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Connie and Pearl had gone on several solo missions before. Connie was a wonderful student, incredibly adept with a sword (and a few other weapons) thanks to years of dutiful practice. She had a wonderful head on her shoulders, especially for strategy, and she knew Pearl’s fighting style so well and their movements were so in sync that Pearl was sure they would have fused by now if they could. The lack of fusing was a drawback for certain, but Connie being human had several other advantages - like being unaffected by most gem magic.
Pearl would never forget the beautiful shock on a Topaz’s face, the wonder in Steven’s eyes, as Connie calmly reached out and tugged a destabilizer from the gem’s hands. The thing had buzzed and crackled in her grip, and she had tossed it aside as if it was no more than a noisy stick. Connie had grinned at the shocked gem and remarked, “Kind of tingly” before raising her sword to the Topaz’s face and demanding her surrender. Connie could also walk through energy walls as if they weren’t even there, which had made for a very amusing couple of spy missions.
That was why Pearl had allowed her to grab the artifact. They had made their way down into the rocky pit, fighting a few leftover robotic soldiers that guarded it, while Pearl explained the history of the thing. The Disorienter left gems too dizzy, confused and unfocused to do much of anything, while simultaneously keeping their physical form in tact. It could be quite useful in getting information out of subjects, or even using their powers when they would otherwise be unwilling. This was fine during the war, but in an era of peace they had no used for such a thing. They intended to drop it into lava and decommission it as soon as they could.
Connie had picked up the bronze ball, tossing it a few times like it was one of her tennis toys, when it suddenly uncoiled and snapped around her wrist like an arm guard. Its humming filled the air, and Connie’s eyes had gone from bright and brilliant to unfocused and manic, flitting around the landscape in baffled wonder. The Disorienter had apparently found something to disorient in organic life, and her brain had been knocked offline. A scattered brain with her physical form completely unaffected. That physical form which was holding a broadsword.
"Zrooom! Shing! Schwing! Schwa!" she cheered and growled, swinging the weapon in question in wide, dangerous arcs.
Pearl had danced back, feeling nerves start to creep in. Oddly enough, her first thought was that Steven was not going to like any of this. She was sure Connie would be fine, but Steven would be very miffed that Pearl had allowed her to endanger herself in such a way, without even considering wrapping the artifact in some cloth to prevent direct skin contact. Pearl was certainly beating herself up over it. She smiled sweetly, made her voice cloying. "Connie, do you think we could pause with the sword for a minute and make our way to the warp?"
"Whaaaaat?" Connie asked, rolling her head back to look at her teacher. She staggered back a step from the weight of her own head throwing her off balance. "Why? You're the swordest swordwoman to ever sword! I'm doing training."
The sword casually swiped, the girl not even looking at what she cut, and a boulder sliced in half. Pearl felt a hysterical laugh bubbling up in her throat. She occasionally forgot just how deadly Connie could be with that weapon, as she was half as sweet as Steven and did her best to minimize harm in their fights. The Disorienter on her wrist had a complicated latch that would take a few moments to undo. Pearl had undone it several times herself, and would happily do it now, if it wasn’t for the sword Connie was swinging around like a sparkler on Independence Day.
Pearl held up her hands in front of her chest. "Maybe we should put down-"
"Yamero!" She shouted, holding her sword with both hands, standing off with Pearl. She approached slowly, voice an odd, throaty drawl reminiscent of those odd cartoons she and Steven loved to watch. "Baka! You dare demand I surrender my weapon? Like a dishonored samurai? I have completed my mission and the power is mine. You fear the power in the ancient relic. You are- I'm so hungry."
Her body language changed, back to loose and wobbly as the sword swung lazily in front of her. Connie’s voice went into a high pitched whine, pathetically childlike as she called into the sky. "I wanna eat. Am'ma! Sambar! Tomato rice! Rasam! En Am'ma enke?"
