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There was a knock on her window at midnight.
A string of nonsensical curses came out of Connie as she sprung up from her desk, knocking her chair over. She was about to grab her sword when she realized the face peering through the window of her dorm was pink. Lars pressed his cheek against the glass, trying to get a good look inside, which was scary enough that she was reaching for her sword before she knew it.
She could’ve been changing. She could’ve been… well, she was a bit boring to be honest, so that was probably just about the only upsetting thing he could’ve seen through her window, and she would have closed her blinds if she was. Still, it was the principle of the thing. You didn’t just run around disturbing young ladies at midnight.
Connie threw open the window with a hiss, “Lars! What’s wrong with you? What are you doing in-”
“Moon’s haunted,” he explained. He peered behind her, his eyes scanning her room, and for a moment she stiffened. She expected there to be something worth looking at, but instead Lars brought his eyes back to hers and announced, “Your dorm’s shit.”
It was, but it wasn’t his place to say that. She crossed her arms and glared down at him, and she was surprised to find him cringe back from her glare. Lion came behind her, his body brushing against her waist as he approached, and she chalked Lars’s reaction up to that. “Why are you here?”
“Because I want you to come with me to the moon? Duh?” He rolled his eyes. Then they flicked around the room again. She looked behind her, baffled, but there was nothing there. “Why else would I come here at midnight telling you the moon’s haunted?”
Really, why would he come see her at midnight? It seemed like the moon being haunted was something that could wait until morning. It certainly wasn’t worth portaling or flying all over the country to bother her at college. She gave him a very, very longwinded explanation of all the responsibilities she had - essays, lab reports, readings, club activities. It was the kind of thing that normally quieted Steven right down about whatever adventure he wanted to go on.
Lars looked unimpressed. His hands drummed anxiously at the windowsill. “Okay, so, like… I’ll buy you booze?”
She looked even more baffled. “I’m seventeen. That’s illegal.”
“Yeah. That’s why I would buy it for you in exchange for you doing this for me,” he drawled. “Because I’m… old enough.”
“Oh, congratulations. You’re so mature.” She scoffed. “I’m not breaking the law for some terrible alcohol.”
He eyed her for a moment, then guessed, “Weed?”
Well, this was a waste of time. She grabbed for the window to slam it shut, and was only half successful as it slammed on his hips. He was muscling his way into her room, grunting as his sneakers scrabbled on the brick outside. “Connie, please.” He groaned, looking up at her with big, pleading eyes. “My whole crew got poofed in a lunar base and I need help getting them out.”
“Why didn’t you just say that?”
She opened the window again and looked back in her room for her sword, hearing behind her, “I forgot your hero complex,” and she retorted, “It’s called being a good person,” and he made a bunch of grunting sounds as he tumbled into her room and shoved Lion off him as the overgrown housecat tried to lick his face. Really, that was about as friendly as they ever got with each other, so it was going well.
Connie grabbed her old bomber jacket as Lars said some mean words to Lion in a not-so-mean voice, mostly about licking being disgusting. She picked up her sword from its spot on the wall, lazily slapping Lars’s hand as he tried to pull open a drawer on her desk because nobody from Beach City knew the first thing about manners or privacy.
She hadn’t expected him to yelp, to jerk back so hard, when playful touches were so common between them. She looked at him for a moment in silence, and he stared up at her, cradling his hand as if she had stabbed it instead of hit it. An awkward apology fell from her lips, but Lars didn’t acknowledge it.
He dragged her out into the night, and Lion came along behind them.
They were alone on the ship. By the time she realized that, the Earth was a vanishing blue marble behind in the wide window. His ship was oddly quiet without the rest of his crew on board. The space felt far too big for just the two of them, and it felt even lonelier with Lars in his captain’s chair, manually piloting and not telling her anything about the haunted moon.
Lion’s head was heavy in her lap, the smell of him the only thing that broke up the sting of metal and sterilizer filling her nose. At least it was nice to know the gems kept the place clean with an organic body on board. Connie sunk down in her chair, muttering, “So we’re not gonna get Steven or the gems?”
“No gems.”
She rolled her eyes, propping her chin up on her hand. “Are you going to explain anything or are you sticking with moon’s haunted?”
“Whatever’s in there destabilizes gems. So they’ll poof, and who knows what’ll happen to Steven. It’s a human mission.” Lars looked behind him, where Lion snuggled up with her, then back down at his own pink hand. He kindly amended, “It’s a mammal mission.”
“And what is this mammal supposed to be doing?” she asked dryly.
He shrugged, his shoulders hunching, and mumbled, “Smash shit with your sword if a ghost shows up?”
“If you don’t take this seriously, I’m taking Lion and going home. He can make it from the moon, you know.”
