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Sometimes, Katherine’s princess tea parties feel like the only time she ever gets a break from the difficult political maintenance of Dawn. That’s not true, she knows - she has her bonding time with Sausage, and her morning routine to herself, and, well, things have certainly been progressing with Pearl… but the princess tea parties have been a thing ever since she and Gem met, and they just feel like her only chance to really step back and get some time to relax. So she always ensures she makes time for them, no matter what other things the elders might like her to be doing in that time. Keeping up positive inter-empirical relations, she calls it.
It’s certainly not necessary to make sure Gem knows that she still loves her. Goodness knows they’ve always loved each other, although maybe not exactly in the same way before as they do now. Recent developments have been… enlightening.
Princess tea parties haven’t changed, though.
“Would you like a refill?”
“Oh, no thank you,” Katherine smiles. “This is really good, by the way, is this recipe new?”
“Not exactly! I reworked a strawberry cake recipe. Turns out you can slot raspberries in their place without all that much complication. And it goes so nicely with the white jasmine!”
“It totally does! I’m very impressed.”
“Ah, thank you,” Gem says bashfully. “It’s really nothing special.”
“It’s wonderful,” she insists.
Conversation turns, after cake and their first cups of tea, to how their lives are going. Nothing much is changing in the political landscape, but there’s one very important bit of social progression that they’re both keen to cover.
“Pearl,” says Gem, “is wonderful.”
“Of course.”
“Of course she is! Right?”
“She’s lovely.”
“But… Have you noticed she’s a little… y’know, touch-shy?”
“I have,” Katherine nods. “Which - I mean, you’re certainly not like that.”
“No, which is what makes me think there must be something going on there! And, really, it’s not a problem at all, it’s just… you know, a little concerning. If she won’t tell us why.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know she doesn’t have to, but… if we’re going to be… progressing the relationship with her… that stuff is kinda necessary?”
“Mhm.” Gem takes a sip of her second cup. “I, uh. I’m not sure if this is relevant to the situation at hand, but I did notice something.”
“Gem!”
Gem’s head shot to attention and she turned around, greeting - “Pearl, hello!”
Pearl wasn’t dressed in her usual hoodie, though. Actually, weirdly, this was the original cloak that Gem had made for her way back when, well over a year ago now, when Pearl had been new and feral and unwilling to accept replacements for her clearly filthy clothes. Gem had never seen her wear it, or indeed anything other than the hoodie. She’d even given Pearl an old black cloak as well that one time, but as with the red one, that had vanished into Pearl’s storage as far as Gem was concerned.
“What can I do for you?”
“My hoodie got broke,” she said, and held out the now-recognisable lump of red fabric in her arms. “Can you sew it back up?”
“Well, of course I can, but - what happened to it?”
“I, uh, cut it.”
Gem, having taken the hoodie, held it by the shoulders and shook it out. There was a huge, fraying slash through the side, stained dark with copious amounts of blood.
She looked from the hoodie back to Pearl, who didn’t seem to be currently bleeding, at least, and back at the hoodie again.
“You cut it?”
“I tripped. On a rock.” Pearl smiled, utterly unconvincing.
“Ooookay,” said Gem, “well, I’ll clean this up and fix the… cut, and it should be ready to get it back to you in no time! You get on with your day, I’ll message you, alright?”
“Sounds good, yeah,” said Pearl, “thanks, mate!”
“No problem!”
When she turned to go, flipping the hood of the cloak over her head as she did, Gem took a minute to investigate the bloodstain a little further. There was none of the signature iron tang of scent that would have come with the fabric still being saturated with blood, so at least Pearl had probably run some water over it… but this might be a difficult fix. Especially since this was all Pearl wears; she was going to know if it had been changed or swapped out.
Gem was nothing if she wasn’t dedicated to a difficult task, though, and so she got to work.
“That’s interesting,” Katherine nods. “And the repair went fine?”
“Oh, of course! I cleaned it up just fine and got it back over to her by the end of the day.”
“That’s good!”
“But you know what the funny thing was?”
“Oh?”
“She didn’t change right there and then! She just put it on back in her satchel and left, and she was still wearing the cloak. I mean, I was surprised - I figured she’d wanna get back to normal as soon as possible, but it didn’t happen!”
Katherine hums. “Y’know, I think I might have a similar story.”
“Yeah?”
It was a beautiful day in the vegetable fields of Dawn, and Pearl was helping Katherine pull carrots.
