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I listen as I turn around
You're in the air, in every sound
Where do we land when land is gone?
I look away, away
—Sinking Shores by Hannah Schneider
I
The first time, she finds him on the beach at midnight, alone with his guitar, and something in her chest fragments like sea glass. The melody he plays isn't one she knows—though she has listened, these past months, to every song that's drifted up from his van, every half-formed tune he's hummed while walking the boardwalk—but it catches in her mind like starlight on water. He doesn't see her; he never does, though she towers above the Temple, though her shadow must surely fall across his shoulders when the moon hangs low enough to cast one. His eyes are closed, his head tilted back, and the expression on his face summons memories she thought she'd buried: Pink, sprawled in the garden, describing Earth's sunsets with that same transported joy; Pink, dancing through the halls of Homeworld, trying to explain what music meant to humans; Pink, saying I love them, can't you understand?!
She hadn't understood then. She doesn't understand now, observing Greg Universe pour his heart into empty air, into a song that will vanish the moment he stops playing. Gems do not create ephemeral things; their art, like themselves, is meant to last eternities. Yet here he sits, generating and discarding melodies like the tide generates and discards waves, and each one strikes her gem with the force of a sword. The song shifts—minor key now, something that makes her form ache with frequencies she can't classify—and she finds herself leaning forward, straining to catch every note before it dissolves into the sound of the sea.
When he opens his eyes, she sees tears on his cheeks. This, too, she cannot comprehend: this liquid evidence of emotion, this physical manifestation of feeling that humans seem to generate as easily as breathing. She has seen him cry before—in laughter, in frustration, in what he calls joy—but never like this, never so unconsciously. He doesn't wipe the tears away; he lets them fall, as if their existence is as natural as the tide, as if there is no shame in this display of vulnerability. Her own tears, she thinks, could drown cities. Her grief once flooded worlds. How can his small sorrows bear the same weight as her millennium of mourning?
The song ends. He sets the guitar aside, gentle as ever—and this, too, bewilders her, this tenderness toward objects that will inevitably decay—and lies back on the sand. She should leave. She has already stayed too long, learned too little. But he starts to sing again, wordlessly this time, and she finds herself frozen in place by the simple fact of his existence: this brief, brilliant creature who loved a Diamond and lived, who creates beauty without purpose, who weeps without shame.
"I miss you," he says to the stars, and she doesn't know if he's speaking to Pink or to someone else entirely. "I keep thinking I'll run out of songs about you, but I never do."
She flees before she can hear more, but the melody follows her, echoing in her gem, a question she has no answer to.
II
The second time, he's working at that primitive sonic amplification device he calls a "car wash," and she cannot fathom why the sight arrests her so completely. There is nothing remarkable about the scene: just a human performing manual labor, maintaining equipment that will need to be replaced within decades. He moves with the same efficiency she's observed in countless other humans going about their designated tasks. His hands are sure on the controls, his movements economical, his attention focused entirely on his work. She has watched Pearl perform similar maintenance tasks a thousand times. She has supervised countless Peridots as they adjusted and readjusted equipment far more complex than this simple machine.
But Greg Universe hums while he works, and something about the sound makes her form vibrate with frequencies she's never experienced before. The melody wraps around her like organic vines, finding purchase in places she didn't know could be touched. His voice—rougher than it was in those old videos of his performances, marked by age in ways she still struggles to understand—carries notes of happiness so pure they hurt to hear. How can he find joy in such mundane tasks? How can he sing about soap suds and water pressure as if they matter, as if they're worthy of celebration?
"Looking good," he says to the machine, patting its metal flanks with absurd affection, and the gesture summons memories she thought she'd erased for good: Pink, cooing over her first successful attempt at growing organic life; Pink, gathering those strange creatures she called "cats" into her arms; Pink, touching Earth's soil as if it were precious as diamond. She had dismissed such behaviors as evidence of Pink's defects, her unfortunate tendency toward inappropriate attachment. She had never considered that such attachment might be a gift rather than a flaw.