“Alright!” He snapped and flicked a few buttons on the ship to set the autopilot. It engaged with a pretty little chime, and he spun around in his captain’s chair to face her.
Lars didn’t seem so Lars now. He leaned onto his knees, his weight dragging down his slender frame. She didn’t like the tired look in his eyes, the slump of his shoulders, the way his voice sounded like he was dragging himself out of some kind of hell. “I’m gonna sound crazy, but I need you to believe me.”
“Alright.”
“Really? That easy?”
She gestured to the lion in her lap. “I’m used to believing the unbelievable.”
He looked a bit better at that, but barely. Lars sounded more like the captain he’d become as he debriefed her. The Off-Colors had picked up an energy signature on the dark side of Earth’s moon on their way off-planet and decided to investigate. It wasn’t anything substantial. The energy read was small enough to be an error, and if they hadn’t been orbiting the moon on their way out they wouldn’t have caught it at all.
But sometimes little things like that were old gem relics that barely worked anymore. It could be good for a couple of days of exploration, sometimes even good for an adventure if there was stuff to follow up on. If nothing else, with it being so close to Earth, there wasn’t much risk in looking around.
They mostly chased excitement and entertainment, as none of them needed much to survive, so it was exactly what they were looking for. They’d done it a million times before, and while it wasn’t exactly safe, it was better than spending a few millennia sitting around a bakeshop.
He detailed their landing and departure, all of which were normal aside from Rhodonite saying the place was giving her the creeps. He was quick to add that Rhodonite often got the creeps from old places, so even that wasn’t too off. The moon base they had found was old and only half-completed. The ground floor on the surface was in shambles, never finished and worn with time, but the two basement floors showed up as complete on the scans.
“Wait,” Connie interrupted. “How are you going to get me in there? I need atmosphere.”
“Don’t worry, I always test it,” he said. He held his hand parallel to the floor, gesturing up and down to represent each floor. “The surface floor doesn’t have anything, but B1 has a standard gem atmosphere that’s just a little cold because the space-proofing has worn down a little. B2 is just like the ship. All breathable, all safe, warm enough. We can just portal there and all you have to do is not open the big door marked exit.”
“Gem doors aren’t marked exit.”
“Can you not?”
She could, although it took effort. She bit her tongue and let him continue.
They hadn’t had any problems on the ground floor, and had found it unsurprisingly barren. They had searched for around a day, brushing off moon dust and scavenging for old tech. With it not being completed, there were only the bones of the structure left. There was nothing worth seeing, not even footprints.
Connie wanted to point out that it was a bit odd for there to not be footprints - that kind of thing didn’t vanish for millions of years, not thousands - but she supposed it was easy enough to say the gems had swept it clean when they abandoned the project. That wasn’t unusual for them. Besides, she didn’t want Lars to make that face at her and go Can you not? again.
The Off-Colors had entered the basement, and all of them had started getting uncomfortable. Even Paddy was unsteady, sensing something wrong in the air. Paddy was slow to pick things up, but she was rarely wrong. With a few more scans, they found the signature was still live.
There were a few odd noises that were hard to describe, but they had experience with things like that too. Sometimes old structures shifted, causing subsonic rumbling that made gems and humans uncomfortable as they braced for the possibility of collapse.
“Was the first floor empty too?”
“Yeah. B1 was empty. Only difference was that it was finished, so all the rooms were set up like labs. Chairs, tables, all that kind of stuff.” He frowned, rubbing the back of his neck. “Everything was fine until B2.”
“Where everyone got poofed?”
He nodded. “On the stairs. It was like there was some kind of… pulse? I can’t explain it. Whatever it was, it took out everyone at once. Everyone lost their form, and even I was just…”
Lars rubbed his hand over his mouth now, lips pressed in a thin line. “Gem stuff doesn’t really work on me, but I felt it. It was like my body couldn’t figure out what to do. I was throwing up. I was dizzy. I thought I was gonna pass out or die for real for a second.”
Connie’s brows came together as she slowly scratched Lion’s mane. “The disruption wasn’t staggered? There wasn’t a delay between each person getting poofed, it all happened simultaneously?”
“As best I can tell.”
“That is.. weird, ” she said slowly.
There were ray disruptors, which were uncommon but not impossible. Still, the rays could only be channeled into a thin beam. If the wielder got lucky, maybe there was a chance of taking down two gems at once. Each gem should have been poofed in a sequence of a swinging beam, and it wouldn’t be fast either. Ray disruptors weren’t handheld. They were massive things that sat on machinery and took real effort to turn.
She’d done plenty of research into gem weaponry over the years, casually before Spinel and intensely after the odd way Steven’s gem had reacted to her scythe. Her knowledge was encyclopedic by now, and unless everyone in the gempire had agreed to keep certain weapons a secret, a pulse of disruption shouldn’t have existed.
