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It starts with light.
It’s never quite day in the Kindergarten—the walls are too high, the mist is too thick, and you know the sun mainly as an abstract, a vague motion of shadows. For all your life you’ve hidden here, listening to cannons firing high above your head, watching ships so huge they blot away the sky bend the grasses on the rim of the canyon and rumble off into the distance.
One night the sky went pale yellow, and the battle sounds fell silent. And now, there are monsters moving in the dark.
And when you first see her, light is all she is—a bright beam cutting through the gloom, swaying with the sound of her footsteps. When her body is finally in view, the brilliant glare of the gem on her head subsumes her face, casts her image long and grey across the stony ground; her skin reflects all the colors hidden in its white. You’ve never seen anything like her, never known anything like her could exist—a being created for beauty and elegance, a being created to do anything but wage war. For a moment, you think she’s something like an angel.
Then she opens her mouth—voice crowing straight through her nose; “Amethyst!” number one of one million—and you know she isn’t. She’s real, and maybe you can reach her.
***
The first time Amethyst sees the stars clearly—not through a haze of dust and old exhaust—she loses all semblance of language and shrieks delightedly, laughs like a gale of wind, seizes your arm with a strength she doesn’t understand yet and pulls you out from under the sheltering arch of the temple’s entrance, pointing insistently. You follow her down to the edge of the water, smiling. For all the trouble she has caused, does cause and will continue to cause, at least she responds appropriately to the concept of space.
Letting her climb into your arms again, you move your lips against her gossamer hair and direct her upward gaze across the Perseus arm, checking the landmark of the crab nebula pulsar, to four bright stars in the east. There, you say, is where we came from, thousands of years ago, before you were made.
In what’s becoming a habit of hers, she jumps straight to the hardest question: why did you leave?
We all had our reasons.
The stars reflect in the calm ocean, and again, doubled, in her midnight-blue eyes. When she’s quiet and still like this—which she rarely is—she’s lovely, radiant; not a product of war, but a daughter of Earth.
On homeworld they say servant gems are drawn to power, that they are naturally inclined to reach for the highest arm to hold, but somehow you know it isn’t her latent battle-readiness that makes her so intriguing. It is her beauty and her wildness, and the beauty of her wildness, an inexplicable combination so unique to this planet; this planet that, you suppose, is home now.
She flings her arms around your neck, a rather exuberant gesture for only having known you a few days. She still hides from the others most of the time, but with you, she opens up like a flower.
You flinch at her hug. She notices.
***
How old were you? Young by relative standards; old enough to realize that she’s a little bit ridiculous, and a little bit frightened. Still young enough to think that in spite of all that she’s a sheet-titanium cutout, a picture of what a gem should be.
“Summoning a weapon is a fundamental magical skill, but it also requires immense concentration and lots of practice to perform consistently. You’ll have to be very committed! It will take—” She pauses lengthily. Her hands clutch against her chest, almost quivering with feeling. “—Unparalleled devotion!”
You lift your eyes from the bit of branch that you’re meticulously relieving of every last one of its blossoms. “You…are such a drama queen.”
“Listen, do you want to learn how to do this or not?” she demands, snatching the branch away with a sweep of her arm.
“You know I do!”
“Then pay attention.”
You impersonate her perpetually ramrod-straight, puff-chested posture. Fold your hands. Fix her with a wide-eyed stare. You want to be one of them. You want her to believe in you. It’s kind of funny the way she wrinkles her nose when you lick stuff, but there’s another level of her disapproval, one that’s real and grave—one that makes you feel the way you felt once back in the Kindergarten, when you caught a little bird and, not knowing such a thing could happen, held it so tightly that its wing was crushed beneath your hand and it couldn’t fly when you let it go. That was the first time you knew you could hurt something without even meaning to. That was the first time you thought you might be bad.
“Try to clear your mind of any distractions. You have to completely understand the importance of your cause, the ramifications of the battle you’re about to enter. We fought for a thousand years to secure this planet’s independence, and its creatures depend on us to protect them from the dangers introduced by gem involvement at the early stages of their evolution. On a practical level, we defend the earth from monsters, but symbolically, we atone for our civilization’s exploitative actions, like—” She stops. Looks at you. You try to sit up even straighter.