He starts to sing in earnest now, something about sunshine and clean cars and simple pleasures. The lyrics are objectively terrible—rhyming "squeaky clean" with "washing machine" with "living the dream"—but she finds herself swaying slightly to the rhythm, her form responding to the joy in his voice as if it were a physical force. He doesn't perform for anyone; no other humans are present to appreciate his efforts. He simply sings because he wants to, because the act of singing brings him happiness, because music flows from him as naturally as light from stars.
"What do you think?" he asks the car wash, gesturing at his work with theatrical flourish. "Pretty good for an old rocker, huh?"
She wants to answer him, even if she doesn't quite know what he's asking about. She wants to understand how he can speak to machines as if they're friends, how he can find contentment in tasks that will need to be repeated tomorrow and every day after, how he can pour so much love into things that cannot possibly love him back.
She leaves mere notes into another song of his, but she carries the short tune with her, humming it in the chambers of the Diamonds' palace until she's had enough of Yellow asking her what was wrong.
III
The third time, he's in his van, surrounded by old photographs and what humans call "memorabilia," sorting through the physical remnants of his past. She shouldn't watch this; it feels like trespassing, like viewing something sacred. But she can't look away from his hands as they move over old concert tickets, faded t-shirts, photographs curling at the edges with age. He touches each item with reverence, with a gentleness that makes her gem pulse with unnameable emotion.
"Remember this?" he asks the empty air, holding up a photograph that makes his breath catch audibly. She can't see the image from her position, but she knows from his expression that it must be Pink—Rose, as he knew her. "First time I played at the beach. You said my music made the waves dance."
The longing in his voice stops time. How can he speak of her with such tenderness, after all these years? How can he touch these fragments of the past without shattering under the weight of memory? She has spent millennia trying to preserve her recollections of Pink, keeping them perfect and untouched in her mind. But Greg Universe holds his memories lightly, lets them breathe, speaks to them as if they're old friends rather than sacred relics.
"I thought you were just being nice," he continues, and Blue realizes that time has not stopped after all. "Took me years to figure out you really meant it—that you saw magic in everything, even some wannabe rock star with bad hair and worse pants."
He laughs, and the sound contains multitudes: joy and grief and love and acceptance, all tangled together like light through a prism. She has never heard anything like it. She has never wanted so desperately to understand something in all her millennia of existence.
When he begins to sing—soft and low, a love song she's never heard before—she feels something in her form shift irreversibly. The melody winds through her consciousness like a living thing, rearranging her understanding of reality with each note. This, she realizes with dawning horror, is why Pink chose Earth. This is why she chose him. This terrible, wonderful capacity for feeling everything at once, for holding joy and sorrow in the same breath, for loving what cannot last—
She flees before the revelation can complete itself, but she knows it's already too late. She has begun to understand, and understanding will destroy her as surely as any weapon.
+I
The truth arrives like dawn: inevitable, terrible, and beautiful beyond bearing. She finds herself on the beach again—always the beach, as if Earth's endless waters might somehow absolve her of this impossible thing growing in her gem—watching Greg Universe teach a group of human children and gems alike to play guitar. Their hands fumble with the strings; their voices crack on the high notes. By any objective measure, the sound they produce should be unbearable. But Greg kneels in the sand beside them, infinite in his patience, and shows them again and again how to shape their fingers into chords.
"Like this," he says, and something about the gentleness in his voice unmakes her entirely. "See? You're getting it. Try again."
The child—a small female with hair like copper wire—screws up her face in concentration and tries the chord again. The sound is still discordant, still imperfect, but Greg's smile blazes like a supernova. "That's it! That's exactly it!"
She remembers, with sudden shocking devastation, the first time Pink brought her a handful of flowers. They were already wilting, their petals bruised from her grip, their stems bent almost to breaking. But Pink's face had shone with that same incandescent joy, that same pure delight in the creation of beauty, however fleeting. She had dismissed it then as another of Pink's incomprehensible fascinations with organic life. She had not understood that the impermanence was the point—that there was something magnificent in loving what could not last.
