Work Text:
“I’m sorry, excellency, but if this is about the irregular pearl, then I have direct orders to deny you access.”
Rose tilts her chin downward, making use of the stare of palpable sincerity that has, for millennia, always gotten her anything she wants. “I am here to perform my duty, sentry. I know for a fact that she was badly injured in the arrest process, and there is no evidence of that injury having been attended to in your logs. In such cases I have no choice but to intervene, regardless of personal involvement.”
The guard raises an eyebrow. “Ma’am?”
The practiced, political sincerity falls. Real, connected sincerity—a sincerity Rose has been running headlong into more and more—takes its place. One arm on the desk between them, she leans into her face and says, firmly, “I don’t want another gem suffering for what I caused. Not her, not you, not anyone. If you let me do what needs done here, I’ll see that you face no consequences for it. I have the authority to alter the records of comings and goings here. Give me twenty minutes. I promise I won’t leave you hanging.” The guard’s face remains skeptical. “Please,” she says. “I’m desperate.”
Her own vulnerability disgusts her—in her mind she curses Yellow and the others for bringing her so low. Their argument is with her policies, not her personal life, and the only reason they’ve bothered with Pearl at all is that they knew what it’d look like when public record broke the news that a lowly manufactured servant had been arrested for having unlawful contact with Rose Diamond. They know that if they turn the common gems against her—she who has been their one advocate in the Authority for centuries—the hindrances to efficiency that her advocacy brings can be swiftly eliminated.
The sentry sighs, and Rose straightens. Please, please, please, she thinks, there must be at least a few of you who still trust me. “You’ll fix the timetable as soon as you get back?”
She nods.
“Ma’am, I don’t mean any disrespect, but if I do this for you, please remember it isn’t your gem on the line if you try anything funny.”
“I understand. If you can do this I will do everything in my power to make it up to you, and I won’t take any chances. I give you my word.”
There is a silence. The guard stands before her, absorbing her heavy gaze. “I’ll open the warp for twenty minutes. I think I can stall the supervisors that long,” she finally says. “Get back as soon as you can, though. If it’s quick enough and nobody sees you I can play it off like it was left open by accident.”
“Thank you,” she breathes. “Once all this blows over I’ll see if I can’t get you promoted.”
She rushes to the warp pad and in an instant she’s there, opening her eyes to the sight she’s been preparing herself for.
The room is small, to her, four blank walls meant to contain powerful threats. But Pearl looks so tiny and so afraid, huddled in its far corner. It seems absurd that anybody could think of her as one of them.
The moment she sees her, Pearl leaps to her feet and fairly rockets into her arms, burying herself from her shoulders up in her hair. “I can’t stay long,” is the first thing Rose says, to get it out of the way, but she isn’t sure if she hears her. She’s weeping with relief, delicate fingers stretching crosshatched over Rose’s back, feeling its shapes and peculiarities as if it’s the first solid ground she’s seen in a thousand years adrift. Her right hand still trembles with the aftereffects of the electrical attack that kept her from running when Yellow Diamond came looking for her.
Rose gently places her hand on the back of Pearl’s head (she knows now, after all this time, how to touch her; never too sudden, never too harsh), smoothing her short hair back towards the nape of her neck. She whimpers when she puts a hand on her shoulder, and Rose quickly flinches away, burning with the knowledge that it is, indirectly, her touch that brought this gem so much pain in the first place.
We can’t allow this to continue, Yellow had said over Pearl’s unconscious fugitive form, staring Rose down with her bright single eye. She has disgraced your rule. Her brazenness undermines our authority. There is no place for this in our empire, Rose. We’re doing this for your own good.
And later, when the Diamonds had convened as they regularly did, the conversation repeated itself in a less oblique form: Surely you’re not so foolish as to think that you love her…and surely you’re not so deluded as to think she has the capacity to love you?
She tried not to listen, but she couldn’t ignore Blue Diamond’s silent glare, a glare that made sure she knew what was going to be done, and sure enough, by morning the whole planet knew, and were talking about it in words much less oblique and much less gentle. Worse, they didn’t seem to have one bad thing to say about Rose herself.
She was made to be charming; guess she couldn’t keep her charm under control.
She just wants attention.
She just wants money.
She looks so smug in all those pictures they got on the sly.
Ha! Wouldn’t you?
