Before you peered into this room, the aftermath of the Corruption bomb was the vilest sight you had ever seen.
Those Gems, however, you did not know. They never carried your unconscious body, reassured you that sleep was normal for humans, or gave your elbow a rough squeeze because that was the only way they knew to tell you everything would be all right.
You reach backward and close your hand over Dr. Drakken's lips so he can't scream. White Diamond has already seized one of Earth's best men. You will not let her get another one.
Beside you, Bismuth's face grieves for only a moment before fury ignites it, an expression all too familiar to you. "Garnet! Pearl! No!" she says. Her hands glow, transforming, even as she charges forward.
This time, you fail to snag her in time.
Bismuth bursts into the room, one hand swinging a mallet, so intent on what remains of her friends that the rest of the room has become a nebula to her, you know. White Diamond dips her chin a fraction, and the beams raze from her eyes and engulf Bismuth.
You turn away; there is nothing hard or cold enough inside of you to enjoy the sight.
Farther down the tunnel, you hear a small urgent whimper, as though someone has taken hold of the other end of the sound and attempted to restrain it. You lift your head to see Peridot slumped against the tunnel wall, clogging her mouth with both fists, her legs drawn as far underneath her as they will reach. Fragility seeps from her despite the rebellious stars she wears and the sharp poking of her visor.
You move closer to her, bringing Drakken with you. "Okay," you say, "we just figured out that won't work. So we need another plan –"
"Stop it!" Steven calls from inside the room. "Leave her alone! Bring – them – back!"
You startle. Steven's voice frequently rises in excitement but seldom in anger, and the tears you hear in it crowd inside your gem until there is no room for your own emotions. Right now, you understand Bismuth. Whole facets of you urge you to run into that room and stand between Steven and White Diamond, the way he stood between you and Jasper on the boat, yet you will be of no use to him drained.
"Bring them back?" White Diamond lowers her leg and pleats her fingers in front of her. Her movements are as refined as you remember them, but her smile is a grotesque crack. "To what, Pink? Their faulty, miserable little lives? The lives you gave them? You seem to have forgotten that you're the one who makes everything worse. I make everything better!"
"No!" Steven says. "This wasn't my fault! None of this is my fault! You can't keep blaming me for things my mom did!" Even in the stark shadows of the room, you see his shoulders drop in hopelessness. It is a posture that belongs to someone else.
White Diamond lets out a supercilious laugh. "Your 'mom'?" she says.
You can't force your eyes to roll at her lack of understanding, the way you would do with Jasper, Aquamarine, or the Rubies.
Steven nods his sweetly curled head. "I'm not her, White!"
"But don't you know things about her that you couldn't possibly know?" White Diamond says.
Dr. Drakken clutches your hand so tightly you can feel the damp fabric of his gloves marking your palms. It is the only thing you can feel. You are submerged in Kanatar's frozen ocean, ice encasing you. She is the most powerful being in the universe, and in that instant you think of Rose Quartz, the ocean of her army reduced to a tidepool – a friend to hold each hand, and nothing more.
For an instant, the waves slamming around in your gem churn up the desire to flee again. But it does not speak with authority this time, and you can barely recognize its presence.
Steven stammers and takes a step backward, frighteningly close to the emptied skins of his friends. "I-I've just been connecting with her. My powers, they help me connect with others." Your gemstone gives a small cry of pain. "I'm just…feeling her feelings…"
White Diamond folds her arms. The light streaming from her overwhelms the room and casts everyone else in silhouette. "Really, there's no need to keep up this little charade. It's just you and me now, Pink."
"That's what you think, lady," Dr. Drakken mutters. You never imagined him to be capable of whispering, and yet the words that normally bob and float like buoys have been pulled in, folded up, and stacked neatly away.
"Isn't it obvious?" White Diamond says. "Even though you've embedded yourself in that human child, your light can't help shining through. You know you're in there. You've known it all along. Stop cowering inside your gem. You can hide from yourself, but you can't hide from me."
For a moment, you believe she sees you, and that is not the most terrifying part of it.
Steven shakes his head again.
"Enough!" White Diamond rises to her feet, and the drained Gems rise with her. She does not need to nod at them the way a leading Nephrite would or jerk her neck in their direction like an Agate in command does, not when she has forced her mind into theirs. "No more games, Starlight."
Garnet and Pearl step forward and each grab Steven by an arm. He struggles and kicks to be free, but they grasp him even more tightly; their physical forms that once sought to protect him from all harm are now weapons against him. His flat body does not even have enough slack to hang there between them.