As delicately as she could manage, she said, “What you’re describing should be impossible.”
“I know.” He sighed and rocked back in his chair. “The most powerful weapon I know that can hit a whole area like that is the suspension wands, and those don’t hurt. They can only lock you in place. And, I mean, those work on me but…disruptors? I’m still organic. It shouldn’t mess me up.”
She brushed her thumb along her chin as she considered that. “On full blast with Yellow Diamond, I can get a little bit of tingling. If it’s strong enough, it can definitely do something to an organic nervous system, and you’ve got enough of Steven’s magic in you for it to bug you. But all the technology derives from Yellow Diamond. I don’t know how anything could be stronger than her. What happened after that?”
His eyes met hers, dark and worried. “I need you to believe what I’m gonna say.”
She tangled her fingers in Lion’s mane and nodded once.
Lars rubbed his hand over his mouth again. Rubbed his palms against his thighs. She was quiet as he fidgeted, building up the courage to say whatever crazy thing had happened to him, and after a deep breath he finally muttered, “I was possessed.”
“Possessed?”
She didn’t mean to sound disbelieving, but the shock in her voice was obvious. He groaned. “I told you! I told you it’s crazy, but the moon’s haunted. There’s some kind of gem ghost or something. I’m telling you, something possessed me.”
“Gems don’t even have a concept of ghosts,” Connie retorted, unable to stop herself. “They don’t believe in souls, or an afterlife, or-”
“Okay, fine! Don’t call it a ghost!” he snapped. “But I’ve been all over the galaxy, and the only thing I’ve ever even heard of that can affect gems and me like this is Steven. Steven wasn’t in that basement. Nothing Steven did was anywhere near there.”
“You’re sure?” she asked. “Maybe Steven accidentally brought something to life, or touched something-”
“I know what it feels like to have Steven possess me.” He grimaced. “Trust me. I know his magic. It wasn’t anything like him.”
She looked away with a wince of her own. “I forgot. Sorry.”
They sat in silence for a minute, nothing but the soft hum of the ship and the annoyingly clean smell stinging her nose. A quiet chime signaled their arrival on the moon, and a glance outside proved that the remnants of a gem structure sat before them. Lion made a little grunt, raising himself a bit to gently place his nose against her cheek. Her arms wrapped around him, searching for the familiar feeling that was almost like fusion. Lion felt like Steven. It was something she couldn’t describe, but she understood how Lars would know for sure whether something had come from her boyfriend when it had been messing around in his brain.
Connie was lucky enough to be completely organic, for any touch of gem magic on her to be rare so that it wasn’t easy for her to identify where things came from. But she knew Steven, and Lars knew Steven, and though it felt impossible, she couldn’t believe that Lars would mistake that feeling for anything else. His aura was distinct.
“I don’t know what’s down there,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to know. If I had gotten my crew out, I wouldn’t be going back there.”
She swallowed but it did nothing to ease the knot in her throat. “You left them behind?”
He didn’t answer, but he didn’t need to. The weight of it hung in the air, the impossibility of Lars ever willingly leaving a member of his crew. There was no option but possession, complete and total. If Lars had even the smallest scrap of choice, he wouldn’t have left without every one of his friends in his arms. Whatever was down there had made Lars into a puppet, and she could figure out the rest from there. He was hoping that either that possession could only affect one person at a time, or that her being human would make her entirely immune.
“Peridot says, in the future, my exposure to Steven could affect me like it affects you,” she said carefully. “But she says it hasn’t happened yet. His powers are too good with working with biology. I’m still completely organic, probably until my forties or fifties. Late-twenties is the earliest anything would change.”
“I don’t want you to be hurt,” he whispered. “If I thought I had a choice, I wouldn’t do this, but… I couldn’t fight it, Connie. I don’t know where it came from and I couldn’t fight it. My body just walked out, and it felt awful, and disgusting and…”
It was quiet again, his breathing shaky as he held his head in his hands.
When he spoke, his voice trembled. “If I get possessed again, it’s fine. If I can be a distraction so you can get them out, that’s all that matters. I just want to get my friends and go home. Whatever awful shit is down there can stay down there”
Her index finger slid across the hilt of her sword. “It was that bad? You really don’t want to know what it was?”
“I love exploring shit,” he said. “But that? No way in hell. I’m done with it. This is just a rescue mission. If you wanna come back with other people after being in there, you go ahead. I’m not your dad. But I’m telling you, I want to get in and out of there as fast as I can, and once I’m out I’m never going back.”
Connie was a curious person - probably more curious than Lars. But that didn’t mean that Lars was uninterested or dull. For years he’d been traveling and come back with stories about crazy planets, cloud nebulae that tasted like cotton candy, gem relics that she had refused to touch once he told her what they did. He might have been a coward when she first met him, but she’d never say that now, and she wasn’t stupid. There was no brushing off how badly he’d been rattled.