Pearl hoped that was a real language, and backed slowly towards the warp. Steven had said Connie knew a bit of other languages, didn’t he? Her voice was even and calm as she pulled a bottle of Steven’s essence from her head and poured it onto the nearby cracked warp. It healed with some lovely sparkles, and Pearl was relieved she wouldn’t have to find a way to drag Connie miles back to the one they had used to get here. "We have food at the house. We don't have to drop the sword, we just have to get back. Wouldn't that be nice, Connie? You can eat whatever you want once we get back there."
Connie frowned. "I want to eat Amethyst. She eats so many things. It's her turn."
"And you can do that!" Pearl said, voice breaking with panic. What did that mean ? "We just have to get back to the house first."
She stepped forward, deadly serious with her sword pointed out in front. Pearl really wished Connie would go back to fantasizing about eating Amethyst, as nightmarish a mental picture as that might have been. “I’ll go back with you, Pearl. But I know your plans. I know you want the artifact for yourself. I know you want the power coursing through my veins, the ability to snap people out of existence. I won’t be fooled by your games, Airy. I won’t be trapped in endless timeloops while you gather power to-”
But whatever Pearl was going to gather power for was lost as Connie lowered her sword, letting it drag along the ground behind her as she moved to the warp pad and whined, “Let’s go, let’s go! I miss Steven. I wanna see Steven. I miss his stupid squishy face.”
Pearl followed quickly behind her, nerves on edge as she got into swinging distance, and activated the warp pad straight away. When they landed in the beach house, Connie stumbled back. She had forgetten to balance herself on the trip, and landed on her back. Thankfully, instead of leaping up swearing vengeance, the Disorienter still seemed to have her in a nicer mood, and she giggled hysterically from her spot on the floor, feet beating at the wood as she kicked her legs with mirth. The weapon was still firmly locked in her hands, and Pearl backed away calling, “Steven? Are you home? We could use a little help!”
“Oh, hey!” Steven said cheerfully, trotting down the stairs. “How did the mis…sion…?”
Pearl watched his eyes go wide as he looked at Connie, barely able to breathe from hysterics as she rolled around on the floor, and quickly put her hands on his shoulders. She could already see him starting to worry. She had been right before. She knew he wasn’t going to like this. “She’s fine! Steven, she’s going to be fine. She just has a little artifact on her, that’s all. Once we get it off she’ll be good as new!”
He looked past Pearl, frowning a little. “What’s it doing to her? Has she been laughing like this the whole time?”
“Oh, no. I’m sure she would have passed out by now if that was the case,” Pearl said cheerfully. Steven’s face grew more distressed. By the stars, this wasn’t going well. She pushed on, “It’s fine! In gems the Disorienter does exactly what it says. It disorients a gem without disrupting their form, allowing for a fairly nonviolent way of detaining gems. It sends a series of electromagnetic pulses that-”
Steven held up a hand. “Remember the talk we had? Pretend I’m five.”
Pearl sighed, her elegant scientific explanations slipping away as she was forced to explain the crucial elements in a simple, childish way. Her annoyance about it made her tone snappish, “The bracelet goes zap in different ways and makes Connie act impulsively and strange. If we remove the bracelet, no more zap, and Connie will return to herself no worse for wear.”
“Got it. I’ll take care of this.” He patted Pearl’s shoulder and marched over to Connie with that little bit of swagger he had developed over the years. As he approached, Connie stumbled to her feet, sword limp at her side as she looked around the room like she had never seen it before. When her eyes landed on him, they lit up with recognition, and she squealed and began to babble in what Pearl still hoped was a real language. Judging from Steven’s calm attitude, it seemed to be very unconcerning.
"You're being very, very silly," Steven said with a grin. "I don’t speak enough Tamil to get half of that, Connie. I want to help, okay? Just talk to me in English."