Do you see the way she looks at her? What a pathetic desperate little—
They’re gonna have to just get rid of her—she’ll never act her place again now—
How’d she even get her hooks in? She’s just—
She’s just a pearl!
She’s just a pearl—
SHE’S JUST A PEARL, ROSE—
All the noise the world has made about the two of them in the past rotation now goes silent in her mind as she focuses instead on Pearl’s shaking hand in her own. “She hurt you,” is all that Rose can force out at first. “I knew it. She said it would only be enough to paralyze but I knew it was too much power. I’m sorry, my treasure, this is all my fault—”
“No it isn’t. Please don’t say that.”
“But it is!” In her agitated state, Rose’s sudden insistent tone makes Pearl nearly jump out of her skin. She makes some soothing noises and reaches for her other hand, leaning down to clutch both tightly. “You didn’t choose to come to me. I laid it out as if you had a choice but the only other option you had was going back to the factory—that was no choice at all. Whether you wanted any of this or not, you really didn’t have anywhere else to go, and…and I insisted on breaking the rules. I couldn’t control…I put you in danger. It was all my fault. This is all my fault. I’m so sorry.”
At first Pearl looks lost—lost and scared, like the place she thought she knew is breaking down around her. But then her face hardens into a sort of anger. Rose is exhilarated. She looks so conscious. So alive. Not like a factory product at all.
She turns her back to Rose, showing her clothes to be blackened and tattered where the lightning hit. “Is that really all you take my feelings for? Obedience?”
“What do you mean?”
“You think I wouldn’t choose this if I could? You think I wouldn’t go through this for you, go through this with you, if it were up to me?” She laughs a little, a bitter laugh. “It’s not some great sacrifice to let you want me! Rose…the greatest thing I have ever been is yours.”
Rose is silent for a moment in the face of this declaration. It’s one of the most emphatic, decisive things she’s ever heard Pearl say, and she almost hates to contest it. But the crisis that now surrounds them has her thinking a few steps further. “Wouldn’t you want to be something more, if you had the chance?”
The look on Pearl’s face when she turns around is priceless, laden with the complexity that first changed Rose’s mind about what sort of gems she could love; one part bewildered, as if to affirm that this has never occurred to her before, and one part calculating—she takes the possibility seriously, she considers it with the same exacting care she affords everything. “I mean, that’s a lovely thought,” she says with a shrug (and it’s the first time Rose can remember that she hasn’t grasped onto her words of encouragement as if they, too, could heal her wounds), “but realistically, I’m probably not going to be, so why be bothered about it?” She doesn’t sound hopeless or unhappy. It’s simply the way things are, and compared to the way things used to be for her, she finds it eminently acceptable.
Pearl murmurs an “excuse me,” invoking the protocol that punctuates her every action, and sinks to her knees with a heavy sigh, eyes closing, limbs at a tremble even beyond her sewing-machine hand. The continued act of sustaining her wounded projection is draining her strength. She leans at an angle with the floor, her weight supported on one unsteady elbow, for only a moment before Rose reaches out to lift her with a hand to her side. “Sit up, dear, let’s get you mended. No sense in drawing it out.”
With fluttering eyelids Pearl allows her to undo the clasps of her ornate outer clothing and shakes it off her shoulders to the floor.
“Alright,” Rose says, trying to swallow the dread away, “turn around.”
Her arms and shoulders are covered in rippling lines of tiny fulgurites—petrified electricity spread over her body like a net. The burns themselves are gut-wrenching canyons in her pale back, blistering brilliant aqua, turning her smooth nacreous skin to a crackled patina. They yawn as her head drops low, woozy with pain. “Oh Pearl,” Rose whispers again through her tears, “I’m so, so sorry.”
“It wasn’t you who wanted it done,” Pearl replies through clenched teeth, clutching her shoulders with taut fingers, “but if you’re going to cry, then for goodness’ sakes please come do it over here.”