White Diamond crouches in front of them, destruction shining from her flawless face. "It's time to come out – Pink."
Connie releases her first scream. Garnet and Pearl lift Steven and tilt him forward as they would with a solar panel to catch the sunlight. Steven himself has stopped struggling by this point and gone still, so still for a moment you fear he is already gone, yet you cannot look away this time. You owe Steven that much.
White Diamond lifts Steven's shirt.
Her shadow spills across the floor. Even there, you can make out the shape of her black fingernails, sharp as daggers and longer than your entire body. She slips one under the top of Steven's gem and wedges another in at the bottom. She gives the gentlest of tugs.
When she raises her hand again, the culet end of a pink diamond glints between her fingers. Steven goes limp.
Your surroundings lose meaning; your thoughts lose definition.
Beneath you, the ground turns to air and you must be falling, although you do not feel it. You see the little round face on the other side of the mirror, beaming, the first smile anyone has offered you in centuries. You feel the soft fleshy hand pressing against your gemstone, the moist saliva seeping into your crack and healing it. You hear his voice, even higher and smaller than it is now, bawling your name as the waves closed over Malachite's head.
A noise like the Corruption bomb, whistling as it soared closer to Earth, fills your head. Ordinarily, a gem being yanked from a body is no more than a particularly painful way to be poofed – you have seen Quartzes do it to bring a speedy end to a fight – but Steven is a creature of a type your people have never known. White Diamond, like Drakken, is performing an experiment and unlike Drakken, she does not care what the outcome should be.
You collapse against something spindly yet soft. When you glance upward, Drakken clamps both hands over his mouth and screams noiselessly into them.
Behind you, Peridot makes an effort to quiet her sobs. You, by contrast, are dry, the wasteland Homeworld has become echoed in the stone on your back. There is no ocean to submit to you and no opportunity to close your eyes and search for serenity you will not find.
Connie's next scream crashes over you, returning you to the present and delivering numbness down your back that halts your shaking before it can claim you. Standing on the summit of panic, you grab the sides and begin to climb down.
You manage to turn in her direction before your body freezes entirely. Connie drops the sword with a clatter and rushes to bend beside a crumbled figure in denims and a short-sleeved shirt. It twitches; it moves.
The whistling in your ears ebbs away as you hear him moan. Peridot is still crying, quietly and responsibly, yet hard enough for you both, or so you hope. You feel almost guilty that you can give Steven no tears.
He lifts his head from the floor, pushing himself up on both palms. You can see only the back of his neck under the black curls, and it is the color of driftwood that has seen too much sun and salt, the pink tinge missing. Your chest stills. There is nothing left in it to stir anymore.
"Steven! Oh my gosh, are you okay? Talk to me, please – Steven!" Connie says. She kneels beside him, takes hold of his left arm, and drags it around her neck, supporting the left half of his body. The rest of it proves too much for her strength alone and slumps to the floor, and you think of Dr. Drakken's sagging, wilted flowers with their scorched petals.
This is sadder.
Drakken grabs your arm and leans his head in closer to you. The head-ship's shadows ripple across his face, but you can still discern the scar from which he cannot escape and the noble tremble of his lower lip. "I'm going in there. I've got to help him!" he says, his stentorian voice quieter than you knew it could be.
"No." The word falls from your mouth, dropping anchor.
"Look, she hasn't hurt Connie!" Drakken says.
"Yet," you add.
"She's not even looking at Connie! She obviously doesn't consider mere humans to be a threat."
Anger touches you, as a fact and not a feeling. "This is no time to test out one of your little hypotheses!" you say.
"Connie had a sword, and White Diamond still wasn't paying any attention to her!" Drakken's voice hisses as he tries to keep it at a whisper. "That sounds like pretty conclusive evidence to me!"
Peridot nods, tears slipping off her chin.
You glance again at Steven, the right side of him spilling out of Connie's hold, and wish with every scrap of your useless powers that you could be the one to elevate it. You sigh. "Okay, but – no plants. Nothing that would make her think you're dangerous."
"My dear Lapis, I spent over twenty years of my life trying to get people to think I was dangerous. And I failed miserably. So there you go!" Drakken gives you a smile probably meant to be playful, yet the corners of it quiver like a sail that needs to be lashed to the mast.
He lets go of your arm in the same slow, helpless way Homeworld's halves must have let go of each other: aware they can survive apart yet still haunted by the loss. The first person to ever tell you he loved you skitters away down the tunnel and pops into the head-ship.