She wrings the tips of her fingers and furrows her brows for a moment, then takes a breath and goes on. “Well, the bottom line is that you have to concentrate very hard on what you need to do, and that can be difficult, and it might take a while, but eventually—” She cups her hands around her gem, trapping its steadily brightening glow, and after a second’s hesitation reaches up just in time to catch the handle of her spear as it emerges. She twirls it out with multiple flourishes. “Like so!”
You purse your lips as the glow of the intentionally splendid summon fades. Clear your mind. Concentrate. Reach out. Do the thing. You close your eyes and press one hand to your chest, and to your surprise something is there to grab, so you grab it, wondering more about what it even is than how you’ve managed to get it. You keep on pulling and it just keeps coming, until finally you feel it pull away with a tiny release, like cracking your knuckles, and it flops over in your hand—a whip; your summon weapon.
You look at it, wide eyed, and then back to her. “Like that?”
Expressions flicker across her face: nervousness, confusion, relief. “Well—yes—just like that!” She smiles wide and presses her hands together, the glow of pride described; but her gesture is too feeble, and there’s a hint of worry in her eyes.
***
You just want to get this over with.
It’s the first time in a while that you’ve had to deal with her without Garnet as a mediator. And maybe you’ve been avoiding, but that isn’t your fault—lately she insists on making everything so difficult, and if there were ever a century in your life when you needed—deserved, even!—for things to be easy, it’s now, with Rose gone and every link to your old home lost, and an entirely new towering set of expectations brought with the duties of a guardian, a mentor, a family member of a half-human child.
It is because of those duties, and those alone, that you’ll try, for the minute it will take to fuse with her, to forget everything.
Each step of the dance is a compromise. You forgive and forgive and forgive. And then—you do—you forget. All the times her words have made you bristle; all the times she’s knowingly or unknowingly poked the bruises; all the times she simply hasn’t seemed to care. It all clears away like fog in the light of sunrise. You can see her. Moving with you. Wanting what you want. For a moment, through all the panic, you realize that it’s been so long that you’ve forgotten the strain and excitement of it: stretching and twisting to fit each others’ shapes, reaching farther than you thought you could reach, reaching farther, reaching farther, wanting what she wants what you want what she wants what you wanna do, is see us turn into—
With a breath, with a sigh, she is here, all is calm. No more reaching. No more strain.
Every time Opal blinks into existence, it seems, she wonders what all that fuss was about. Is she really so difficult? Is she really such a last resort? Even at the worst of times, she feels so—obvious. Why shouldn’t she occur? Why shouldn’t she be? There is no misunderstanding in her.
Enough introspection. Time to go give a giant bird the Heimlich.
Five thousand years later, defending humanity is still a really, really weird job.
***
She never sleeps, of course. She’d never think of it. Nothing pleases her like being above pleasure, above the same Earthly wonders she’d been quite willing to revere for Rose’s sake. You figure she’s being a hypocrite, but not enough of a hypocrite to actually try to doze through it all. It would be very contrary to her ethos.
All the same, lately, you find yourself wishing she’d wake up. You long for her to see you, to pay some attention to everything around her. You ache the same ache she does and you still manage to stay vibrantly aware, barreling through life, every molecule in you hot and kinetic. But as rapidly as you move, the scenery never flies fast enough that your eye doesn’t catch her as a dream-walking vertical line.
Your presence intrudes on her reverie and for that reason makes her angry. You redouble your efforts to jolt her back. Even if she’s only the way she was before Rose died when she’s screaming at you, at least that’s reassurance that she’s still there. If you can keep her eyes open, maybe she’ll notice you.
You learned the hard way that she doesn’t want comfort or sympathy. For all you can tell, she just wants you gone. Well, you’re not going.
She used to stay close to you at night. You never admitted it because you didn’t want her to think you couldn’t face such old fears, but you needed that. The world is so silent after sundown. You don’t quite feel lonely, but you remember being alone, and that opens caverns in you. Now she doesn’t even notice when darkness falls around you. If she knew how much you miss her, she’d probably start hovering again, which you don’t need. Or else not even be moved to give two snots. You don’t need that either.