They’d been out for maybe an hour at this point, moving slowly, because a stomach bug might have taken out Dawn’s carrot farmer family and left them without a fresh source, but it wasn’t like carrots didn’t keep in an icebox for a good couple weeks, and the citizens were sure to have some stocked up. Not to mention the fact that carrots were primarily gilded if they were gonna be used for people-food around here; it just made sense, with their close connection to Gobland and its extensive mines, and with how much more longevity and nutrition you could get out of a single carrot.
But that wasn’t the point! The point was that Katherine, benevolent princess that she was, had volunteered to take on the task of getting out in the fields for a few hours every day, both to make up for that lost supply and to make sure the crops were staying healthy and not rotting away in the soil. And Pearl, who had popped over to check on the dogs (gee, she sure did do that a lot) was helping.
Sure was a hot day, though. Katherine collapsed back against a tree, fanning herself and taking a swig from her water bottle.
“Y’alright?”
“Yes, I’m fine, thank you, Pearl,” she said, wishing she’d chosen something a little more breathable to wear. “Aren’t you hot?”
“What?”
“In that sweatshirt. It must be boiling.”
“Oh, nah! I’m alright. Wouldn’t wanna lose it.”
“You could always tie it around your waist?”
“No, it’s fine. I’ll survive.”
“I’d rather you were comfortable,” Katherine frowned.
“Takes a lot worse than this to mess me up,” insisted Pearl, and just to prove it she went back for the next row of carrots.
Katherine sighed, and kept her spot under the tree, because if she was gonna take a break then she was gonna take a break… She just wondered what it was about that hoodie that was so important that Pearl couldn’t even take it off even in the heat of nature like this.
“That does sound relevant!” says Gem. “Y’know, I bet that’s probably what it was. She didn’t wanna take off the cloak ‘till she got home, same with the hoodie.”
“I think you’re right.”
“So… I mean, would it be impolite to ask?”
“Oh, definitely,” Katherine impresses, “we can’t just ask Pearl why she won’t undress, that would be so out of line.”
“So, what, we just have to wait and see if we ever find out?”
Katherine pauses. “Actually? I think I have an idea of something I can do to up our chances of getting information.”
“Please?”
“No.”
“Pleeeeease, please please please, please, Pearl?”
“No! How did you even notice that?”
“I’m perceptive! C’mon, Pearl, please tell me? You know you wanna!”
Pearl sighs. Sausage is, at the best of times… and the worst… probably the most tellable person she’s ever encountered. Something about the guy just makes you want to keep him informed on all your problems and your gossip, which isn’t helpful when you, like Pearl, have a lot of secrets you’d prefer to keep. But he is, as a result, probably the person here besides Scott who knows the most about… well, her and Scott.
He doesn’t need to know about her undressing habits, though, as far as she’s concerned.
“I really don’t,” she tells him, and swats at his head.
She’s managed to keep him from knowing exactly where the Archipearlago is for this long, but he’s basically right underneath Animalia, and that means that any visit to Scott’s is invariably gonna involve a sub-visit to Sausage one way or another. This time, he caught her before she arrived. At least they’re not keeping Scott waiting; thank goodness, the guy can sleep as long as he likes, and indeed he likes to sleep as much as physically possible.
(Pearl doesn’t know if Sausage knows that Scott’s a cat. He’s never mentioned it. Maybe the mask was enough to keep him fooled even after Scott started leaning into his feline inclinations a lot more, wanting to distance himself from his life in the games. Maybe, for all his questions, he’s never actually asked.)
“Please? I’m asking for a friend!”
“No you’re not.”
Sausage sighs and changes tack. “Guess I’ll just have to tell Katherine to give up her ideas about taking your clothes off…”
“Why were you talking to Katherine about taking my clothes off.”
“Because I’m me!”
… Ah, yeah, y’know what, that’s explanation enough. “Well, I’m not gonna get into it. Nobody’s takin’ my clothes off but me, at least for the time being.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure! And if I’m tellin’ anyone, it’s gonna be them, not you. I’m sorry, mate, but it’s not exactly something you need to know.”
“Fineeee,” Sausage huffs, “well, that’s all I needed to ask. I guess I have to do everything around here. Anyway, you can go back to… whatever you do with your favourite guy.”
“Literally just hang out is what we do,” says Pearl.
And so that’s exactly what she does; she goes to see her soulmate, they hang out, she sleeps over for a couple of nights, they hang out some more.
Interestingly, the visit is interrupted by an unexpected text:
<katherineeliz> Hi Pearl! Would you be interested in coming to the bay south of Dawn for a swim some time? The coords are XXX/XX/XXX, Gem and I would really like to see you there ^_^
Bait. She’s not falling for it.
<PearlescentMoon> sausage if you stole katherines comm you have to give it back thats mean
<katherineeliz> Aww, come on :P
<katherineeliz> She means it! She’s just too shy to ask you
<PearlescentMoon> and whose idea was swimming huh
<katherineeliz> That was a joint venture!!