The lesson continues. Greg teaches them a simple song, something about friendship and starlight and the joy of making music together. The children's voices tangle and separate, somehow harmony and discord at once. He doesn't correct their mistakes; he weaves them into the melody, transmuting error into invention. When one child begins to cry from frustration, he sets his guitar aside and speaks to her with the same attention he gives to his music, the same care he shows to all these brief, bright creatures who cross his path.
"Sometimes the best songs come from the mistakes," he tells the child, wiping her tears with the hem of his shirt. "Sometimes you have to hit the wrong note to find the right one."
The words strike her like lightning. How many wrong notes has she hit, in all her millennia of existence? How many mistakes has she made, trying to force the universe into perfect harmony? She has spent eons seeking flawlessness, and here sits Greg Universe, teaching children that discord itself can be beautiful.
When he starts to sing again, she finds herself moving closer, drawn by something deeper than gravity. The children's voices rise and fall around his like waves, like stars spinning through space, like all the chaotic, wonderful things she once tried to order into submission. And Greg Universe catches sight of her—finally, finally—and his smile doesn't falter. He adds a harmony to the chorus, something that seems to reach directly into her gem and rearrange everything she thought she knew about music, about Earth, about love.
Soon, the lesson ends. The children scatter like constellation points, leaving their teacher alone on the beach. The sun hangs low over the water, painting everything in colors that shouldn't exist, that can't be captured or contained or preserved. She should leave. She should run back to the cold certainties of space, to the familiar geometries of Homeworld. She should—
"You can come down, you know," Greg says to the air, to her, to the setting sun. "If you want to learn."
She moves before she can stop herself, each step bringing her closer to catastrophe. The sand shifts under her feet—unstable, mutable, imperfect. When she finally stands before him, she realizes she has no words in any language for this singular piece of hollowed-out time.
"I don't understand," she manages, because it's the only truth she has left.
Greg looks up at her, fearless in a way that defies all reason. "That's okay," he responds in kind, and pats the sand beside him. "Understanding's overrated anyway. Sometimes you just have to feel it."
"Feel what?"
"Everything." He strums a chord that catches in her gem like starfire. "The music. The ocean. The sunset. Being alive."
"I'm not alive," she insists, but sits anyway, shrinking herself so that she is small enough to exist in his space. "Not the way you are."
"Aren't you?" Greg's fingers find another chord, then another, building something new from nothing. "You're here, aren't you? Watching the sunset, listening to music, trying to understand things that can't be understood. Sounds pretty alive to me."
Blue wants to argue, to explain the fundamental differences between organic and gem life, to maintain some semblance of distance. But Greg starts to sing—something new, something that seems to be forming itself around her presence—and she forgets every word she's ever known.
The song has no words, or perhaps too many words, or perhaps words in a language that exists only in this moment, between sunset and starlight, between what she was and what she's becoming. She feels herself dissolving, reforming, becoming something impossible and wonderful and terrifying. Is this what Pink felt, that first moment on Earth? Is this what humans feel all the time, this endless capacity for reinvention, this perpetual state of becoming?
"I think," she says when the song ends, when she can breathe again, "I think I'm falling."
Greg laughs, and the sound contains universes. "Yeah," he says, "that's kind of what being alive is all about."
The stars emerge one by one, writing equations the Diamond can no longer solve across the darkening sky. She should leave. She should forget this ever happened. She should return to the familiar rhythms of her existence, to the cold mathematics of space.
Instead, she says: "Teach me."
And Greg Universe—readily, effortlessly, without a second thought to what Blue Diamond has just confessed to the sea and the stars—begins to play another song.
And she falls, and falls, and falls, and never hits bottom until it is Greg's arms she is falling into; here at last is Earth's greatest paradox: a Diamond undone not by war or time or grief, but by the simple truth of finite love. Perhaps this, too, is what being alive means: the endless freefall of loving what cannot last, of creating what cannot endure, of becoming what you never imagined you could be.
Soon, the song ends. The waves continue their ancient conversation with the shore. Nothing has changed, except everything has changed, except she has changed, except the universe has changed, rearranging itself around this single point in space and time: another Diamond and a human, sitting on a beach, making music that will never last, all the more beautiful for its impermanence.