She stared at him for a moment, the only sound the crashing waves on the beach beyond and the electric buzz of the Disorientor, before she suddenly raised a hand to her forehead with an obscenely dramatic flair, her voice so affected with emotion it sounded like an accent, "Oh, Steven. I was raised under tyranny. The world was so cruel and cold and empty. If only someone really soft and pink with a big magical destiny could save me with the power of love and communication." Her eyes widened with mock realization. "You don't think... It could be you, do you?"
The grin slipped off, replaced with an irritated scowl. "Yeah. Okay. We're getting that off right now."
"No!" she shrieked, turning to sprint out of the house.
“Connie!” he shouted as he raced after her. “Come on! Don’t make this harder than it has to be!”
The problem was that Connie was faster than him unless he tapped into his Diamond strength - but if he tapped into that there was the possibility of charging into her like a bus, and he wasn’t too fond of any consequences that could come from that. Steven chased her down the beach and back up, and soon found himself terribly winded as Connie continued to run, occasionally screaming like a banshee. As he doubled over to catch his breath, she suddenly wheeled on him, shrieking louder than ever before.
"You think I don't know what you do behind my back?" she shouted. "You're out there, making love to Juanita in the sand dunes while I stay home and care for our child! I can still hear you screaming her name!"
"Who is Juanita?!" he shouted back, pulling at his hair. "We don't have a kid! Could you hold still for ten seconds?"
Her face was pure disgust. "I can't believe you're disowning Lakshmi. On her birthday ."
Steven eyed her carefully for a moment, seeing the sword poking into the sand, and leapt for it. They had sparred plenty of times before, and he knew the holes in her style. Her brain being temporarily at half power only made it easier. She tended to overbalance to her left, so he came in on her right. As she moved back from him, he took advantage of her instinctual lean and pushed her in the same direction. Sure enough, her balance slipped, tumbling backward, and he had just enough time to give her wrist a tap and bubble the hand with the sword before she landed on her back.
He snagged the falling sword and hurled it far down the beach, into the rocks. That probably warped the edge, and though he was sure Connie would be grateful for the help, he could already imagine the frustration in her eyes as she looked forward to the hours of realigning the damage and sharpening it to perfection. But for now, she was down, and she was already coiling up to leap back to her feet. He fell on top of her, his hands pressing her shoulders into the sand, his knee pressing hard into her thigh ( Sorry, sorry, sorry, he thought) as he kept her steady and tried to get a good look at the thing wrapped around her arm.
And then, somehow, he had to not let go as Connie’s voice pitched up an octave into a whiny, anime girl voice and cried, “Baka! Yamete!”
Steven’s face burned. “You’re going to be so mad at yourself when this stupid thing is finally off.”
He finally saw the latch, a not-too-complicated thing that involved just a couple of sliding parts, and grabbed onto it. An unpleasant tingling sensation crept up his arm, neck, and into his scalp. Actually, it felt pretty good now that he thought about it. His hand stayed wrapped around the cool bronze, but he leaned back, oddly relaxed and calm as the buzzing pulsed through him. He could hold onto this stupid thing forever. He kind of wanted to take a nap. The world in front of him was swirling, the ocean up in the sky and the sky crashing down on the sand. It was so surreal. So cool.
Connie jerked away from him with a furious, “Get your own!” and lucidity crashed into him like a wave.
“Okay,” he muttered. “No touching it. I can go get gloves.”
“It’s my glove!” she shouted, and tackled his squealing self into the surf.
Five minutes later, and Steven was trekking up to the house, shirtless and soaking and missing a flip flop.
"How's it going, dude?" Amethyst asked. She was chilling on the porch, sipping at a huge glass of lemonade like he wasn’t getting beat up by his drunken best friend.
He gestured furiously to his disheveled state. "Take a guess!”
Steven stormed inside, suiting up in a pair of thin gloves, another shirt, and replacement flip flops, and came back out to find that Amethyst was still watching Connie’s manic pursuits along the beach. Only, this time, she also had a huge bucket of popcorn with her, which she munched on slowly as she watched the show. He stood in front of her, gesturing wildly towards the drunken human girl tornado-slashing through the air. “Why aren’t you helping ?”
