Chapter Text
(Inspiration: art by cyndavilachase)
It's said that a black hole bends the fabric of space around itself and it is impossible to escape its gravitational pull; it's one of the universe's greatest anomalies and a beautiful, destructive phenomena. It's theorized that near a black hole, time slows, and at its event horizon, time stops altogether.
It's believed that black holes devour anything that falls into the net of its event horizon. They're deadly, carnivorous, cannibalistic.
Black holes are found throughout the universe, often times not discovered until too late, hiding, and not until they've already begun corrupting a nearby star.
Oftentimes, black holes can be found on planet Earth, too.
Connie can testify about one.
Universe
yo͞o·nē·vers
u·ni·versenoun
- Defined as: A particular sphere of activity, interest, or experience.
- Defined as: The whole world, especially with reference to humanity.
- Defined as: a) The world of human experience. b) All existing matter and space considered as a whole; the cosmos.
- Defined as: A distinct field or province of thought or reality that forms a closed system or self-inclusive and independent organization.
- Defined as: Responsibility; inheritance; Pink; galaxies and star clusters unjustly thrusted into prepubescent hands of a half-human prince who hadn't ever been granted the privilege of touching the hand of his mother or crying on the shoulder of his mother.
On November 14th at 4:31 AM, a healthy baby girl is born to Priyanka and Doug Maheswaran. Five pounds, seven ounces. Birthed with a tuff of black hair on her head, blushed fatty skin, large and irresistible and impressionable eyes. She's five days old when her mother finally settles on a name: Kanupriya—Kan to Kanni to—nicknamed Connie for short.
Connie has had a lot to deal with. She's to grow up with her whole life planned out for her—with some wiggle room, of course. She's to be put in a Head-start program for preschool, then get moved up a grade or two once beginning enrollment. She's to have a rigid school and study schedule, and graduate high school with nothing lower than a 4.0 GPA. When applying for universities, the interest and persuasion planned to be ingrained at toddler age will take effect then, driving her interests in the medical field and will feed into her decisions for university applications. There, she will earn a degree in a medical field and maybe, just maybe, she'll marry a doctor and move out and live in a relationship where she won't ever have to worry and become a devoted wife and pop out two or three—
She's expected to produce nothing short of 200% in success.
Expectations are one of the worst things parents can force their children to inherit, whether with selfish intentions or not.
Connie has had to deal with a lot—like how to express her personal feelings and interests to her strict parents; like finding out what she wants for herself. Like trying to speak in a way that her parents will most likely be persuaded in her favor. Like how her life turns on its head at twelve years old and she meets the son of a black hole.
His name, of all things, is Steven.
When Connie is twelve, she learns that life can't always be fixed with timidness and pacifism. Emotions aren't things to solve, like equations, and they don't always have predictable outcomes like an algebraic calculation or step-by-step directions.
Then four months after Connie's twelfth birthday, she stares out at the rolling ocean waves and strikes a conversation with the lonely son with galaxies in his eyes.
The boy was born from a literal supernova explosion and a van-dwelling couch-surfer, and raised by alien women—the most peculiar combination with the boy being an eccentric outcome, Connie thinks. The boy is an amalgam of both fascination and dreadful misery. And he strikes a metaphorical match, hands it to Connie, and soon she's able to create the flames of her own fire.
It isn't long—a year and two months, to be exact—until they find out that the aforementioned supernova had collapsed long ago, hiding behind the veil of stars and sparkles and sanguine pink and false pretense. The supernova had a name, then, too: Rose Quartz—Steven's mother.
And then, Connie watches the star-child—Steven—slowly collapse on his own over the duration of years, forced to bend and break to fill out the mold and the legacy left by his mother. It's too much pressure, expectations, and responsibility. In turn, Connie watches becomes as self-cannibalistic as his mother had been during Rose's first conception.
Connie used to study the stars through her telescope.
Now, two more years after meeting the Universe boy, she witnesses the evolution of a star as he spills out on the triple-waxed hardwood floor of his living room, anguished and catastrophic and self-destructive. Loud. Horrid.
Steven involuntarily bleeds out on his living room floor, his family watching, while his body bulges and contorts, shifts, and bones and muscles reshape. Horns sprout from his skull and his jaw cracks and incisors sharpen, blood dribbling into his eyes and spilling from his jaw. He screams out in agony.