Peridot clings to you like a piece of moss, and you realize anew how small her hand is, even in yours. Though an undeniable comfort, her presence here worsens the situation. You did not want her to know war.
Drakken skids to his knees on Steven's other side and crooks Steven's right arm around his waist. White Diamond's gaze drifts to them and then over them. She does not even appear to see them, her eyes focused on something toward the far left wall. Peridot flips to see what it is, jerking you around with her.
A globule of pink hovers in the air between Connie and the wall, luminous pink against the grayscale of the room. You have never seen a Diamond's aura, rumored to be projected only in times of greatest need, but surely that is what you are looking at now: pure, hot light fused with mass, perhaps capable of being touched yet so beautiful and foreboding that none would dare to try.
As you watch, it begins to assume a form, too small to be a Diamond or an ideal Quartz. A head takes shape, as do stubby arms and legs, the top of his feet freed and the bottoms secured in strapped shoes to match your own. Another Steven stands before White Diamond's throne, blinking around the room with eyes of sooty black and raw white.
That is when you notice Pink Diamond's gem has disappeared from White's hand.
"Whoa." Peridot presses close to you, her words running into your arm as she releases them. "I was scared there weren't going to be any Stevens. Now there are two?"
"Shh," you say. You are unsure of what you are seeing and afraid it might not be real.
White Diamond glares at the pink Steven. "What in the universe – who are you?" she demands, and for the first time she sounds snappish. "Where's Pink?"
The black-and-white eyes turn to White Diamond. You cringe at how wide and blank they appear, though clearly not drained or blinded; rather, they are missiles, seeing only their target and not to be distracted by anything else. "She's gone," he says, his voice flat.
White Diamond's face startles for only the briefest of seconds. "What?"
"SHE'S GONE!"
Even from in the passageway, you feel the ship sway as Steven hollers the truth at White Diamond. He stomps a foot childishly, but the stone beneath him shatters and bursts of energy surge forth to rock each wall with the power of a waterspout. The wind sends your bangs tumbling and whips your pant legs against you, but you are too far away for it to knock you over.
You are too far away.
The pale Steven limps forward in the light, and the pink Steven stands motionless in the shadows. You understand, then, what has happened. It disables a Gem to have her gemstone torn from her, for she possesses nothing material apart from her stone. Steven, however, does have something else, something weak and tenacious and magical in its own way: a human body. White Diamond has only separated his two natures, the process less dramatic than the collapse of a fusion.
She thought it would return Pink Diamond to her, but Steven's Gem half does not become Pink Diamond any more than his human half would become Greg. He is his own person, something you have known since he first spoke kindly to the mirror.
White Diamond eyes the pink Steven with the irritation appropriate for an interrupted nap. She isn't afraid of him.
Should she be?
It is a thought both ridiculous and painful: the idea of anyone being afraid of Steven. Yet right now, you wish she would be.
"If this is your idea of a joke, Pink, it isn't funny," White Diamond says.
"No," the pink Steven agrees. "It really isn't."
Drakken, Connie, and both of Steven's halves stand before White Diamond, surrounded by the hollowed shells of former allies. Your cheek muscles strain around your clenched teeth. You did not return from Kanatar to crouch hidden in a tunnel while those you love risk everything.
Yet if you were to enter the room, White Diamond would identify you and drain you at once. She has Blue Diamond's aptitude for remembering faces and differentiating between multiples of the same Gem type, without Blue's ability to make it feel like a compliment to be recognized. Even if you shapeshifted into some other form, the most important attributes of you would remain unchanged, your droplet-shaped gem a stigma between your shoulder blades, your oceanic skin proclaiming your powers.
Once, though, long before your life was ruined and saved, there was another type of Gem granted control of the seas. This type of Gem can easily be mistaken for a Lapis Lazuli; Dr. Drakken did as much the first time he saw one on Earth.
You turn to Peridot and catch her arm. "Peridot," you say, "as far you know, has there ever been a traitorous Aquamarine?"
Peridot's eyes flicker back and forth like they used to when she scrolled through data on her screen; seeing them then, you would have never imagined they could drip the way they do now. "No," she says, and her voice sounds like it has to navigate around something heavy in her throat to reach you. "Lapis, what are you do –"
You press your fingers to your lips to urge her silence and close your eyes. The light that is your body shifts, beginning the change – at first resistant, as though rusted from eons unused, but moments later the edges fall away, leaving the light as pliable and obedient as your ocean. You feel your face rounding, your arms and legs shortening, and the waterproof pants you conjured with such pride transforming into a submissive blue skirt with a black Diamond woven into its top, your legs imprisoned in white tights.
