst, burned a hole in the beach, and then he'd just left without a word to anyone. Judging from the time, he knew that Connie would have showed up to see him, and he could only imagine what she'd think. He felt very suddenly weighed down with guilt; after everything she had done for him, he'd left her behind to worry, and he knew that it probably looked like he'd been kidnapped again.
He set Spinel's bubble on the ground between his feet and pulled out his phone. The screen was horribly cracked from the incident on the beach, almost unreadable, but he somehow managed to type out a short message.
"I'm okay, I'll be back."
He tapped send, then waited for the message to deliver; he wouldn't get any reception on Homeworld. He moved to put the phone back in his pocket, but paused. Would Connie believe that he sent that text, or would she think that someone else might be using his phone?
He frowned. Connie had been particularly paranoid and protective of him since he came back, which was perfectly understandable, but he desperately wanted her not to worry over him. So, he did the only thing he could think of to show her that it really was him without leaving any room for doubt. He furrowed his brow in concentration as he summoned the object out of his gem. It felt like a lifetime ago that he'd placed it in there, afterwards running out excitedly to tell Pearl about his accomplishment. He scoffed.
Connie's photo fell into his hand and he was hit with a wave of nostalgia. Nostalgia quickly followed by nausea as he remembered what else he'd put into his gem that day. Without further delay, he summoned Lars' ube cake into his hand. He recoiled in disgust at the moldy confection which was luckily still trapped inside of a bubble; he was so glad that he couldn't smell it. A carpet of white, green, black, and pink covered the slice of purple cake. The bubble and its offending prisoner were thrown as far away from him as he could manage, and then he turned back to the photo.
He could only hope that the lens of his camera hadn't been cracked by the sonic boom he'd created, but he wouldn't have been able to tell anyways through the shattered screen. Again, he waited for the message to deliver before picking Spinel's bubble up.
Hoping that Connie would check her phone quickly, he let the warp pad drag him away.
…
"Please, Connie, you need to breathe!" Dr. Maheswaran cooed into her daughter's ear, though whether or not Connie heard her was debatable.
The younger girl shook violently from her shoulders to her knees even as she sat with her legs pulled up to her chest. Her mother's hand on her back was of no comfort to her as a mantra played over and over in her mind, a sharp staccato that pounded away relentlessly in her chest.
Again, again, again…
He was gone, again. Because she left, again.
She hadn't the faintest sense of anything happening around her as her eyes remained fixed on the pit burned into the beach, the gentle pink light of the molten sand being the only source of light at this time of night. She didn't look up as three familiar figures showed up and began to survey the damage, nor when one of them suddenly shouted that they had found Amethyst's disembodied gem. Nor did she notice when her phone gave a light buzz in her back pocket, muted as it was by the sand below her.
"Connie, are you okay?"
Connie blinked up at deep blue eyes. Lapis crouched in front of her, one hand resting gently on top of her shaking knee. Her eyes flashed back and forth between Connie's, searching for the answer she couldn't give. Her jaw was stuck, unwilling to move and allow her to speak. Lapis's face softened in sympathy, her mouth pursing into an understanding grimace as she held her hand out for her to grasp. With a heave, she was on her feet again.
"Let's go see if they've found anything," Lapis said with a nod in the direction of Bismuth and Peridot. She turned to walk away just as Connie's mom laid a hand on her shoulder. In silence, they watched as the group stepped gingerly along the edges of the rapidly cooling crater. Connie's phone buzzed again.
Her hand found its way into her pocket and she threw a cursory glance at the screen.
Jam Bud
2 New Messages
Her heart skipped and the phone slipped from her fingers. Her shock lasted all of two seconds before she dropped to her knees and snatched it back up. After three failed attempts to swipe the notification open and unlock her phone, her mom gently pried it from her hands and read the message aloud. Then she turned the screen to Connie, where her own face stared back at her. It took her a moment to recognize the photo that she had given Steven just before she left for space camp, and she felt like she could melt.
Her sob of relief caught the attention of the gems and soon enough they'd all taken turns reading the text and inspecting the photo.