She giggles a little in spite of everything as Rose’s hands close gently around her waist (she knows full well that she’s incredibly ticklish—knows full well, and takes full advantage, even at the darkest of moments—maybe especially at the darkest of moments. Pearl has no idea what a comfort her laughter can be). Rose pulls her into her lap and drapes her upper body in her arms. She kisses between the burn marks as her falling tears close and soothe them. The four canyons disappear one by one, the dendritic fingers of the fulgurites dissolve, the quaking of her right hand slows to a stop. She feels her tense frame uncoil under her hands and lips. When the healing magic has done its work, she just kneels there and holds her for a moment, rubbing her back, smiling with an adoration unassailable by scandal as Pearl nuzzles her head happily against Rose’s thigh, all trappings of decorum and respectability forgotten. “That feels better, doesn’t it? You kept an awfully brave face all that time, poor dear. But that’s no surprise.” She runs her hand though Pearl’s hair again, staring into eyes that can’t help but worship her, doing all she can—in this moment when her treasure, her Pearl, has directed her fledgling will toward outlasting everything that stands between them—to worship back. “You are a warrior, after all. They may not realize it yet. But if they think they can break you, then they’re wrong.”
Pearl reaches across her body for Rose’s hand. As she has often done in happier times, she twines her own small hand around two of Rose’s fingers rather than strain to cover the whole. Though the deep calm in Pearl’s face remains, the gesture is a reminder—of the precariousness of her existence, of the dependence the law requires of her regardless of what she could accomplish on her own. “What do you think they’ll try to do?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I don’t think a pearl has ever been detained here. The law says that whoever you belong to decides what becomes of you, but I never actually signed anything to bind you to me, and Yellow knows that. I’m afraid she’s probably going to get Nacre involved.”
Rose feels Pearl squeeze her fingers tighter at the mention of her creator’s name.
“She’ll ask them to send me to her, of course. It’s what she’s wanted all this time.”
“Yes,” Rose replies, and she wants to say she won’t let it happen, she’ll keep her safe no matter what, but she’s afraid to go making sweeping promises again. The last one of those she made was I’ll never let them hurt you ever again. Or maybe it was I could never be ashamed of you. Or was it you don’t need to fret about the risks I take with my reputation; whatever happens I’ll make sure you’re taken care of? Whichever it is, she supposes, doesn’t really matter—she’s broken them all in one fell swoop.
“What are we going to do?” Pearl asks. Her voice is even as she snuggles up against Rose’s shoulder, her face blissful and sleepy with the sudden departure of pain.
“I’ve been working on the guards around here. I’m hoping I can bribe a few. Even if I can’t, force is an option.”
“…For what?”
“Your escape, silly.”
She looks down to see Pearl lying wide-eyed against her, one arm flung back over her own, face frozen. “Oh dear.”
“Well, what were you thinking of doing? Batting our eyes and talking them into letting us off the hook?”
“That’s what we’ve always done before.”
Rose pulls her even closer, pressing her to herself, closing her eyes to feel her shape with every other sense as the lead in her gut lifts just a little. She loves when Pearl says “we.” Every time takes them closer to what she dreams for them–the future where they are helpmates, lovers, partners in crime. She thinks, just maybe, that she can move forward under the weight of what she’s done. She’ll have to work miracles to make up for this, of course. But just five minutes ago she was healing gaping wounds–at the end of the day, aren’t miracles what she does?
“We’re dealing with Diamonds now,” she says, echoing the ‘we’, using the tone that says ‘just let them try and stop me’–a tone that, these days, she uses with Pearl and no one else. “It’s going to be a little trickier. But I’m meant to go off-planet in three days–there’ll be a ship ready for us. I’ll come back and get you and we’ll go. Just keep you out of their reach until everything calms down and the red tape buries the case. Five, six hundred years. Then we’ll come home and it’ll all be back to normal.”
Pearl sits up straight, still pressed against her, placing a hand to Rose’s collarbone. She looks unsure for a very long, silent moment, but then she smiles. “Well,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to go to space.”
“That’s it! That’s the spirit.”
“The important thing is that we’ll be together,” she says, relaxing again. “That’s all I care about.”
“We will. We will. It won’t be like running away at all. We’ll just–forget about all this, and explore the galaxy together!” She pauses. “I promised I’d only stay twenty minutes.”
“You should go. We can’t take any chances.”
“Don’t be scared, my love. I’m going get you out of this madness before it gets much worse,” she says, kissing her softly in the center of her gem. “Can you bear it just a little while longer?”
Pearl opens her eyes—heart-stopping blue, like the skies of some distant world. “I think I could bear anything for you,” she replies.
Rose laughs. “Oh darling,” she says. “You’re always so melodramatic.”
“You think I don’t mean it,” she says, and something in her tone is almost…scolding. Imperious, by pearl standards. “But I do. I do. I always will.”