When you open your eyes, Peridot towers over you, as she did in the Interrogation Room just a few years ago. The memory burns at your surface but does not swim any deeper than that; you recognize neither of the Gems within it.
"Stay here, Peridot," you instruct her. You know you should not have command of her, but you will never forgive yourself if you don't save at least one friend today.
"But –"
"But nothing," you say. "I need you to be safe. Please."
Peridot looks down at you through her tears, and for the first time since Blue Diamond was struck down, a soft solace runs the length of your spine. You reach out and fold your arms around Peridot, your light pressing against hers, sharing space without the danger of fusing.
As you let go, something warm and wet splashes atop the bob that you now know to be smooth and sleek.
Your new wings need to beat at twice the pace of the wings to which you are accustomed: long and lanky like the rest of you, pushing the air back in strips. These are fuller and firmer, bell-shaped, and the air rolls off them in curves unfamiliar in their perfection. The rapid beat fills your gemstone as you fly into the room that seems even brighter and even darker viewed through an Aquamarine's enormous eyes.
The pink Steven remains unmoving, and the pale Steven slumps, supported by Drakken and Connie on either side. He groans, the sound flaying you like Amethyst's whip, as you soar over him to hover level with White Diamond's head. You want to punch her directly in the jaw; you want to clip off those fingernails that ripped Steven's gem off. But neither of those things will help Steven stay alive.
You bring a hand to your cheek and mimic an Aquamarine's voice: thin and tense, a tent flap stretched between two stakes, with that teetering, high tone that Drakken once described as snooty, filtering out the accusation White Diamond deserves. "Oh, my goodness," you say. "I heard the screams and thought all of Homeworld had fallen." You turn and force yourself to face the husk that was once Blue Diamond. "Is – is My Diamond all right?"
"Oh, she's perfectly fine, Aquamarine." White Diamond waves a hand to dismiss you. "In fact, she is now better than ever."
Her cold words try to shove you back, reminding you of a stiff breeze off Kanatar's frozen ocean, threatening to solidify your wings. In that moment, all of Homeworld's rankings and castes grow even pettier and shallower, because in that moment you see that to White Diamond everyone is a Pearl. You feel ripples in the center of your gem, and there they will stay. You will not let your face show anything.
"Well, that sounds glorious, you helping her and such." You tilt your head as though confused. "I just don't quite understand how."
White Diamond does not answer you. Without rising from her throne, she leans her body toward the pink Steven, who has begun to walk in soundless steps across the room toward his other half. "Where do you think you're going?" she demands.
The pale Steven lifts his lolling head and the hem of his shirt folds back. His stomach does not bear the indent you saw on Drakken's the day he was sick; it is a bare field with nothing to connect him to his mother. "Please," he gasps to his pink half. "Help…"
Something bursts apart in your gem, and you thrust it back together again, enclosing the pain inside like Drakken's dog in his kennel, to be released if conditions ever improve.
This has gone on long enough. You have to do something for Steven, even if it is just bringing him comfort.
The pink Steven returns his missile-like gaze to White Diamond. While she glares back at him, you float down to the human Steven. His eyes, so weary and dulled, drag to yours. He does not know it's you.
You cover your mouth with one hand and blast a long hard breath into the palm. A foghorn sound rings out, just loud enough for this small huddle to hear. You don't know what this noise means, exactly, though you have figured out it is considered rude. At this moment, however, you care nothing for understanding or etiquette, only the reaction you wish to receive.
Light finds Steven's eyes and he smiles. It is a spare, diluted version of his usual smile, but even White Diamond has not stolen its cleanness, so beautiful and out of place in this room cast in shadow and populated by grayed vestiges of his friends.
Turning to the blue man beside him, you carefully arrange your fingers into the sign for I love you that he taught you before your team set off from Earth. His frown does not disappear, but the crease in the center of his eyebrow does.
The pink Steven turns and surveys without emotion his weakened human half, then steps forward, closing the distance. Connie, still bearing a portion of the pale Steven's weight, urges him back to his feet and toward the pink Steven. Drakken does the same on his other side, falling awkwardly over his own feet as he pushes Steven and just as awkwardly coaching, "There you go, buddy – you'll be all right." The scene makes your back weep. He does not belong here in this room where evil coexists with oxygen in the atmosphere, and neither does Steven.
"Pink, what are you doing? Don't you dare take another step!" White Diamond's voice cracks, a wave that has met a rocky coastline it cannot topple.