“Shrug city, fam,” she said, and shoved another handful into her mouth.
As he headed out again, Connie dropped the sword into the sand. She was breathing hard, finally properly winded, but she smiled as she saw him. “I’m so glad you’re here, my prince. I’ve been fighting for hours, and I don’t know how much longer I can continue. The darkspawn are coming, and the Wardens have all but fallen. I think I might be the only one left.”
Okay. She was tired, but she was Connie. She was telling stories like she always did. He could make this work. They played like this all the time. He sauntered up to her, trying to seem a lot more princely, and considered speaking in his terrible Medieval Times voice before deciding it would be smarter to match her way of talking instead. “Well, my noble Warden, you’ve done well and deserve a long rest. Allow me to help you remove your armor, and we can retire to the nearest inn for food and drink.”
Her cheeks darkened as she looked away. “That’s far too forward, my prince, and with danger still about.”
He choked. “No! No, that’s not… actual armor! The armor on your arm!”
“You know I can’t ever remove my guard,” Connie said wistfully, her free hand caressing the buzzing bronze. “It’s the only thing that keeps my magic under control. Without it, I’ll rip the fabric between worlds asunder. Demons from all dimensions will come pouring in. The only way to fix it would be to remove all magic from all the worlds, and how unsatisfying of an ending would that be?”
“Oh, that’s not true,” Steven said, fumbling for a reason why it wouldn’t be. “Because I’m… a magical prince. With healing magic. And I can heal your dangerous magic away.”
She was suddenly up against him, draped on him like a heroine out of a trashy paperback, and his arm instinctively wrapped around her to keep her from falling over. Her hand came up to his cheek, the romance of it making it warm under her hand, and her voice dropped to a sweet purr. “But the only way to heal it would be to kiss me every day at the sunset. I could never be that kind of burden on you, my prince. You would really commit to a romantic embrace every night? If we were ever separated the world would end.”
Nervous, squeaky laughter escaped him. “Yeah, it sure would. I guess I could commit to that. Anything to get that arm guard off. Let’s just make sure we take it off before we do the whole committing to kissing at sunset every night.”
“That’s not how this works.” Her voice was so flat for an instant he thought she was back to lucid, before she went back to purring, “You have to kiss me first, to heal the magic away.”
He winced and groaned. “That’s really not going to work, Connie. You’re definitely not in a position to say yes.”
She rolled out of his arms and flopped face first into the sand with a groan. He kneeled down, carefully reaching for the Disorienter, only for it to turn into yet another combat. She scrambled under him, shoving and pushing and growling as her teeth struggled to dig into his wrist. Thankfully, she wasn’t vicious enough to shake her head and the simple pressure of her teeth was nowhere near strong enough to hurt him in the slightest. He patiently used his strength to get her down on her back again, pinning her arm out to the side so he could finally wrestle with the latch.
Then her growls faded as suddenly as they came. "Steven, please." Connie's voice was a breathy whine, her eyes wide and soft, her lips parted just a bit. She stared up into his face with open desire, with yearning, that made his heart flutter with shock and heat rise to his cheeks. She was so close, so warm. He hadn't noticed a second before, but something in her voice did crazy things to his stomach. She was starting to lean up, her eyes focused on his lips, and he was paralyzed. He couldn’t let her kiss him. She wasn’t in her right mind. They weren’t a cou-
And, in the moment he paused, she rolled her knees up to her breast and slammed both feet into his barrel thick chest, sending him tumbling head over his in the sand with a pathetic little yelp. Humiliated and furious, he watched as the out of her mind girl ran towards the ocean, then fell face first into the surf with more hysterical giggles. That still felt targeted at him, even though it couldn’t possibly be. And, in a terrible reminder, Amethyst’s gleeful cackle behind him made embarrassment scorch up to his ears, made him sink down into the sand with his hands over his face.