Whatever it was, now wasn’t the time to find out.
“In and out rescue.” She drew her sword and stood, giving Lion one more firm pat. “Go ahead and make a portal.”
He’d gotten good at that over time. With a snap of his fingers, pink swirled open, the blue and white passage almost visible through the haze. They both gave Lion the chance to sniff. It had taken quite a few tries before he was comfortable enough to go through a portal that wasn’t his own, and despite his exposure to it, he was still wary of the magic that was and wasn’t his own. Connie couldn’t tell the difference, but Lion’s sides heaved with investigatory sniffs as he circled, letting out a snort and sneeze a couple times before sitting and looking back at her with a bemused expression.
“You can make your own if it bothers you.” Connie giggled as Lion huffed.
Lars rolled his eyes at the display. Magic siblings they might have been, but that didn’t mean they felt any kinship together - despite being connected through their hair. Lars was never going to be a pet kind of guy. He stepped through his portal, then Lion stepped through, and Connie followed them after. Off the ship, into the base.
The first thing she noticed that it was cold. Not horribly cold - like most gem places, she could bear it in jeans and a t-shirt, but it still sat somewhere in the low sixties. The change from Lars’ ship, which usually ran around ten degrees hotter, sent a chill down her spine as she and Lion stepped onto the smooth, green tile. She paused as that sunk in, the pale green below her pretty but still something she rarely saw in gem architecture.
“Blue and Yellow,” she murmured. She prodded the wall, the same color as the floor and slick and smooth.
“You have a problem with green?” Lars drawled.
“Think about it. It’s Pink’s moon, so what were Blue and Yellow doing building a base on it?”
“Babysitting?”
She followed behind him as he continued down the hall, her eyes still scanning the walls for anything odd. Lion padded beside her, taking big wooshing breaths as they followed Lars. She wondered what he was smelling, because as far as she could tell the place smelled just as unpleasantly sterile as they ship they’d been on. But nothing lived here, so there wasn’t much to dirty the place up.
Connie considered herself stable under pressure, but normally she was surrounded by a fleet of seasoned warriors. Today it was just Lars and Lion, and between the two of them, their nerves felt contagious. She found herself constantly looking back to Lion, watching him sniff, discomfort growing in her gut as he kept up his thorough investigation.
“Something feels off,” she muttered.
“Everything is off! This place is fucking haunted.”
They had a brief debate. She pointed out the lights were on, and he pointed out that the lights probably ran on the same system that powered the atmosphere. She pointed out how clean it was, and he asked what would make it dirty when the place was vacuum-sealed, hence why she could even wander the place at all. Connie asked if Lars could feel the weirdness that the gems felt, which just prompted Lars to insist they move faster. In and out.
Conversation was tight and tense, nothing like the more laidback conversations with the Crystal Gems. Of course, she’d rarely been with the gems in moments they felt terrified. She hadn’t realized how contagious it would be to watch Lars jump at every shadow and brace at every little sound.
She gently tugged Lion’s mane, guiding him away from his investigations as he marked a corner with his cheek. “C’mon boy,” she mumbled. “In and out.”
After a few more steps down the hall, Lars confessed, “You know, the weird feeling is really weird. I’ve been focusing on it, trying to see if I can figure it out, and the closest that I can think of is, like… I’m afraid of dying?”
Connie eyed him. “That’s not normal?”
“Do you feel it?”
She frowned, shaking her head. “I don’t know. It feels weird, but I think it’s just nerves. It’s not a really strong feeling.”
“Well, it is for me,” he muttered. “And ever since I died, it’s not something I normally feel. Stuff has to get real bad before I start freaking out about biting it, and it’s not real bad yet.”
“Your whole crew is poofed.”
“Shit happens.”
Connie was ready to give him a lecture on how this was very much not a “shit happens” kind of case, when they came upon the stairwell and Lars swore. Looked around. Swore some more. He knelt by the empty stairs, running his palms flat along the floor. That unpleasant feeling grew in her belly the more frantic his motions became.
“Did you drop something?”
“This is where it made me leave them,” he said, and his fists clenched.
She could see his hands trembling, and that was the only thing that kept her from asking him if he was sure. No matter how light Lars tried to act, it was clear now that he was upset. He wouldn’t have forgotten the place, not after he had just been here. A pile of gems wouldn’t be hard to miss - especially with Flourite being made of six all on her own. Something would have had to move the gems, otherwise they would be here.
Connie looked down the staircase with a little thrill of fear racing up her spine. She adjusted her sword in her hands and scowled to herself. There was no such thing as a gem ghost, and no need to let her fears get the best of her. No matter how Lars shook and snapped, no matter how Lion treaded lightly on his paws.