The pink Steven takes another step. The white shadow disguised as light tears from White Diamond's eyes too suddenly for even your wings to catch up. A circle glows beneath the pink Steven's shirt, and in an immeasurably short span of time, he has drawn his shield. The ray strikes the shield and dissolves with a hiss nearly identical to one from White Diamond's lips.
"Don't you raise your shield to me!" she says.
The pink Steven only stares.
"I just want you to be yourself, Pink!" That White Diamond's speech has tone at all is startling; the fact that her tone is frantic strangely makes you want to laugh. "If you can't do that, I'll do it for you!"
Her back arcs and her eyes glow again. Just as you knew they would, the shadows that used to be Diamonds or friends all stiffen and imitate her. White darkness comes at Steven from every direction.
This time you have seen it coming. You lunge forward, ready to catch the rays, defect them, or intercept then, when the human Steven's pale hand grabs your skirt and holds you back. You glance down at the laboring form with sweat shining on his face. He speaks to you with his eyes: Trust me, Lapis.
You do. More than anything.
Fuchsia, six-sided shapes emerge from the air in front of the pink Steven's belly and begin to multiply, spreading quicker than rumors. They crystallize into walls around Steven, and you are reminded of a geode, cracked open to show its dazzling interior. As soon as the rays touch those walls, a surge of pure pained energy ripples through the ship, stopping just short of you and the small knot of humans you guard. Every drained form falls like a building without a foundation. You direct your focus to Yellow Diamond, the only one you can watch without memories agonizing you.
For the first time in six thousand years, White Diamond leaves her throne. She has no choice. The impact has thrown her over the side, onto the first of several elevated steps leading back down to the floor.
You clench your jaw so it does not drop. You think you just saw the most powerful lifeform in the universe overpowered.
The pale Steven starts crying. "Stop…don't hurt them…" he calls to his Gem half.
"Pink, I order you to stop!" White Diamond calls from the top step.
The pink Steven does what no one has ever done to White Diamond before: he ignores her, his missile-gaze now trained solely on his human side. Your gem burns, tight, compressed, and unpracticed in the false body you wear. You will be able to sustain this form for a few hours, but not comfortably. Even now, the persnickety flutters of your new flawless wings unnerve you.
You think of Peridot, alone in the tunnel, and for a moment you wish you could transmit thoughts of care to her, yet she disappears easily enough from your mind. Right now she is the only Crystal Gem who is not in immediate danger.
Shoes scuffle too loudly against the floor as the pale Steven takes another step. The pink Steven marches forward until the gap between them disappears, pushes Connie and Drakken aside, and scoops his other half up into in his arms. Tears balance on the pale Steven's eyelashes, and his shoulders tremble.
Dark, organic eyes stare into translucent pink ones woven from light. Steven looks at himself the way he looks at everyone else: with gentle, boundless love. The pale boy's arms go around the pink boy, and the pink boy cradles the pale boy to his chest.
The pale Steven begins to make a sound, a sound made of joy and pain that encompasses all of life. For a moment, the scene before you runs. In the next moment, White Diamond cries, "Pink? What are you doing? Why are you laughing?"
Her anger is somehow less frightening than her blankness – a funnel of wind on the sea where you can understand it rather than on the land.
No one deigns to answer her, least of all either of Steven's halves. Locked together, they disappear into a flash of white light that you recognize and have learned to fear, yet it is brief and when it fades, Steven stands alone inside the circle of shadows, embracing himself, the grin on his face radiant in both its innocence and its knowledge. His light skin is once again healthily tinged with pink, the color of sand at sunset, and you do not need to watch him lift his shirt to know the location of his gemstone.
An Aquamarine would not cheer, so you remain mute.
"Steven?" Connie rushes to him and takes his hand. "Steven, are you…together again?"
"Are you…you?" Drakken adds, hope afloat between his buoy-words.
Steven exhales, his breath now startlingly smooth. "Yup. I'm me. I've always been me." His chuckle alleviates the pressure on your gemstone of being far below sea level, though you can still feel the swollen surface tension in the room, ready to spill apart with another single drop.
White Diamond slaps the floor, her fingernails glinting blacker than Obsidian's form, and the ship gives a shudder that you barely notice. "No! You are Pink Diamond! That is Pink Diamond's gem!
"You do not look like this! You do not sound like this! You are not half human!" Though her voice still peals throughout the room and crowds out opposition, each of her lies seems feebler than the one before it. "You're just acting like – acting like a child!"
Steven climbs the steps to White Diamond's throne. Even lying flat on her side, she is still taller than him, but he does not appear to be at all afraid to approach her. You have never seen anything so brave.