As a child, Connie Maheswaran used to memorize the constellations outside her bedroom window and in rented library books.
On the edge of sixteen, she makes her own star map with blue ballpoint pens, connecting the faint freckles on the back shoulders of the star-child Steven, after his healing battle scars are bandaged.
Connie's fingers glide over the leftover burn scars from comet impacts during battle and the momentary darkened, bruised skin earned from burning solar flares, the permanent reminders of tarnished childhood memories by invading aliens come to murder him. There are old claw marks that left laceration scars leading to his core too which Connie sees, sometimes, when he's asleep and his shirt rises up to expose the gem embedded in his body where his belly button should be...
And then Connie thinks about time.
She thinks about relativity. She thinks about death, life, and infinity.
Albert Einstein proposed the concept of spacetime as being like a stretched bedsheet: if it is held flat at each corner and a ball was placed in its center, the ball would be an individual's masses turning in the void of outer space. The heavier the ball, the deeper the indent, therefore the greater its mass and gravity by extension.
Earth—humans; Jamie, Sadie, Lars, Kevin, Sour Cream, Kiki, Greg, Vidalia, Connie—are tennis balls, golf balls, racquet balls barely making a dent.
Then, with the advantage of a warp pad to travel across the universe, a shapeshifting metal ball—a tall, big-haired alien-woman housing the same belly-button gem as Steven; Rose Quartz—lands on Earth years ago and courts a lighter weight ball named Greg who had been nonethewiser, believing she was an angel from the heavens, a living star walking among mere humans.
Unknowingly, this immortal ball had actually shapeshifted from a heavy bowling ball, and she's not the lightweight aluminum as she appeared to be.
"I barely know you," says the insignificant "racquet ball" years ago, forbidding his own developing emotions.
The "bowling ball" freezes in his arms, the ground lights of the outdoor concert stage making her appear like stardust, and she stares off at the horizon from over his head. "Maybe that's a good thing."
She thinks about her old servant whose eye is now disfigured beyond repair.
"She had a scream that could crack the walls,"
the original Pink PearlWhite Pearl calmly defended. "She didn't mean to hurt me. I just happened to be standing too close to her that time."
And, she thinks about the exuberant personification of joy, her old playmate who was lied to and knowingly left behind but who still hoped for her to return.
"Every day was so much fun...at least, that's what I thought," shared Pink Spinel. "Aren't I a fool to have happily listened, happy to stay? Happily watching her drift away."
And, she thinks about her ex-partner, fellow escapee from Homeworld who loved her unconditionally and more than she deserved.
"Who am I now in this world without her?" Pearl wondered aloud. "Petty and dull with the nerve to doubt her."
And, she thinks about her close blacksmith friend whose might was as strong as her forged swords, but whom the "bowling ball" poofed and trapped in a bubble to lock away, too fearful that her lies and shrouded identity would be found out—and then subjectively killed.
"What kind of leader cares more about the Gems of her enemy than her own?" Bismuth challenged. "You should have shattered me back then... At least if I'm in pieces, I wouldn't know how little I meant to you; you didn't even tell them... You bubbled me away and you didn't even tell your friends—my friends!"
And, she remembers, "Oh, it's you" spoken by her equals—other Diamond Gems of royalty—with degradation, and the "bowling ball" remembers shattering glass with her fist and those she's betrayed, who she led astray, and the victims of her crossfires who drifted too close and destroyed by the pull of her gravity towards her event horizon.
"I'm... Not a good person," she thinks.
"I'm not a real person," she says instead—a black hole, true to her large size, and disguised in a cloud of pink ringlet curls and a cotton silk dress.
"How are we going to make this work? Us?" Said the "racquet ball," unaware of how close he’s drifting to her danger zone.
According to Einstein, bowling balls—made out of heavy reactive resin—make the deepest known indents in the metaphoric bedsheet of spacetime. These "bowling balls" are the carnivores of the stars, the invisible killers that distort the light around them being the only way to discover them. The black holes.
And when they come in contact with other objects, their victims are drawn in and consequently destroyed before ever realizing.
Reading Greg's angst and teary eyes, Rose Quartz asks, "Is this torture?"
"Worse."
"I'm so sorry, Greg."
Connie is thirteen when she realizes that books are best for reading and less for trying to imitate into real life. She finds this out through lying to her parents' face, then immediately nearly losing an arm then her head from her shoulders, and then stares down death in the face. And it is consequently a lot less exciting than she imagines.