“They’re probably lower, then,” she announced, putting as much strength into her voice as she could manage. “Maybe they got rattled down the stairs by whatever the force wave was. Maybe it goes off periodically.”
Lars immediately went for the stairs, but she grabbed his shoulders. There was panic in his eyes as he looked down to the minty green floor below, and she did her best to ignore it so she wouldn’t catch the same feelings. It barely worked. “You shouldn’t go.”
“What?”
“I’m fully human. If a pulse goes off it won’t bother me.”
“Maybe,” he hissed and shrugged out of her grip. “Or maybe it’ll just kill you right away.”
She decided that was his pride talking, maybe that fear of death he was so unused to, and stepped cautiously into the stairwell. Lion grunted behind her, and she held out a hand to urge him to stay. Still, she could see the whites of his eyes, not quite rolling, but just as unnerved as Lars was.
There was no pulse as she moved forward down the stairs, though she was keenly aware of her surroundings. How could she not be? Each step made her heart beat faster, her throat close up. She felt misery settling into her belly, something she hadn’t felt since she cradled Steven’s human half on the floor. Death and pain and agony, immediate and distant all at once. Halfway down the stairs, her feet paused.
Connie looked back at him. “You’re sure they’re down here?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Noth-”
“Your voice is shaking.”
It was. She looked down at her trembling hands. When had that happened? Her whole body was trembling and starting to ache from it. Fear and terror were setting in as she gasped for air, and she stared up at Lars through the terrible, burning lights. It was too bright in here now. It was too cold in here. It was too wrong.
“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” she whispered.
“Come back up.”
That gave her a jolt. Her grip tightened on the sword and she glared up at him, shouting, “Your crew is down here! Stay where you are and I’ll look for them.”
“Like hell,” he muttered, stepping down.
Connie wanted to be cross with him, but she felt relieved to see him coming down behind her. The sight of Lion following behind Lars almost brought tears to her eyes. They finished their voyage down the stairwell together, but by the time they had reached the final step they were all panting with open mouths. The boys didn’t sweat, but Connie could feel some trickling down her back despite the cold air. She wiped it off her neck and stared at the drops on her palm with disbelief.
When she looked at Lars, he only croaked, “This place is fucked,” and pushed ahead.
The tile down here was just as green, though this place seemed more complete. There were actual doors and rooms for one thing, rather than empty halls. Despite the odd feelings that urged them to leave, they carefully peered into each room for a pile of gems, dug through any cabinets they found. Gems weren’t exactly easy to hide, or easy to break, so Connie was sure they’d find them soon. The deeper they went, the more things seemed quiet and still. Their footsteps echoed, and the whole place still smelled
Sterile.
Connie froze, looking at the way Lion sniffed at the walls. “It smells like your ship.”
“So?”
“It smells just like your ship. Clean.” She threw out one hand and snapped. “This place should have been empty for thousands of years, and it smelled like they cleaned it yesterday. I know it shouldn’t smell dirty, but this place isn’t perfect. It’s colder upstairs than downstairs, which means there’s some level of leakage. Over thousands of years, smells should fade here, Lars!”
He looked like he was going to say something dismissive, but the base took care of that. Both of them suddenly doubled over, shrieking as an awful terror thudded against their brains. It choked her, smothered her, in a way that she had never felt before. Nothing but fear and pain and despair and misery, fogging her eyes and making her knees wobbly.
She could see a splotch of blue. Bright blue. Hooves clipped against the tile, and as she wiped the tears out of her eyes she managed to catch a glimpse. It was a buck of some kind, with huge antlers, and the only other things she could notice was the stark contrast of the whites of its eyes against the blue of its fur. Unlike Lion had been, they were rolling. It was stumbling, skidding, its hooves unsuited to the smooth floor beneath.
It caught its left antler on the corner of the wall, sending it flailing with a honking, heartwrenching cry. It scrambled wildly back to its feet, sprinting down the halls just as quickly as it came.
That was when the polar bear came around the corner.
Had Connie not spent years of dealing with the impossible, she felt that this might have been the thing to do her in. Lots of polar bears had a pale cast of yellow, their white fur dirtying into spoiled cream, but this was yellow. Dandelion yellow. Lemon yellow. Even its nose lacked the characteristic black in favor of its monotone color. It made the copper read smeared around its muzzle, drenched across its chest and massive paws, all the more jarring.
Gem monsters were massive, but this was just an animal, and somehow that made it all the more horrifying. It was well fed, rounded as it towered over her and each lumbering step forward made its dagger-like claws click against the floor. Cold, yellow eyes locked onto hers as a rumbling growl filled the hall. She braced for an attack, and instead something pulsed.