As White Diamond pushes herself up to a sitting position, Steven tilts his head and looks directly at her. "I am a child," he says with a soft snort. "What's your excuse?"
Silence descends upon the room, deeper than the void of space and heavy with calamity.
The silence shatters when Connie bursts into giggles. She brings her hand up to cover her mouth, trying to muffle the sound, her eyes uneasy, yet she seems unable to stop herself. Dr. Drakken joins in with a roar of laughter, and for an instant you wonder if that will be the last thing you ever hear.
White Diamond sits without sound or movement, a livid glistening statue. She blinks, and from some vein hidden deep beneath her perfect veneer rise two reddish tints on her cheeks, raw and humiliated.
The surface tension in the room breaks, and you feel the ambiance of evil doing as Jasper did in Malachite's last moments: letting go and folding to the ground in defeat.
You glance away for a moment to rid yourself of the smile that would never form on a loyal Aquamarine's lips, and that is when you catch sight of something that is neither White Diamond's light nor her shadow, neither stark white nor hopeless black.
It is color: more particularly, a golden bud in the center of Yellow Diamond's gem. It flares and spreads, seeping outward like an Earth dawn across every individual facet.
Your head whips sharply, disbelievingly toward Blue Diamond and you see that color also bleeds across her chest, the blue that once welcomed you to life.
Steven lets out a hefty gasp. You turn to face his way, already knowing what awaits you. The stone where Pearl once hid secrets and mirrors is alight on her forehead. Circles glow on each of Garnet's hands. Starlight radiates from the inside of Bismuth's chest. Amethyst's gem is already fully purple, the color venturing beyond its outlines to touch her skin, her hair, and her shirt.
Your eyes burn as though stung with sand, but you do not blink, afraid the scene before you will evaporate should you stop watching.
"Stop it! All of you – just stop! That is an order!" White Diamond says, rising to her knees. She presses her eyes tightly shut and then heaves them open, yet no draining light emerges; only a few lines of strain spring up around them.
As the shadowed forms in the room grow more brilliant, you begin to understand. White Diamond bends other Gems, forcing them to adopt her color. But when her own color is not absolute, she cannot retain control of anyone else's.
You know, then, that you must keep that red tint on her cheeks. It is your only hope.
A picture of the ocean fills your mind and strengthens your back as you flutter over to White Diamond on an Aquamarine's ill-fitting wings. Even you are surprised by the crisp, clean bravery of your movements as you align yourself with White Diamond's head, take a moment to recall the soothing murmur of the tides that believe in you, and drive your fist into White Diamond's jaw.
You wish you had done it the day you realized she had confiscated Pink Diamond's first Pearl. You wish you had even wanted to do it the day you realized she had confiscated Pink Diamond's first Pearl. Instead, that day Taught you all Gems ultimately belonged to White Diamond and only the dedicated servants won a place on her planet, and you bound yourself even more desperately to your devotion.
The impact pushes you backward across the ship and speckles your vision with black. Far below you, someone lets out a low-pitched shriek. White Diamond makes the smallest of sounds, akin to one Steven might make while scratching an insect bite. Even as her cheeks redden anew and her eyelids purse, fear cannot find you; you are a much smaller target than Yellow and Blue Diamond were, you are moving, and White Diamond's powers are failing her.
White Diamond's eyes spring open. Whether she could or would drain you, you will never know, for at that moment a tiny blur flies from the tunnels, hits her in the chin, and then falls to the floor, clanging and jingling against the surfaces it meets on its way down. You catch a glimpse of the object as it makes its descent. Ruby-red with what appear to be green claw marks painted across its front, it is a drink-can, the kind Peridot used to pummel Yellow Diamond during the battle on the beach.
"What in the cosmos?" White Diamond screams, tilting her head to try and squint into the tunnel.
As if in response, another can sails into the room and grazes her reddened cheek.
"Who are you? How dare you? Show yourself!" White Diamond demands even as a third can bounces off her hand.
Peridot does not show herself. She only keeps launching cans into the ship, striking White Diamond again and again on her shoulders, her chest, and her nose. Each hit renews and heightens her blush, her bland perfection growing increasingly distant. You watch White Diamond unwillingly return to Yellow Diamond her stubbornness, to Blue Diamond her grace, to Garnet her quiet wisdom, to Bismuth her sincerity, to Amethyst her earnestness, and to Pearl her courage. Even the other Pearl's undamaged eye and her braided hair begin to lose the murky white shade in which they have been bathed since before the War.