You’ve always saved everything. Your room is a careful labyrinth of mess not because it’s out of your control (it probably is, at this point, actually, but it wasn’t originally) but because chaos suits you. It drowns out the sound of yourself. That was all you had to listen to for a thousand years. You’re sick of it.
These days, though, you have to pay closer attention to see the beauty in junk. You study every lovely discarded thing, pondering why it was thrown away, reveling in its rejectedness. You choose rejected things, you treasure them, you spend your nights alone among them, and you only feel how you want to feel. If it gets to be too much, you can always sleep, and dream about the songs she used to sing you.
***
You watch her shaking with anger, shedding all the skins of what you needed her to be: peace, innocence, a sign that the wounds of the war would heal.
When she fights you the way you always wondered if she could, it’s with everything she has, for the first time ever, and you go cold for a moment because it looks so right. She is a natural, a born soldier, made to do this; once she thinks about how easily you can predict her, once she knows she won’t win that way, she starts using techniques you never taught her, ones she only knows by sheer force of instinct; and all your mind can register as you dodge her rapid strikes is no, no, no, this can’t be how you lose her.
She was born in this place, but you saw this place born. When she says she never asked for it be this way, your first impulse is to say me neither, but you know that isn’t completely true. The words you asked with were: we can’t save every inch of it, Rose, we’ve got to pick our battles. Only small, temporary Kindergartens had existed on this planet before the war. This one was built in secret, a hemorrhage in the mantle, spilling soldiers by the thousands as trees, and animals, and human farms and fields, and humans with them, quietly died and died around it. Rose’s tears hit the ground too late. If it hadn’t been for this place, the war would’ve been four hundred years shorter. If it hadn’t been for this place, the gem-corrupting weapon never would have been detonated.
If it hadn’t been for this place, you never would have met her.
Rose used to say that the earth has a way of forgiving.
***
“I’m getting on that ship,” she says, voice slightly quivering. “If I have to fight you, then I have to fight you.”
Jasper looks back at her and laughs.
That laugh catches you off guard. Sure, Pearl is small compared to her, but you’ve seen her take down things ten times Jasper’s size—seen it from the receiving end, in fact, with Sugilite’s own five eyes. Is such a thing that unimaginable?
A few hazy minutes pass (did she fight or what? Your head is spinning; you’re not really sure) and then you open your eyes in a room, an empty room built for a prisoner, and you realize that’s what you are, a prisoner, and they’ve left you here alone again.
You whimper, unable to hold it back. “No, no, not again, not alone!” Your strong and living fists thump against the wall.
And then, from the wall, comes an aggressive hiss, one you never thought you’d be so relieved to hear—“Amethyst.”
“Pearl?”
“I need you to listen to me. Don’t yell. Don’t give them anything.”
“What? Why?”
“If they know what you’re afraid of, I promise you they’ll use it.”
“What’re they gonna do to us?”
“I don’t know for certain. Technology’s come a long way, it looks like. Amethyst, listen to me very carefully. Whatever they do to you—if they do—anything—” She takes a deep breath. “I know you’d never tell them anything to compromise Steven, or…or your home. I trust you for that completely.”
“You mean that?”
“Am I wrong?”
“No, I just…I didn’t know you saw me like that.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” Your breathing echoes so loud around the small metal room. “Brave. Like you.”
She’s quiet for a long time.
“Pearl?”
“Don’t be like me, Amethyst.”
The statement hangs long and heavy, particulate smoke in the air. It clouds everything you’ve ever thought she wanted from you. All your life she’s been all you’ll never live up to—the warrior you fall short of being, the one you could never win against. If she doesn’t want you to be like her, what does she want you to be?
***
You haven’t felt this numb, this far away from everything, since the late years of the war—and so you recreate those days, surround yourself with dozens of photocopies of yourself in the temporal standstill of the sky arena, fight as robotically as they do, keep moving so you don’t feel the full despairing weight. Hours go by. You keep them coming. You cut them down. They fall like—well. To use the old homeworld expression, like pearls on a battlefield.