Her body shook, her stomach heaved, all without her consent. She suddenly felt sick, like her whole body was going to fail all at once. She forced herself upright, leveling her sword in front of her despite the agony that thrummed in her limbs. Behind her, Lars was throwing up nothing, and Lion was making a noise on the floor that sounded like he was feeling the same.
“The fuck is this?” Lars gasped, coughing as he tried to stop heaving.
“Your ghost,” she shot back. “Arm yourself.”
“I don’t have a weapon! My crew does the fighting!”
Yellow eyes fixed on her above a red muzzle, and she suspected that the bear must have had itself a snack. She took a few steps sideways, keeping the bear’s attention on her rather than her still recovering companions. That might have explained Lion’s sniffing - the same thing that made Lion curious about Lars’s portals must have been lingering all over the base. That explained the sterile smell. Automated cleaning whenever the blood came pouring.
“Hey, handsome,” she murmured. “Hey, pretty boy. It’s okay. We’re not here to hurt you. I’m friends with your brother here.”
“Brother?”
“Cousin. Who knows?” Connie grit her teeth, backing up slowly.
Lion was smart, so maybe this thing was too. Of course, she had never quite figured out just how good Lion was at reasoning. Lars hadn’t seemed to get any smarter once his hair turned pink, but maybe there was a cap on intelligence. Maybe the bear could-
“It poofed my friends,” he snapped. “Don’t call it our cousin.”
“Lars!” Her voice cracked. Her fingers trembled as she struggled to hold her sword. “I’m not immune to these things. Shut up. Please.”
He fell silent as the gravity of that sunk in, and the bear continued to prowl slowly around them. She tried to keep her face to it, constantly having her back to Lars and Lion as she braced for the possibility of an attack or a lunge. If it pulsed again she doubted it would matter. She might be able to recover faster than the two behind her, but it would only take seconds for a massive skull to crack her head like a walnut.
“I can keep it busy while you look for your crew.”
Lars barked out a laugh. “Splitting up is the stupidest thing you can do, Connie. It was going after the deer. Let’s just see if it goes back to it.”
She didn’t want to see it go back to the buck. She didn’t want the miserable deer chased again, even if it was far enough away that its feelings wouldn’t send her falling back to the floor - and that must have been what it was. Pink Lion. Yellow Bear. Blue Deer. It seemed plain as day to her, and that was the explanation for the green of the base.
But Lars was right. She took a step closer to him, making sure the bear had plenty of room to walk past. After one more moment of its curious eyes on Connie’s, it looked away and continued on. Behind her, Lars mumbled that they had to wait until it was around the corner so it couldn’t see them move. He said they should run, but they needed to be sure they weren’t chased. He instructed her to follow the direction it came from.
Connie whispered some kind of agreement and looked back at him.
Lion was pressed against the boy’s leg, and Lars had woven his fingers through his mane. He scratched softly as the predator kept a rumble low in his chest, tense but unwilling to engage with something so huge without their prompting. While she’d been squaring up with the bear, he had had the sense to keep Lion from starting something they might not be able to finish. He was good at this, wasn’t he?
“Go.”
They ran. Not wild sprinting, but as quickly as they could while still staying light on their feet. With Lars giving orders it was easy to slip into following his lead - that had always been her preferred place in a fight. She watched as he signed to her, and they peered into rooms to scan for signs of the gems. He seemed to have the map straight in his head, because they never looked in the same room twice. She could tell from the different splatters of blood on the walls, and how strongly each room smelled of copper.
She tried not to feel revolted when she saw Lion dragging his tongue across the wet spots. He was a hunter, just like the bear. It was only natural.
If any of this could be called natural.
As they kept moving, they peered into one room and saw an automated bot cleaning, scrubbing the blood from the walls and floors and counters. The deeper they went, the less blood there was, and though it was a gradual change, eventually Connie noticed that the jacket felt too heavy around her.
“Is it getting hot in here?” she asked.
“I’m not great at temperatures anymore.” Lars swallowed. “So, you know any animals that get hot?”
“Mammals.”
He shot her a withering look, and she almost explained that it wasn’t a joke. She hadn’t meant to be funny at a time like this, but her head was reeling. What animal could generate enough heat to warm a building?
“Maybe there’s a fire,” Lars mused, then shook his head. “No. With this many systems running how could the fire safety be down?”
Lion trotted up to a door and sniffed, then snarled as his whole body bristled. They exchanged a wordless look and stepped to stand on either side of the door frame. Connie put her hand against the door - warm, but not fire warm. They wouldn’t open to an inferno. She looked down to see golden light spilling out from the bottom, artificial and unflickering. She let herself have a small sigh of relief - it definitely wasn’t a fire then.
She wished Lars would make a portal out. Instead, he pointed to the door, and they both burst in.
Connie longed for a portal all the more.