Only once each shadowed figure in the room has been restored and Steven leaps from one friend to the next, ebullient, does the barrage of cans subside.
"Uggggh. What just happened?" Amethyst blinks and wrenches her neck to one side as if it has grown stiff and sore the way Dr. Drakken's back often does.
Drakken darts confused eyes around the room. "I'm not entirely sure," he admits in what is probably meant to be a whisper, though it reaches you anyway. This time, you do smile.
"It looks like you're outnumbered, White," Garnet says as she steps up behind Steven. Even now and even in reprimand, her voice is soft and gentle. Pearl stands at her side, her arms folded; the jacket which excited her so much shimmers in light that has become brighter. Against the farthest wall of the room, Blue Diamond leans her head on Yellow's shoulder.
White Diamond sits beside her throne like a grand boat that has been beaten by the waves nevertheless. Her entire face has turned pink, a bitter pink so unlike the tone of Steven's skin, his shield, or even his mother's sword. She sighs, a sound you have never heard from her before, and her luminous black fingernails grip her temples. "What is it you want, Pink?" she says.
You wait for Steven to cringe, but he steps forward and grins at her as though greeting a new friend. "Actually, I'm Steven now," he says. "But I do know there was something my mom really, really wanted, and it's what I really, really want, too. Can you help us heal the Corrupted Gems?
"Please?" he adds, and the corners of your mouth turn up. He is still the most polite creature you have ever encountered.
When White Diamond closes her eyes this time, they remain closed. Everyone in the room with the ability to pause their breathing already has, and as you hover beside White Diamond and the decision she holds in her hands, you feel thousands of Corruptions casting malformed shadows over you, all of them holding their breath as well. So many of them you watched twist and writhe, their screams forever a stain in your mind, beating against the glass next to the words the mirror could not say because no one had ever said them near it: I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
Please, you say in silence now.
White Diamond nods once.
Only then does pain spear your arm, the one you used to punch White Diamond; only then do you glance over to see it dangling at your side, withered and crushed like Dr. Drakken's flowers were earlier. Before he can see and panic, you gather your arm to you and measure out a slender amount of the energy and light stored in your gem, guiding its flow down to the broken scraps of your arm and instructing it to repair. Immediately the work begins, its first step to partition the injured area from the rest of your body so the pain cannot cross over. It is one way a Gem's physical form can cope and one way you have taken too far in the past.
"Really?" Steven says, his voice squeaking. "Really-truly-really?"
White Diamond's harsh laugh is the most animated sound you have ever known her to make. "Why not? What do I have left to lose?"
Dr. Drakken glances around the ship again. "So…did we – did we just win?" he says.
No one answers him, the moment motionless as though preserved in a bubble. It is Blue Diamond who breaks the stillness, pulling away from Yellow Diamond, stepping forward, and holding her hand out to White Diamond. White Diamond stares at the hand for a long measure of time, confusion peeking out of a face that has never known it, before she reaches out and folds her strong, frightening fingers around Blue Diamond's. Currents of healing energy waft up your bent arm, matching what you cannot see passing between the two of them.
Were your physical form not still sore and clenched, you would believe this to be a dream.
Steven's grin is the brightest thing in the room, even now that color has come back to it. "Yeah. We won. And nobody lost."
The song of the universe has become a high-pitched scraping in your head, and you know you cannot sustain this form much longer, especially not with the energy you expended rebuilding your arm. You close your eyes and release. The ties binding this disguise to you come loose: your arms and legs extending to their natural length; the hair which you so carefully arranged into an Aquamarine's precise and blunt wedge falling into disarray; your pants returning to you, lightweight but nowhere near as vulnerable as an Aquamarine's swishing skirt. Your knees give way once when the bottoms of your gold-strapped shoes touch the floor and then again when you fall to them, and then you lie on the ground in a tumbled heap. Old instinct stiffens your body, commanding you to get up, warning you that you are too open to attack, and yet in the core of your gem thrums a new possibility: that there may be no one left to attack you.
"Yesssssss!" Dr. Drakken bounds to his feet and grabs the pair of hands nearest to him, which turn out to belong to the first Pink Pearl. He dances and twirls in glee, dragging her reanimated body along with him. "Oh, Corruptions, don't worry, everything's going to be okay," he sings. "For the Diamonds are coming, they'll be here to save the day!"
He stops and blinks down at the first Pink Pearl, with her cracked face and coiled braids. "Wait. Who are you?"
She stares back at him as if the question baffles her as much as it does him; she has been separated from herself for so long.
Yellow Diamond turns her head to address Blue Diamond. "Are all humans like him?"