Six months into being thirteen, Connie travels lightyears to a distant planet and defies laws of nature and ages a minimum of five years. Metaphorically.
At thirteen she performs a forbidden dance, learns a different, more literal meaning of the saying "two becoming one," lives another's experience by diving into the mind of a celestial, and nearly dies again. She walks among the land of giants—towering as tall as four-story skyscrapers—and she holds back tears.
Connie witnesses death, sees enough horrific body transformations and disfigurations that stay in her dreams for years; she's forced inside an alien's body like being stuck between walls, outsmarts an executioner, comes near death again, and then she sees a near beheading—of sorts—and she holds death right in her premature arms, feeling the last ragged few gasps for air from the star-child—from her friend—as Steven's life fades away in front of her prepubescent eyes.
As his time ticks away like blood from a bullet to the head, quickly becoming lifeless from his core—his life-source—from his pink gemstone torn from his body on the polished floors of a throne room with an audience to watch through his family turned into living marionette puppets against their will by the eighty-two foot-tall tyrant Diamond ruler.
Connie cries—because after it all, she's brave, yes, and very, extremely persevering, but she's scared. She’s excruciatingly, violently terrified. Because—even though the title knight and warrior are self-assurance and the aliases are comforting—at the end of the day she's still thirteen. She's still a child. She's too young and hasn't even started high school or hit puberty yet. She still sleeps with a nightlight, makes a wish at every 11:11, and she's only just started her menstrual cycle. She misses her childhood stuffed elephant. She misses her mother's biriyani and warm embrace and her father burning incense.
Connie lives a lifetime more—three even, it feels, maybe—and when she returns to Earth, she's spent and wary and experienced and bored.
Priyanka sends her daughter back to school after she returns to Earth without knowing a thing—Connie struggles for three weeks on how to share the details, of when to bring it up, of what words to use, and then whether she should tell the truth at all.
Connie returns to normal and she finds out that she doesn't want to go. She doesn't want to see the white-washed walls and graffitied metal lockers and last-minute projects stapled to bulletin boards and cobweb-infested trophies locked behind glass and lukewarm beefaroni and tacos for lunch with too-dry bread rolls and desks with uneven legs and surface edges that are chipped and permanently scarred with drawings and deeply etched messages.
She returns and completes middle school, graduates alongside classmates and poses for photos and ignores her mother’s excited squeals. Her mind spaces out, and at the first drumbeat as the band begins to play, she has a panic attack.
The girl beside Connie glances over, unamused, and is never aware of the fearful images playing behind Connie’s eyes—that the bass drum sounds like a spaceship blasting off, that it’s similar to when Jasper, a brutish butterscotch-orange Gem’s, helmet colliding with Garnet’s gauntlets when she’d been sure she was to be trampled to death. That it reminds her of horrific corrupted creatures emerging from cavernous rock walls.
The girl in the metal, foldable chair beside her watches with little interest as Connie jumps to her feet and rummages through her pockets beneath her graduation gown, searching for the handle of Rose Quartz’s heirloom sword, eyes wide and terrified, searching for the echoes of danger.
Luckily, she isn't called out about it. And when her wrist is touched by a girl in the row in front—a girl from Reading and Science classes, Connie remembers, and who is clearly concerned—Connie fades back to the present.
The bass drum beats in time with the rest of the eighth grade band. Connie's asked if she's "okay?"
She shivers once and lies that she's "just fine, just startled."
The rest of the ceremony goes by in a blur. She deflects questions about her attack when her parents later question her action.
“Tell us about a significant event in your life,” her English teacher instructs to a class full of uninterested fourteen-year olds.
Boys and girls, they obediently—with some anticipated groaning—open their journals and share mundane memories: a birthday. A family trip. A week at a theme park. A camping expedition. A first broken bone. A now-deceased pet.
“Tell us about yourself,” the class is instructed.
Connie is in ninth grade now and in her first year of high school. She's crudely finding out that it isn't like the poorly-scripted television shows or the young adult novels she binge-read.
One girl raises her hand and asks if she can write about her first menstruation. One boy writes about stealing his first kiss last week. One girl writes about befriending a cancer survivor.
Connie stares at her blank pages for ten minutes before she’s approached by her teacher in worry.
“Are you having trouble?”