Snakes were not Connie’s area of expertise, but she knew enough to know the thing in front of her was a constrictor. A snake that large couldn’t be anything else. White, beaded skin drapped across a metal pole that ran across the room horizontally. It was bigger than her, at least four times her size, though it was hard to say for sure. It was coiled around itself, contentedly bathing beneath a heat lamp overhead.
Their eyes followed the curves of its body, down to where the tail draped on the floor. In the center of it sat the gems they’d been looking for.
“Fuck me,” Lars whispered, gawking up at the massive thing. “Fuck me.”
“They’re not fast.”
“Oh, great.”
“And he’s probably not poisonous.”
“Probably great.”
“Just…” She swallowed, and the knot in her stomach was definitely all her own now. “Just grab the gems and don’t let it wrap you up, and you’ll be fine.”
Lars looked back at the door with a hysterical laugh. Lion was braced on the other side, refusing to step through at he eyed the massive beast. Lars cackled, “Yeah, man. Don’t blame you.” She gestured for him to lower his voice, and he did as he continued, “It’s gotta be over thirty feet long. Snakes don’t get that big, do they?”
“I don’t know!” she hissed. “I’m not an encyclopedia!”
“Could have fooled me.”
Lars stepped forward - careful, cautious, almost sliding along the floor to reach his friends. He barely made a sound, but it was enough to waken the snake. Connie stopped and gasped as black and white eyes opened, peering into hers. This thing was smart, there was no doubt. She could see it in the way it looked her over, but if it felt any interest it didn’t show it. There was no curiosity, no friendliness, none of the puppy-like friendliness she’d gotten so used to in Lion.
Once upon a time she had looked into eyes quite a lot like these, and all the warriors she relied on had wilted away before them. She had hated the dismissive look in them, the greed and cruelty of white and grey that looked down on everything else in the room like everything was nothing but trinkets. How casually had White ripped Steven in half, letting his human half tumble to the floor, so selfish she hardly paid any mind to the cost of her desires.
Connie disconnected from her body.
She could feel her muscles, her skin, but only in a distant way. They weren’t hers anymore. She was trapped in her skull, a prisoner in her body as Lars knelt down to collect the gems. Connie couldn’t force a sound from her lips, and instead was carried along as her body turned from the room. Lion followed behind her once she was out, the two of them walking step by step with no hesitation. To anyone watching, she must have looked normal.
Her fingers wouldn’t even twitch. They wouldn’t drop the sword to make a sound.
Even her breathing was beyond her control. Slow, steady breaths that matched her pace filled her lungs, even as her heart threatened to burst from her chest. That meant it could stop her from breathing, if it wanted. It could have her cut her own throat.
She passed the hall they’d come down earlier and heard wailing - with it came agony. Terror. Despair. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she kept her steady march on with blurry eyes. The magic was stacked on top of her, each one completely inescapable. She wondered if the bear would pulse again. Would that break her body down enough to break free? She hoped for that awful feeling to hit her again, just in case.
The yellow bear sat with the deer between its massive paws, blood streaked everywhere as the deer struggled in its grip. There was a chunk taken out of its hindquarters, exposing twitching muscle and a flash of white bone covered in spiderweb cracks. The bear wasn’t taking anymore. To the contrary, it seemed confused as to what to do with the deer now that it had caught it. Connie could see scratches on the buck’s side that she thought hadn’t been there before now half healed over.
It was only natural. The bear no longer hungered, so what was it to do with its catch? The deer would never stand still, simply let itself die in the maw that consumed it, and who knows how much it would take to kill a thing like that?
And the snake, warm and safe under the light - no need to move for food, for weather, for sleep. There were no mates to be found. It was blissful, undisturbed stillness here.
As she walked away from the scene and the feelings subsided, she felt almost grateful, but the moment her foot touched the first star that feeling vanished altogether. Lars had been possessed. He had walked away. But how far had he walked? Did the snake banish him to the upper basement, or had it led him out to the ruined first floor, exposed to the moon and empty space?
She hadn’t asked.
Lion crooned and his mouth gently tugged on her hand as she kept her steady pace through the halls. She tried to fight, to struggle, but there was nothing to resist. She had no control of her limbs, with every nerve-ending completely out of her grasp.
His teeth bit harder. There was pain, but it didn’t bother her. It wasn’t her body, after all. Hysterically, she thought that at least her death wouldn’t be painful. Stepping out onto the moon’s surface would be completely numb, and she’d die long before the worst of it sunk in. Then what would happen?
She could imagine her corpse walking across the moon, led to the ship by the snake’s irresistible magic. What a surprise that would be for Lars, to collect all his gems and find her corpse, half-frozen, sprawled across the floor.
Maybe when she was dead her corpse would fall to the ground instead, frozen to the ground like a hiker on Everest. How long would it take Lars to figure out she wasn’t coming? Then she’d be found by him and all the Off-Colors, all of them searching for her body in the remains. What a wonderful gem artifact.