She doesn’t end up going home until Scott informs her that Owen’s time of the month is incoming, and that it’s always wise to stay away from Animalia while its llama ambassador is asserting his dominance over the place. Sausage isn’t gonna get her that easily.
Katherine herself, though, is… admittedly a different story.
“Knock knock?” she calls across the beach from the edge of the passage.
Pearl, who is currently rescuing starfish from the shore and chucking them back in the ocean so they don’t die, looks up. “Hi!”
“Is this a bad time?”
“Nah, nah, you can come down. Did you need to tell me somethin’?”
“It’s… not that exactly, no. I wanted to invite you to our princess tea party!”
Pearl pauses, mid-crouch, starfish not quite in hand. “Huh?”
“Princess tea party,” Katherine repeats, “it’s this thing that Gem and I do every couple weeks, we have a little get-together, y’know… drink some tea, have some cake, talk about our lives… It’s fun!”
“And you want me?”
“Sure! It would be nice to set some time aside to talk about just us. I know the dogs are a great motivator to keep meeting up, but it can’t all be dog-based activities.”
Ah. Thank fuck, Katherine doesn’t seem to have realised that Pearl’s prioritisation of the dogs as her explanation for why she comes over so often is a purposeful choice. If she had, she might have deduced that the real reason is a lot less to do with her dogs and a lot more to do with her interest in women.
“So if you’d like to come, I know that Gem is on her way right now - if not then that’s okay, I promise, we’ll have a wonderful time on our own… but it would be nice?”
… Damn it. She’s convincing. Pearl knows already that whatever look Katherine would give her if she turned this down would break her heart on impact.
And - really, it’s a tea party. Not like she can fuck it up too hard as long as she compliments the tea.
“Yeah, alright then.”
“Oh, wonderful! Okay, come with me, we’re just in the flower field near the bee farm, it’s not too far at all.”
So that’s exactly what she does, and that’s exactly where they go. Gem is actually already there waiting for them at the spot, which turns out to be a picnic laid among the flowers. Pearl raises her eyebrows. “Fancy.”
“Oh, hi, Pearl! I wasn’t sure you were gonna make it,” says Gem.
“Well, here I am?”
“And that’s wonderful,” Katherine continues. “Would you like some tea? Some cake, maybe?”
“Um. Yeah, thanks.” She’s pretty sure she doesn’t need to run through the whole if you would be so kind business if it’s just Gem and Katherine.
The cake, she is told, is a honey infused Genoise sponge with buttercream frosting, and the tea is black with orange. “We didn’t want to make it too complicated in case this is your first time,” Katherine explains.
“Drinking tea?”
“No, coming to a tea party!”
The girls laugh, and Pearl can’t help but shy away a little. “Well, yeah, it is.”
“That’s totally fine,” says Gem, “we just wanna make sure you have fun.”
They give her a minute to try the tea in peace while they swap a couple of stories about… politics, or whatever. Princessy stuff. Pearl doesn’t mind the tea, but she does definitely appreciate the sticky sweetness of the honey cake to wash it down with. The orange flavour is also a really nice combination; it’s very… orangey. She’s not sure, she’s no expert.
“So what do you think?”
Pearl swallows. “It’s good, yeah!”
“You’re sure,” says Katherine; “you don’t want honey in your tea, or anything?”
She cocks her head.
“It’s what I do! It can be hard to strike the balance with tea, but if it comes out bitter then I find a little honey always fixes the problem.”
Pearl scans the picnic blanket for this aforementioned honey and spots a pot with a spoon handle sticking out of it next to the teapot itself. She takes the spoon - only it’s not a spoon, upon removal, it’s like a weird ovaloid circley thing with notches all round it that the honey sticks and drips from.
Katherine must identify her struggle, because she lays her fingers over the back of Pearl’s hands, warm against Pearl’s usual freeze. “Would you like some help with that?”
So Pearl, somewhat sheepish, sits back and lets Katherine drizzle honey from the thing into her cup. Then she reaches into the basket on the edge of the blanket and pulls out a fresh teaspoon, swirling the tea and honey around while Pearl eyes the mixture.
“That’s just to make sure it’s dissolved,” Katherine explains. “Try it again?”
And she does. And, yeah, this is way better, actually. “Thanks.”
“It’s not a problem at all,” Katherine beams.
“Wow,” says Gem, “it sure is pretty hot out today, isn’t it, Pearl?” She’s not wrong; Pearl’s poor circulation betrays her at the best of times, but it is a nice sunny morning and the weather is more than warm. “Boy am I glad these things are detachable,” she continues, and gestures at her sleeves.