The communication hub could have invited threats you can’t even imagine, threats from modern homeworld with weapons so powerful that all you have protected for so long would never stand a chance. If it weren’t for your dumb luck, the same dumb luck that’s pushed you, a hundred times in ten thousand years, out of the way of the reprimand you figure must still be coming for you, they could have been there before you even realized what you were doing. You look at yourself. You meet her sword with yours. You give her what you deserve.
At some point the shouting in your mind makes its way out your mouth. “What were you thinking?”—a swipe to disconnect a hand from a wrist, a blade from a body—“Was it worth it?”—a swipe across a throat—“Was it worth ruining everything”—parry!—“Risking everything”—thrust!—“Just to feel worth somebody’s while for a grand total of”—finish her off!—“What—an hour?” Your shouting knocks your perfect dodges off by fractions of inches. Sometimes the holograms’ blades graze your arms, leaving deep scratches. You don’t even feel them.
“And then come back home”—stance low, blade in hand—“Look them all in the eye”—block their strikes—“Call yourself a knight”—keep moving back—“Call yourself a crystal gem—RRGH!” Another wave of projected soldiers falls. You nearly double over with the force of your fury. “YOU’RE A FRAUD! YOU’RE INDUSTRIAL WASTE WITH AMBITIONS!” You pivot to meet the next dozen, no end in sight, no plans for stopping. Over clanging blades, you shout on, voice hoarsening as the sky grows warm with sunset. “You had a chance to make up for being—this—for all those years of being a burden—and—you let yourself turn into a liar and a coward and a worthless—oh—how could you do this to her?! How could you do this to everyone who believed you could be more than—you failed, you defective scum! You failed Garnet”—stab—“You’re failing Rose!”—stab—“You’re failing Steven!”—stab—“You’re failing Earth!”
Finally, there’s only one. “Match set, challenger—”
“SHUT UP!” you shriek, beheading her in one strike. Her useless body disintegrates. You stand there, heaving painful breaths, letting the sword fall with a clatter from your hand to join the legions of others scattered around the arena floor, laying where their bearers were defeated. You sit down hard, suddenly realizing how tired you are, and that’s when you hear the warp pad activate.
“Hey,” she says, just loud enough to carry across the tiles to where you are. “Are you okay?”
You choke on your already-racing breath and spit out the first explanation for the scene she’s walking in on that flies into your mind: “Oh, yes, I’m alright, I’m just—looking at my swords.” Even as you realize what a terrible lie this is, you feel compelled to sell it, so you pick one up and stare again at your detested reflection, humming slightly as if lost in thought.
You hold this pose as she comes and stands at your side, hand on hip, looking ahead as if scanning the horizon. “You’re losin’ your mind, Pearly,” she informs you.
The sword falls. You cover your face with one clammy hand. “I know,” you sigh, tears that you’ve managed to beat back all day pricking at your voice.
Her hands press beneath your aching arms and lift your weight from the ground. “Please come home and talk to me? I’m worried about you.”
You stand on rubbery legs, and her soft palm trails down the stinging skin of your forearm to touch your hand ever so lightly. Something jars in your mind, like brakes slamming on, as your fingers link with hers. She is here. This is now. Her thumb grazes places rubbed raw by the sword handle, and you flinch.
She looks back, eyes full of pain. “I’m trying to be gentle,” she says.
“I know,” you murmur. The tears threaten again. “I know.”
***
Pearl remembers.
There are only three gems left on earth. Of those three, only two saw the rebellion. Of those two, one lives largely in the future, and seals her life as a soldier firmly away, telling herself, constantly, every day, that that is not who she is, that that is not what she’s for.
That’s reasonable. Understandable. But it leaves only one.
So Pearl remembers. She carries history. She knows the names of all the dead. She can display representations of all that occurred, in meticulous detail and from any angle. There is so much data that sometimes she feels like it crowds her self down to the bottom, and ironically, by virtue of all that she has done beyond her intended function, she is holding soldier gems’ stuff for them again; again she is a vessel. But a sacred one.