It was getting cold again, chillier with every step. She found herself at the base of another staircase, and heard her foot fall with a terrible certainty. There hadn’t even been a pause, no suspense to build, just the inevitability. She tried to stop, to scream even, anything other than her emotionless trod to her death. It would have been a victory to make any sound, any twitch, but she was was still locked away, riding in her body without a bit of control.
Connie almost wished Lion wasn’t there, so that there wouldn’t be a glimmer of hope that meant there might be a chance her life wasn’t over. Would he be clever enough to knock her down? To drag her back? Did he know she couldn’t step through the door and live? His teeth made her hand ache, and she wondered if she was bleeding.
Her sword finally clattered to the ground, slipping down the staircase. Lion jumped at the noise it made, but her hand was already reaching for the door. Her eyes were burning there, but this time the now familiar feeling was all her own. She was afraid she was going to die. Terrified. Miserable. And this time she couldn’t even scream about it.
The feel of the metal handle was cold enough to make it burn against her skin.
Lars tackled her from the side, sending her tumbling through cold blue and white space. She could feel her ribs bruising as hard points dug into her chest and stomach, and she could only be relieved as it hurt and made her cry out in pain. They sprawled on the floor of the ship, and she grabbed at the sore spot for dear life. Pain, beautiful, terrible pain. It was real and hers and not the awful numbness of magic or space.
“Connie!” Lars cried, scrambling to grab her face. “Connie, stop!”
She was screaming. Connie hadn’t even realized she’d been screaming, and her throat was throbbing as she desperately tried to stop the sound. He panted as he looked her over, waiting for her noises to die down. Then he patted her down, brisk and worried as he looked for signs of blood.
“I’m okay,” she whispered, lowering her trembling hands. “Did you… are they…?”
He held up a ruby then set it back down on the floor. There was no neat pile, just the Off-Colors scattered around the floor of his ship. That was alright. It was messy, but they were safe. They could sort themselves out and fuse once they were out of this terrible place.
Connie realized Lars was talking. “-time I got them all out, I realized you weren’t there. I portaled a million times to find you. I feel like I’m gonna die.”
“I didn’t want to,” she gasped, her voice pathetic and ragged.
Lars stopped, reaching out to put a hand on her shoulder. “I know.”
A sob hiccuped out of her. “I didn’t want to die! I was trying! I didn’t-”
Lion pushed against her, his mouth smelling of the coppery blood he’d licked from the walls but his bodyweight warm and reassuring. She buried her face in his side, away from his mouth, and crying made her shoulders shake. She remembered the painfully cold metal knob under her hand, how easy it would have been for just a few more seconds to pass. Lars was rubbing her back, the most comforting he had ever been. And she hadn’t been so kind to him earlier, even after he had felt all that.
“Do you want me to grab your swor-?”
“No!” She hadn’t meant to scream it, but she did. She turned from Lion, clutching his cape as she fiercely shook her head. “You were right, okay? We got the Off-Colors and we have to go. We can’t go back there. No one should go back there!”
“You sure?”
“It’s not safe for anyone,” she croaked.
Her hand stayed over her thudding heart. She had been immune from so much of the Diamonds’ powers, and Steven had at least had it lessened. Revulsion filled her as she imagined Blue cradling the buck, or the snake coiled around White’s wrist. They had reached inside her, grabbed everything she was. She flexed her fingers, trying to remind herself that she was in control of her own body. That she wouldn’t walk to her own death like an afternoon stroll.
Lars looked out the window, down to the base below, and agreed quietly, “It’s not safe for anyone.”
After a moment, he was back at the controls. He ranted what a stupid thing to do that was, that the Diamonds hadn’t even thought for a second before trying to get toys of their own. They hadn’t thought about instincts, or what they might leave behind. They hadn’t even put up a warning sign. When had they done it anyway? The whole thing was fucking ridiculous. They would have to tell Steven about it. Someone was going to have to pick all that up.
“How?” Connie asked.
He didn’t answer.
He dropped her back off in her dorm, and when she slid under the covers the heat reminded her of the room with the awful snake, black and white eyes looking at her without the slightest bit of sympathy - inhumanly cold. Her hands trembled as she gripped her sheets, and in the fear she could hear the sound of a screaming deer. Phantom bloodstains splattered across her walls, and her eyes followed the imaginary scene.
Even as the sun rose, the daylight was no more comforting. She only remembered the yellow light of the heat lamp, the warmth, the contrast of that against the cold knob under her fingers. Exhaustion filled her, but sleep wouldn’t come. She closed her eyes and every bit of slack her muscles tried to give just made her jolt awake. It was too close to the feeling of the thing inside her, puppeting her to her death.
There was a knock on her window at noon, and this time she screamed.