“You’re lucky! I wish I could do that,” adds Katherine.
“I would be sweating like anything if I had a whole extra layer on over top like you, Pearl!”
Pearl recedes, just slightly. “Yeah.”
“So, uh!” Gem’s smile retains the exact same angle, her voice the exact same inflection, but Pearl can tell she’s gathering nerves. “Is there a reason that you don’t -”
“Yeah, actually,” says Pearl, “there is.”
Gem doesn’t shift. “Mhm?”
Pearl lets the silence ring.
After the long, long moment that it takes to make it clear she won’t elaborate, Gem backs down. “Right,” she says, still smiley.
Katherine clears her throat. “More tea, anybody?”
“Oh, no, thank you!”
“I’m fine.”
So Katherine sips from her own cup, loud against the lack of conversation even though she’s careful and never slurps. Her eyes dart between the situation in front of her and the direction of the hives to her side; she’s definitely wondering if she can salvage this with bee talk, huh?
Guess she and Pearl aren’t so different, then. They both try to avoid the difficult conversations by defaulting to their animals. Only Katherine’s defusing the bomb of Pearl’s unspecified under-hoodie trauma, and Pearl primarily uses this tactic to keep from mentioning her big gay feelings. What a pair.
… They have a point, though. All of them. Gem’s within her rights to at least ask about the whole thing, even though there’s obviously been some talking going on behind Pearl’s back that she’s still not aware of. And Scott’s input was that she didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to do… buuuut that she would probably want to do it sooner or later if they were going to get married.
(Not that the marriage is gonna be a thing. Scott catches wind of one gay feeling and you never hear the end of it. He’s like Sausage like that.)
Yeah. She probably should explain what’s going on. If only so she never needs to do it again.
Pearl needs a drink. Or possibly an emotional support cat.
She can see that Katherine’s in the middle of opening her mouth to change the subject when she speaks. “Okay, so.”
Both princesses go still.
“I, uh.” Actually, this story doesn’t really need to be as complicated as she was worried it might be. “I had a pretty tough go of it, before I got here. Last thing I did was die. A lot. In pretty nasty ways. So I got a lot of scars out of it. I have -”
She pulls her bangs up with a sweeping hand, revealing the thick red line that she knows runs across her skull and down her forehead, the one where Joel and Etho split it right down the middle with an axe.
“- this. That was the first one.”
The girls’ eyes widen one after the other, ever so slightly out of sync. They look between each other. Gem is the first to actually respond. “Oh my goodness. A-and you didn’t have any - any healing potions, or -?”
“Not that kinda place,” Pearl shakes her head. “And then I got shot in the back with a firework. And then I got blown up feet first by a pile of dynamite. So forgive me if I’m not exactly eager to show my legs off; they’ve got third degree burn scars. Maybe fourth. I dunno how burns work, I’m not a doctor. Some of it I can’t feel anything.”
(The fact that the latter two deaths were technically Scott’s and not her own goes unmentioned. It’s not like there was a difference functionally - neither of them could see the firework coming, after all. The only real discrepancy was that Pearl didn’t realise what Scott was doing until long after he’d made up his mind; until it was too late.)
(She’s glad that, here, he doesn’t have those scars.)
“... Suns,” Katherine says, finally, which is roughly the Katherine equivalent of fucking shit, Pearl, jeez, as far as Pearl can tell.
“So, uh. Yeah.”
Katherine’s expression is slowly solidifying into mortification. “I’m so sorry! I wouldn’t have mentioned it to Sausage if I had realised it was so serious!”
“No, you, uh - well, you know what Sausage is like. He didn’t get on at me too much about it, really, it’s fine.”
“If you’re sure,” she frowns.
“I’m totally sure. As long as you tell him you got your answer, yeah, so he can drop it.”
“Oh, of course!”
“I’m just glad it’s not because you don’t like us,” Gem continues, “a little body insecurity I can handle, but if it was a me problem I would probably have just retreated back into the forest on the spot.”
“Hey,” says Katherine, a little warningly, “no vanishing into the Grove. You don’t know what’s in there.”
“You don’t know what’s in there,” mutters Gem.
“Anyway, you’re right. I’m glad it’s not because of anything on either of our own parts. I’m sure we’ll be perfectly able to show you that we don’t mind a few scars at all!”
“... Sorry, what?”
“Well, you know,” Gem fumbles, “it’s, uh. It would be nice to get moving in a more intimate direction. It can’t all be picnic dates forever.”
“This is a date?”
Gem and Katherine look over at one another, and then back to Pearl. Seems like she’s out of the loop in more ways than one.