Garnet tells you once that she doesn’t talk about any of it, the war or before, because she wants to start over—here, on earth, with you. You’re not sure you believe that—you see her avoid, shrink from your voice, look at the stars like they’re going to save her. There’s nothing you want more, and nothing you’re more afraid of, than the possibility that she might start looking at you the same way.
When it’s really bad—when she’s alone wherever she is, when she’s surrounded by a prison of blue light—sometime it will still be Rose’s name that she calls. But when you hold her hand and tell her again and again that it’s over and you’re here and she’s here and you’re safe you’re safe you’re free, listen, you are free—you know that the reviving ground of this planet, so far from the worlds she daydreams of, will grow all the medicine she needs with or without her long-time healer.
Earth angel, earth angel, will you be mine? Your hands in her hair tell her stories you don’t dare to speak.
Too much remembering is hard on the fighting spirit. Would it be too much to say that maybe what would help…is to become someone forgetful?
***
The glow of summer dusk filters through the gaps in the boards of the barn, pinstriping your egg-tempera arms in pale blue. Garnet’s taking Steven home to bed; Peridot sits with her back against the fencepost muttering into her tape recorder; and it’s just the two of you in here, in the near darkness, stripping bolts among scraps and dust.
You steal a glance to where she was and see she isn’t there—before you can turn to look elsewhere, you feel her head against your shoulder blade, her arms around your waist. “Hello,” you whisper with a smile, remembering more innocent times.
“Pearl,” she says, “why did you want to be a soldier?”
You freeze. Somehow, you know. Today she has been in the Kindergarten with a homeworld gem. Today she has heard the official descriptions. Today she has put the pieces together, confirmed that she recognizes herself in the figures of your blue-tinged nightmares.
You want to turn and tell her everything, hold her and apologize for concealing the truth, reality, that one principle she clings to in her drifting and whimsical existence; you want to tell her you never wanted her to think of herself like them, to wish to be like them, to have any concept of that as something she was ‘supposed’ to be, because the only thing she is supposed to be is herself, her own, the one you protect. But she didn’t ask about herself. She’d never ask about herself. She asked about you.
“So that if I believed in something, I could do something about it,” you say in answer to her question. It’s an answer you’ve rehearsed, just in case you were ever posed this exact question, although oddly enough, it’s one question most gems don’t usually seem to think about.
As usual, Amethyst rips the lid off the implied can of worms with abandon: “If you believed in something?”
“Well,” you respond softly, looking down at your still-working hands. “I didn’t always know I was going to. I’m not—naturally inclined to, as it were.”
She hugs you tighter, and says four words that change your life: “I don’t believe that.”
***
It starts with light. Her gem warms like an ember as you lean toward her, and when you remember that first kiss, what stands most vivid in your mind is not the conversation that led to it or the moment that was right for it but rather that you had to close your eyes against the high-beam on her head and when her lips touched yours, as they finally did, you felt the proverbial fireworks in your chest.
But there’s a heaviness here too. All the shy kisses and corny flirting in the world won’t erase that. Bitter, bitter joke: did it hurt when she fell from heaven? Yeah. It hurt. A lot, actually.
“You know, don’t you, that if you ever want to go away, nothing’s really stopping you?”
Her eyes fly open. “But you know…you know I’d never want to leave you.”
“Not even to see the rest of the galaxy again?”
“I’d take you with me.”
“What if I didn’t want to go?”
“I suppose we could rig some sort of tether system.”
You laugh because she’s serious. She laughs because you’re laughing. You’re so together. You wonder how you were apart so long.
“The sky is always touching the earth, you know. Technically everything above ground level is a part of outer space.”
Bitter, bitter grin: “Don’t lower your standards for me.”
“That isn’t what it is,” she says. “It’s all about perspective. Things catch up no matter where you go, but you can find the tools to deal with them no matter where you are.” She pauses, smiles, bends her waist again to lean her forehead against yours. “Besides. The only thing I have to lower for you is my body.” You lightly swat the end of her nose, making her squeak and jump backward.
You pull on her hand. She sits beside you. The beach glows grey in the pre-dawn mist. “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothin’, P,” you say, stroking your thumb across her knuckles. “Just waiting for the sun to rise.”