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Time moves erratically for Pearl, a constant hum punctuated by loud pings of occurrences that she calls memories. Her eyes open for the first time and she is among so many of her gem type, shoved into little boxes and told never to break out of them, but oh how much she wishes to. She closes her eyes just a moment and she’s accompanying the famed Pink Diamond on her day-to-day tasks. She blinks and Pink Diamond - no, Rose - speaks of rebellion, her knighthood begins, the innocence of a young gem lost in wartime. Pearl closes them again, counts to three, opens them to Rose announcing her and her new plaything are having a ‘baby’. An eye flicker, Rose is dead.
After much too long after his birth (to the point that later she feels ashamed for taking so long to pull herself together), Pearl holds Steven for the first time, and from that moment on it’s difficult to pry him from her arms. If her spear is her third arm and a sword her fourth, he becomes her fifth.
Steven lives with Greg until he is 7 and the house is finally finished being built. Until then, he gets shipped back and forth between Greg and the gems during the day, or rather, between the van and Pearl’s arms. Garnet and Amethyst hold him too, but it’s obvious how Pearl finds comfort in being in physical contact with him, and if this is how they keep her from wasting away in her pain again then let her carry him around all she wants. They all have to learn how to feed him, and change him, and put him down for naps. He clings to them as they busy themselves putting the house together, gets restless when they put him in his crib when they can’t watch him and construct things at the same time. Steven grows up in awe of them, just as he does with Greg but it’s different. Greg is his dad and has been there from day one; he can remember his presence long before his actual memory begins, by the sound of his laugh and the smell of his skin. But the gems, they appear so abruptly in his sequence of memories, scattered here and there that for a while he questions if they didn’t just blink out of existence in between visits. They’re like the fairies in his bedtime stories, just as mystical, much more beautiful. They make him feel shy and yet bring him a special sense of comfort.
Pearl titters about the floorboards of the house still under construction, Steven perched comfortably on her thin hip. There is still so much to do: the kitchen cabinets lack doors and shelves, the loft where Steven will sleep is only partially complete (Pearl doesn’t like the idea of him sleeping in a loft, he could roll out of bed and down the stairs and smash his face on the wooden floor and crack his gem and- breathe, count to five and breathe even though you biologically don’t need to), Greg mentions furniture that still has to be delivered from something called a thrift store. Pearl suddenly remembers that she needs to do a load of Steven’s laundry, but as she looks back and forth between the pile and the baby, she cannot get herself to make a decision. She spots a basket, and moments later she’s making the trek up to the temple’s right hand where the washer is (we should really install a warp pad here, she makes a mental note), both of her bundles secured in the basket. She gets carried away sometimes with that thing, throwing Steven and a bunch of odds and ends she needs to carry into it and balancing it haphazardly on her hip. It’s more efficient this way she argues when Greg has a fit about it. Efficiency is very important to her when the house needs to be finished soon and her life is suddenly filled with tasks that have an invisible timer to them, not unlike it was back during the war. Playtime after breakfast for 3 hours, lunch at 1, nap at 1:30, dinner at 5 followed by a bath and pre-bed cartoons for 2 hours, back to the van by 8, move in at 7 years, full powers in at goddesses only know what age, organic fragile body beginning to weaken at 60 then dead by 100 if he’s lucky she doesn’t have time to not multitask here he will die before she finishes blinking there is just so little time (breathe. Count to 10 like she showed you).
Steven loves the gems equally; he says that he doesn’t have a favorite. He just has favorites for certain things. Garnet takes the time to help him find the best seashells and is the best at making up silly stories for him. Amethyst is great at roughhousing with him and convinces his dad to let them get donuts even though he only just ate dinner. He tells Greg all of these things every time he comes home to the van after spending the day with them, idly plucking away at his little guitar as he recounts being a pirate and chasing a purple bird up and down the beach. Greg ruffles his hair and says he’s glad he had so much fun. Then he asks, what things is Pearl his favorite for?
At first Steven looks down at the guitar in his lap, face scrunched up in concentration and much too serious for his age. His demeanor is such a way that Greg fears that maybe Pearl hasn’t accepted him after all. Maybe she’s only putting on a show, and when no one is around for her to preform for she neglects him, or worse- he doesn’t want to think about something worse.
But then Steven pipes up and stops Greg’s train of thought. Pearl, he says, is the best at fixing the pillow forts he makes so that they don’t keep falling down. Pearl is the best when he scrapes his knees, putting half a box of bandaids on each and a dozen kisses to match. Pearl is the best at holding him when he just feels like being held. He’s quiet a moment, then says that Pearl is the best at being a mom.
Greg struggles that night with what to do. Steven is so young, he’s not ready to understand the true nature of what’s happened to Rose just yet, he’s not ready for the ensuing guilt that he knows his empathetic little boy will feel, he can’t properly correct him. And yet how ironic that the very last person he would expect to view Steven as their own child is the same gem Steven’s seeing a mother figure in. But Pearl is still fragile over the situation, it’s only been 5 years (going on 6), not even a blink of an eye of her lifespan, and if Steven were to slip and call her mom Greg’s not sure if Pearl could take it.
(It does happen, and she takes it better than he thought she would. If anything there’s a swell of pride in her, that this is an indication that she’s doing right by Steven somehow).
8,000 years old. Barely the length of a daydream, yet Pearl feels that she’s been living this dazed existence for eternity. Rose was her everything, what kept her mind from drifting off too far to be retrieved again. She lost Rose in a fever dream, but as she looks down at the little human shoving flowers in her hands and beaming at her, she realizes she’s found a new reason to not lose herself again.