"Text him back, ask where he is!" She implored her mother, still feeling too shaken to type properly. She watched as her mom did so. The message popped up into the chat, and she held her breath at the swirling icon that appeared just below it.
"Hmm," Peridot hummed as she tapped and zoomed in on the background of the photo. Just beyond the corner of the polaroid they could make out some kind of grey wall that seemed to have dozens of deep, odd-shaped holes carved into it. "That looks like the kindergarten," she continued in her usual clinical tone, "but that's miles away from here, and I'm fairly certain he didn't warp there."
Everyone's eyes flickered briefly to what remained of the beach house. The planks of wood that had once made up the stairs to the entrance lay scattered down the sandy slope, though even they had fared better than the rest of the home. Connie couldn't stand to dwell on it just then. She had more important things to worry about.
She swiped out of the photo and felt her heart drop.
Not delivered.
The small red exclamation mark next to her message confirmed her fear. If he was able to send a message from the kindergarten, he should be able to receive a message in the kindergarten. He wasn't there anymore.
"He's not on Earth."
Everyone jumped out of their skin at the sudden exclamation. As one, they turned to find Garnet marching up to them, their Garnet. She looked exactly like she had almost a month ago, aside from the fact that her characteristic sunglasses were missing.
That fact was remedied quickly as, in classic Garnet fashion, she flashed her hand over her face and they appeared. Also in classic Garnet fashion, she had saved the most dramatic announcement for after the pause, speaking clearly into the shocked silence.
"He's gone to the Diamonds."
…
The throne room looked exactly the same as it had when he last visited nearly a full month ago. For a moment the familiarity threw him off; this place seemed to be the only thing that remained constant no matter what was happening outside. The cameras from the broadcast were still tucked against the walls, their lenses hanging limply towards the floor just as the Pearls left them.
Unbeknownst to him, that very broadcast started the chain of events that would change his life. As he sent his voice out across the galaxy, spreading a message of disestablishing tyranny and granting peace and freedom to all, Spinel had been listening. From her dilapidated paradise-turned-prison, she had seen what Pink had done, what she'd created from her own life. Pink Diamond was gone, and all that was left of her was a comparatively weak shadow, with barely a memory of her left in his features.
He understood now.
It didn't excuse what Spinel had done, how she'd reacted, but he at the very least understood her motive now. Little did she know, however, that attacking and kidnapping him would lead to the discovery of a betrayal thousands of years old, and that tragedy was just around the corner for them once again.
They'd been through yet another tragedy, and yet Steven held the tiniest spark of hope close to his chest. Maybe, just maybe, the Diamonds could fix Spinel up without turning her into a Cluster-like monster. There was only one way to find out.
He could remember that Yellow Diamond had been in charge of the Cluster and shard-fusion projects back when Peridot first came to Earth, so that's who he looked for first. Unlike the other times he'd visited the labyrinthine palace, he now had thousands of years worth of memories to guide his way. He found Yellow's chamber in no time.
Yellow's Pearl was stationed just outside of her door, derailing Steven's train of thought with confusion. Why were Yellow and Blue's Pearls still loyal to them? It certainly wasn't because they'd been treated well. Maybe it was just something so deeply ingrained in their makeup as they formed that they couldn't help it, that they would forever choose to stay with their Diamonds. He was reminded of how Pearl had stayed with Pink Diamond even as she went to live on Earth as Rose Quartz and technically 'freed' her from her servitude.
He couldn't help but wonder if all of the Pearls held the same level of obsessive love for their 'owners', or if that was just his Pearl's defect. The loyalty of a Pearl, what a joke.
Yellow jumped up from the seat at her desk as Steven stepped in. He could see a couple of gems standing in front of her, as dwarfed as he was by her enormous stature.
"Steven, what a lovely surprise! We were all so glad to hear that you'd been returned to Earth, we've been waiting for you to visit!"
The two Agates at her feet jumped to an automatic diamond-salute when they spotted him; it was an unnecessary gesture, but one that he was often afforded by gemkind as a show of gratitude. He waved at them in acknowledgement before turning towards Yellow. Just as he opened his mouth to speak, he caught sight of another gem standing up on top of the desk. He stopped short, cocking his head at her strange appearance.