“You could help!” he shouted.
“I believe in you!” she called back.
Round three. He stormed up to Connie, ready for another brawl, and instead found her looking wistfully back at him. Her arms crossed gently over her chest. “I know you never thought I was strong enough to keep up with you. I know that’s why you never told me everything. I know that’s why you pushed me away. When I came here, when I saw your gem cracked I… I shouldn’t have just left once you were fixed. I just didn’t know what to do, Steven, so I hid at Ocean Town Academy. I didn’t know how to talk to you, how to look at you after you cut me out of your life.”
Steven frowned, a swirl of honesty and make believe in her words. “Connie? What are you talking about?”
She looked out into the waves. “I keep telling stories. None of them work right. Romance. Action. Adventure. Anime and video game stuff. I’m trying to cram myself in and I don’t think I fit right. I don’t think I’m supposed to be here. I think I’m going to keep getting caught. I’m going to keep messing up. I’m always going to be in the wrong place. I’m never going to be at the right time. I said I wouldn’t lie anymore, but I’m still lying, because I’m acting like I’m part of your universe, part of your story. I’ve only ever been pretending. It’s only ever been a story I tell myself to pretend I matter. If you cut my subplot nothing changes at all. You’d make it without me.”
“That's not true,” he whispered. “Connie, you’re… you changed everything. You changed my whole life. You’re my first real friend. You’re my best friend. You’re the only person I’ve ever told everything. You’re the only one I can talk about Homeworld with. You made me a better person over and over. You helped me be honest with how I feel. You helped me work through my anger and my fear and my guilt. When I hurt you, you made me stop. I don’t know who I’d be without you, Connie, but I know it isn’t good.”
Her eyes fell closed. “I’m so tired.”
Steven slowly walked closer, putting his hand on her shoulder. “I know. It’s been a long day for you.”
“It’s not that.” She whimpered. “I’m always tired. I can’t stop working but it’s never good enough. I’m still falling behind.”
“I’ll fix it. C’mere,” he murmured. He cradled her head softly to the crook of his neck, where it had rested hundreds of times before. Steven’s hand slipped softly into her hair, scratching softly at her scalp as he carefully, blindly, fumbled for the latch on her wrist. Something gave, and there was a quiet wumph of something heavy falling into the sand. Her arms wrapped around him tight, and his came around her waist, supporting her weight as the mania from the device fell away and exhaustion hit her all at once. He rocked her gently. “That’s it. You’re okay. I’m here.”
“I didn’t mean any of that,” she mumbled, her lips brushing against the sensitive skin of his neck. “I was out of my-”
“I want you here,” he whispered fiercely. She stiffened in his arms, muscles tensing, but she was too tired to flee. Her muscles failed, and they sunk down into the sand together. “I always want you here, as much as you want to be here. Everyone wants you here, and you make everything better when you are.”
“The last part was true,” she confessed quietly. “I don’t think I fit the story.”
“I’ll make you fit,” he retorted. “Or we’ll write a new one. It’s not worth telling if you aren’t there.”
She was already half-way in his lap, so he tugged her in the rest of the way. It had gotten easier over the years. She was just a touch taller, but he was bigger in every other way. When he wrapped her up she was swallowed up by him, and she perfectly filled his arms. And they knew they fit together because human bodies (and half-human ones) were squishy and soft, and that all bodies fit together perfectly if you wanted them to, but snuggling up together still felt like interlocking puzzle pieces, banishing doubts that there was any alternative to being by each other’s sides.
“The sand’s getting in my pants.” Connie sighed at last. “We should move this to your room.”
And as everything settled back to normal, Steven clutched her tight so she couldn’t run away. He could already feel her bracing, that she knew what was coming as well as he did, and he purred into her ear, “That’s far too forward, my Warden.”
Her humiliated scream of rage nearly deafened him.