"Unfortunately, no," you mutter.
Blue Diamond looks directly at you, and you blush. You had forgotten how her hearing is stronger than the other Diamonds', or perhaps it is just that she is the only one willing to listen. For the first time that you have seen since Pink Diamond left her, Blue Diamond smiles, peace rippling across the quiet, refined features.
From the eye socket comes a shorebird-cry that seems an attempt to exclaim everyone's names at once. A small green form shoots into the room like a probe being dispatched, arms waving from side to side. Peridot runs as if ready to launch herself on top of you, though at the last moment she registers your fatigue and crouches beside you instead, trying to soothe with her eager hands.
"Lapis!" she calls. "That was amazing! You did soooooo well. The voice was perfect! You're such a natural actor! And then you totally slugged her! She never even saw you coming and then, KA-POWEY!"
As soon as she pauses, you reach out and tweak her nose. "You weren't half-bad yourself. Those cans – I didn't even know you'd brought them from home until you were socking her with them."
When Peridot giggles, you see once again the barn and all the other objects you have lost: your hammock, Peridot's biscuit-shaped chair, the pretend animals, and countless meepmorps. But in that giggle you also catch a glimpse of the future – blurred and coarsely defined, as you lack Sapphire's future vision, yet with colors vibrant and shapes rounded and hopeful like Drakken's jaw.
She leaps over to Steven and embraces him, still babbling. "Steven! Thank the stars you're okay! And you're back together with yourself, instead of being two selves! I mean, the world could always use more Stevens, but it looked like you were having trouble –"
At last your limbs stop shaking and you are able to stand. Bismuth still sits beside you, scratching her head with one hand, the other pressed to her forehead. She gazes, glass-eyed, around the ship, absorbing much and understanding little. "Aww, man," she groans. "Did I miss the whole fight?"
The edge in her voice speaks of wistfulness, not bloodlust. You let the slightest of smiles form. "Yeah," you say. "But you kicked butt anyway."
Bismuth grins crookedly at you and runs over to grab Garnet in a hug and swoop Pearl up into arms thicker than any part of Pearl's own physical form. You have not yet reconciled Bismuth's warmth with her coldness, but this scene of harmony and safety would be somehow incomplete without her.
Dr. Drakken traipses up to you and holds out his arms in question. You rush into them. He holds you against his side, and you can hear the cranking, rumbling, and churning of the many human systems that allow him to rejoice, try to protect, and look forward to whatever will come next.
It is strange, how security was once inexorably linked to Homeworld, and now it is only visitors from Earth that provide sanctuary.
Drakken pulls back and examines you with big black eyes, overactive and true. "Exceptional work, Miss Lazuli," he says, bowing at his waist.
You turn your feet outward and bend your knees; it is the closest you can come to curtsying in your new clothes. "Likewise, Dr. Drakken."
"So –" Drakken peers over your head and nods in the direction of the older Pearl. "Who is she?"
"The original Pink Pearl." Your voice is quiet but strong, even as it quivers. "She was the first person White Diamond erased."
Drakken's eyebrow creases. "Pink Pearl got erased? My, that's ironic!"
You don't see how, but you assume it is something that can be left for later.
Over Drakken's shoulder, you notice that White Diamond, too, remains sitting on the first step down from her throne, still sporting a blush across her cheeks, her hands furled in her lap. It feels as wrong to see her without her authority as it would to see Blue Diamond without her cloak. Steven ascends the stairs and looks directly into her eyes, the eyes that once held the power to burn away a Gem's essence. It will be eons at least before you can award her your trust, yet Steven does not appear to have any reservations about offering his.
"Ya know, if you just let everyone be whoever they are, maybe you could let yourself be whoever you are, too," he says, so softly, to her.
White Diamond draws her legs inward as though she must keep her distance from this strange little lifeform over whom she had no control even when she held his gemstone between her fingers. Surprise washes over her face. You, however, are not surprised at all, though you still wonder if you will awaken to a far grimmer reality at any moment. Your own gem sparks, but it no longer marvels over what you witness, only cherishes it.
Steven has put his greatest talents to use as he always has: healing and freeing what everyone else tells him is beyond repair.
~So...I wanted to find a way to work the supporting team into the big confrontation with White Diamond while maintaining Steven's big climactic moment of saving himself. Also hoped to find a way to make White Diamond's redemption a little more. . . realistic and not quite as sudden but within basically the same time frame. She will still have a long way to go after this chapter. Anyway, let me know how you think I did! Love you all and hope you're staying safe!~