From her midsection up, she looked perfectly normal; well-built muscles and the simple, practical clothing of an agate covered her, exactly as he'd expect. The problem, however, started around her ribs. From her left side down, for lack of a better term, it looked like she'd stepped on a grenade. Against all logic, the gem stood on air. Bits of leg and clothing peeked through here and there, but large sections of her physical form seemed to have been simply erased.
He was forcibly reminded of a movie he'd seen with Connie not too long ago. He couldn't remember the name, but just then he could definitely remember the imagery of undead pirates chasing around the protagonists on half-rotten and half-missing limbs. He couldn't help but draw the comparison, the way the gem atop the desk seemed to hold her shape by sheer magic was undeniably similar. She stepped forward, showing off a foot that had no ankle to guide or hold it.
For a moment he was frozen in shock, but then a horrible suspicion drew over him. Was Yellow experimenting on gems again? He looked up at her, catching the warm smile she shot at the Agate. He cleared his throat.
"What are you doing?" He asked, looking pointedly between her and the desk.
"Oh! This," she began, "is Moss Agate. She had a rather nasty accident just the other day, but she's feeling much better now, isn't that right?" The agate on the desk nodded vehemently, a grateful smile stretching her lips. Yellow held out a palm for her to step on, then gently lowered her to stand next to Steven.
Close up she looked even worse, though Steven could tell that her condition didn't cause her pain. She smiled at him and straightened into a diamond-salute, clicking her heel against the place where her other foot should have been. Still, she stood and walked as steadily as any other two-footed, intact gem would. He shot her a weak smile just before his jaw dropped.
Settled over her sternum, he spotted her gem. To his amazement, the light stone bled through with veins of darker green was bisected by a thick slice of clear glass. His widened eyes flew up to meet the prideful gaze of Yellow, who quickly answered his unvoiced question.
"We've been experimenting with the concept for a long time, but until recently we hadn't made much progress. It was actually you, Steven, who helped us finally get it right."
He blinked, not quite understanding where he'd helped them. "What are you talking about? And what happened to her gem?" He asked, gesturing again to Moss Agate.
"Well, she had an accident in the forge the other day as she was helping our team of Bismuths repair one of our scout ships. She-"
Moss Agate cut her off, jumping in to tell her own story. "I was trying to pull off the plate from the front of the hull to reach a damaged control panel when it suddenly gave. Like, way easier than it should have. I pretty much fell straight backwards into that stream of lava that the Bismuths like to use to heat up their materials." She stopped and turned towards Yellow, her tone turning sharp. "I've been saying for ages that that thing was a safety hazard, especially now that any gem can work in the forge. Not everyone is lava-proof." She looked back to Steven before she continued, "Well, I fell in. As you can imagine, I didn't fare well."
Yellow chimed in, casting an apologetic look down at the Agate. "I apologize, but we're still working on a new way to supply that amount of heat to the forge. For now, we don't have any other way."
Steven could've died from shock. If anyone had told him a year ago that Yellow Diamond would willingly apologize to an agate, he'd have them institutionalized. Not only that, the smaller gem had interrupted her and chastised her to her face, and Yellow didn't so much as frown about it. Before he could dwell on his surprise, she continued.
"A large section of her gem was destroyed. A few months ago she would've been lost completely, but because of a new breakthrough we've had, we were able to salvage her. Look closely at her gem, Steven, and you'll see that we've grafted a slice of quartz to the parts that were missing."
Steven choked on a gasp. "Grafted? Isn't that just like fusing?" Through his mind ran the horrid memories of Yellow's shard fusions, and he felt his stomach twist.
"No, nothing like that at all. You see, the clear quartz we're using here isn't like us," she stated, gesturing to herself. "The material was never sentient to begin with. It's a blank slate, raw building material."
"How did I help with that?" He asked.