Connie shrugs her shoulders and partially lies that she couldn’t decide on a life-changing event. These daily journal entries are meant to serve as a partial diary but some writing exercises are graded.
The woman pats Connie’s shoulder and cheerfully exclaims that anything is allowed; the only one who will be reading this entry are the writers. Connie doesn’t truly trust her.
“You have fifteen more minutes,” the teacher announces.
And so, Connie writes about feeling out of place in school for the “Tell me about yourself” paragraph. She vents about feeling as if she doesn’t deserve her friends, that it feels like she wears a mask in public, to her parents, and community, and she doesn’t feel like she can prevent the flip-switch change in persona. She either puts up an obedient, barely objecting attitude at home or she is the fearless knight to her friends who and is the one who never cracks, never breaks down, and she’s always there for someone to lean on or to give advice.
She feels like a fraud to who she truly is. She feels like she's going to eventually lose her mind.
For the “Significant life event” paragraph, she writes about the feeling of her body contorting and re-forming to create a new, singular being with the lone-boy who has a gravitational-like pull to her, keeping her forever near. She writes about her interest in physical endurance fuels her flashbacks to when she nearly drowned, and she hasn’t swam in the ocean in five years. She writes a “fun fact” that she learned swords fighting and used it to “poof” people who kidnapped and imprisoned her.
Three days later, Connie’s parents are contacted on the pretense that Connie had premature sexual experiences and some prevailing trauma from endangering encounters—going by Connie’s word choices and what the teacher assumes are metaphors.
“My wife is a psychologist,” the teacher shares after scheduling a parent-teacher meeting. “And from what I picked up from her, these events Connie wrote about can severely impact her psychological development as she ages and matures. Not to mention how, if gone unchecked, it will impact her relationships, her perception of the world, and the relationship with herself.”
The Maheswarans understand and thank the teacher. Afterwards, they pick up Connie from tennis practice and the car ride home is uncharacteristically silent. When they pull into the driveway, a pink lion is waiting in their lawn. Her parents watch Connie gleefully embrace the large feline and sink into its lush mane and her parents quietly fret over how to bring up the topic of their daughter's journal—about the written entries, about their worries, her teacher’s concerns, and needing explanations.
Connie finds herself in a foreign room across from a woman with blonde hair and deep-set wrinkles. Two Master’s degree and a PhD are framed in cherry wood hang on the wall above an office water dispenser. An essential oil diffuser releases lavender and rose every fifteen minutes. And Connie feels no bit of concern and instead feels dread when the woman compliments her attire, when she informs why Connie’s parents brought her here—like Connie hadn’t already figured it out—and the woman shares a bullshit story about her own first therapist visit as an even more pitiful attempt at trying to connect.
In truth, Connie feels very little for this woman’s attempts. She doesn’t care but plays along anyway, not realizing her mask comes on even as she nods along and asks more questions about the woman than Connie is answering about herself.
Connie crosses her knees and her ankles and is polite as she smiles when she’s asked, “How are you feeling?”
Fine, Connie answers, the same she does for every visit until she slowly begins to reveals her truth.
“How are you feeling?”
Same answer as on Tuesday.
“How are you feeling?”
Annoyed.
“How are you feeling?”
Irritated.
“How are you feeling?”
Bored.
“How are you feeling?”
Apathetic.
“How are you feeling?”
Depressed.
One day, Connie is greeted by a newly written, one-word message left from the class before in black pen on her assigned desk in science class: I'm so fucking bored x_x
She holds off her urge until thirty minutes into the lesson. She writes underneath it: ikr! I would rather still be on break than here. Literally. She doesn't think much of it.
The next day, she's greeted by a follow up message, written in black pen ink again: If the world ended again and the continents shifted again it would be much more interesting than this. I would even take going to outer space.
Connie responds in dark red pen beneath it: Same! Outer space is SO much more interesting than this
You say that like you have been, Appears the next day.
I have, Connie writes that afternoon.
HOW? You go to space summer camp? Is written halfway down the desk the next day.
I know a guy ;) No I haven't been to space camp. Have you been?
Yeah I went last summer, going this summer. Did you go to space because a rich guy? Your boyfriend?
No. Just special. Not my boyfriend
Sure *rolling-eyes face* And are you a girl or boy? idk why but I picture you as a girl. What's your friend's name then?
I'm a girl. And I see you as a guy, are you? And my friend, I'll just call him Star.
What's your name?