"Why, you provided the key ingredient to the process! Here," she turned to a small drawer, digging around inside. She pulled out a small pink bottle that he recognized. "Without this, we would just have a pile of gem shards. Of course, a bit of my power is needed in the process, but even that isn't enough by itself."
Steven had spent days spitting into that bottle. He had hated every second of it, but the Diamonds sending gems from the palace every other day to use his 'healing services' had driven him crazy.
Hope sprang through him so fiercely that he nearly fell over himself in his haste to jump onto Yellow's desk. He held out the bubble between two shaking palms.
"Can you fix her?"
Yellow squinted at the shards floating around behind the rose-colored barrier, frowning in concentration. Suddenly, her eyes flew wide and she fell back into her seat. She shook her head in disbelief before crossing her arms over her chest and eyeing him incredulously.
"Steven, would you care to explain to me why I should help that Spinel?"
From the anger burning in her eyes Steven knew that she recognized the gem he held out, and he didn't have it in him to explain.
"Please, just trust me. I need her-"
"Steven, she kidnapped you! She hurt you! Have you even seen yourself? You look like-"
He cut her off, his anger flaring up again. "Of course I have! What she did to me absolutely does not matter right now, all that matters is fixing her!" It was all he could do to keep from screaming in Yellow's face; he could feel the heat radiating from his now-glowing skin.
That only seemed to incense Yellow further, so he took a deep breath to calm himself. Once his temperature had returned to normal, he looked up again. "I'm sorry. I promise I'll explain everything, I just… I need her to be okay. Please, help her."
Maybe it was because of how pathetically his voice cracked as he begged for Spinel's life, but Yellow caved. "Fine, but you'll tell me everything."
He let out a shaky, uneven breath and nodded.
Yellow got to work immediately, popping the bubble over a silver tray as she pulled up a standing magnifying glass. With quick, practiced moves, she sorted the pieces into place. Steven noticed with dismay that the pink dust and smaller fragments were all swept together into a small pile in the corner, apparently useless.
He knew better than to question Yellow's work, especially when she was already in a bad mood; he simply had to trust her. He watched on silently as she lined the pieces up, using lumps of clay to support them from falling apart. In no time she had Spinel almost completely reassembled, her splintered gem held together in a clay cast.
Yellow used various silver tools to poke and prod at the cast, digging out a chunk in the shape of her missing piece. His eyes widened in astonishment as Yellow mixed Spinel's gem dust in with what looked like powdered glass, sifting them together in a separate tray before dumping it all into the clay mold.
He held his breath as some of the liquid from the pink bottle was dropped onto the center of the gem. Nothing happened, but then again he hadn't expected it to.
The three Agates on the ground climbed up beside him to watch as Yellow pushed the magnifying glass aside, cracking her knuckles. They knelt down next to the clay mold, prompting him to step forward as well.
Lightning sizzled on Yellow's fingertip when she laid it against Spinel's gem, little sparks that grew into animated strikes and currents that spread over the facets below. They struck over and over, hopping between the cracks fluidly. A hand on his shoulder brought him to his knees just in time to watch as the fractures miraculously began to seal behind the rescinding trails of electricity. It took longer for the currents to melt down the clear quartz powder at the bottom. Soon enough, Steven noted with tears welling in his eyes, she was whole again.
Yellow drew her hand back and leveled Steven with a glare. "It's done. Now, why did I just save the life of the gem that tried to kill you?"
Where to start? He let out a sigh that belied the sheer, overwhelming relief he was drowning in. He knew that he needed to tell everyone the truth if Spinel was ever going to have some semblance of peace when she came back. He thought it best to just get it over and done with quickly; though he was suddenly quite worried about how all of them would react to the whole 'I am Pink Diamond' thing. He cringed.
"You promised, Steven." Yellow reminded him, leaning back into her seat.
"I did. I just, um, do you think you could call up the others? This is something you should all hear together…" He trailed off as a faint glow caught his attention.
Spinel! She was glowing!
Yellow leaned forward, separating Steven from the gem with her hand. Her poise was defensive as she pushed him away, though he struggled to climb over her fingers.
"Stop it! She's not going to hurt me, let me go!" She refused, and eventually he gave in and simply jumped over her, floating down gently next to the silver tray.
"She won't hurt me, it's okay!" He reaffirmed. He picked up the blazing gem between his palms, guiding it up into the air where its light completely overtook it, morphing and growing into a shape that he recognized. His cry of relief was caught in his throat as it constricted; he was far too overcome for his voice to function properly. As it was, he could hardly breathe, but he didn't care in the least.
"Spinel!" He choked out as her form solidified.
She fell to her knees, facing away from him. She went stiff, staring straight ahead of her for a moment before she fell forward, bracing her hands against her knees. For a moment, everything was still and silent. Everyone held their breath as they waited for the pink gem to move, to speak, to do anything, but she never did.
"Spinel?" He called gently, stepping nearer. As he knelt in front of her, he could see the damage that had been done. Just below her gem, where her chest sloped down to her waist, a hand-sized chunk of her was not missing, but instead invisible. Fractures appeared along her arms and shoulders, just big enough to notice if he looked close enough, but all in all she'd come out looking much better than he could've hoped for.
Even so, she hadn't moved. Very slowly, so as not to scare her, he reached out. His heart beat violently against his ribs. He waved his hand in front of her face, but it seemed like she wasn't aware of him at all.
"Hmm. This hasn't happened before." Yellow stated calmly, materializing a screen in front of her to take notes on.
"Spinel? It's me, Steven. Y-you're okay now, everything's okay. Please, say something." He laid his palm against the top of her hand, and her eyes flashed up. Her sudden gasp made him realize that she hadn't been breathing that entire time, but now she was hyperventilating. The more rapid-fire breaths she drew in, the harder she began to tremble.
The look in her eyes made Steven's blood run ice cold. She wasn't looking at him. She wasn't looking at anything at present, but rather it seemed that she was consumed by some terror in her mind, one that lined her face with every second of six thousand years of dread.
Panic overtook him. His palms rose to hold her cheeks, lifting her eyes to his face. "Spinel, look at me. Look at me," he demanded, but she still couldn't shake whatever trance she was in. She winced as he shook her. If she didn't come to her senses soon, he knew that she would faint. Already she seemed to sag against him, so he did the only thing he could think of.
He looked for any sign of recognition in her eyes as he inched closer, still holding her cheeks in his palms. Her face was pale and cold, drained of all life as she continued to gasp for air. He squeezed his eyes shut and leaned in.
She practically fell against him as he laid his forehead against hers, and her breath caught. He whispered in the space between them, his breath ghosting over her lips.
"Please come back to me; I can't lose you again. I can't-" His voice broke, but then so did hers. She shuddered out a broken sob, and the sound snapped something in him, too.
In that moment they fell into each other, wrapping their arms around one another and squeezing so tight that it was almost painful. He felt Spinel's hands grasp at his shirt as she cried into his shoulder, and he held her through it, choking on his own tears as well.
Yellow Diamond and the Agates seemed stunned into silence. Whatever they expected from the resurrection of Steven's captor, this was not it.
He thought that he had lost her for good, that Pearl had won. He thought that he'd never hold her again, or hear her voice, or breathe in her scent again. He had never been so glad to be wrong. For a moment, he felt that everything was as it should be. But just for a moment.
In the very next, she was ripped away in a stuttering flash of light. Steven fell forward onto his hands as her body disappeared, suddenly feeling as if the breath had been stolen from his lungs. Instantly his eyes flashed around, looking for her, but he didn't have to look for long.
He heard a startled whimper from just behind him, and he turned to find Spinel on her knees, staring in wide-eyed terror at her gem. Her chest rose and fell with her quickening breath as she looked up at Steven. Even as he watched, her gem gave a weak flash and she fell backwards, thrown by some force that none of them could see.
Steven looked up to Yellow, hoping that she could explain what was happening to Spinel. Was this a side-effect of some sort? He hadn't seen Moss Agate's gem flashing or causing her any trouble, so why was it happening to Spinel?
Yellow looked just as startled as he felt. Spinel cried out again, clutching at her gem.