Chapter Text

1. Like Our Routine.

“For now just remember how you felt
the day you were born:
desperate for magic, ready to love.”

—Kate Baer

~*~

It is natural to be drawn toward familiar things. 

And so, after an epoch on the moon—after idly watching life go on without them—Lars and Connie found themselves yearning.

The portal blinked shut behind them.

They felt the grass underfoot, the breeze. The chill of the night swirling around them. 

The sheer loudness of this night’s quiet ambience.

For now they pretended not to be overwhelmed by all this. They ignored how threadbare and crater-dusty their clothes had become after their extended stay on the moon, now full and bright above them. The air had bite, not lunar emptiness—this was Earth's living, breathing kind of cold.

They walked a while. 

When they came across a small rise with some grisly artifacts on top of it, they became curious.

Having been extracted from an Earth still somewhat healing from the old interstellar war, human-wrought iron was beginning to litter the place in a variety of different shapes. Although it was beneath them in the practical sense, having abandoned human weaponry long ago in favor of gem pieces, Lars quickened his pace to reach it.

“Hell.” He held aloft the gladius he’d just plucked out of the crude fingers of a skeletal hand. Moonlight cast eerie shadows over the bones, bounced off the blade's worn edge.

He squinted at the blade. "What do you think the dude was fighting?”

“Leave it,” Connie said as she caught up, folding her arms. “It’s strange here now. Colder.” She sniffed. “Smells.”

“So they’ve figured out iron. So what? Wasn’t this whole field trip your idea?” Lars playfully swished the thing about in the air. “Isn’t it nice to breathe the fresh air again?”

He took in a deep breath to illustrate his point. “Even though, yeah, it does smell weird."

“Look,” she said, tense suddenly. “I changed my mind. I… I don’t know if we should be here.”

“Of course we shouldn't be here. When has that ever stopped us?”

She scanned the horizon. In the distance, mountains. Forests. All illuminated dimly by the very moon from which they had descended in the glittering night. “We probably broke society last time we were here—“

Lars spoke in a singsong tone, “We promised neeever to talk about thaaat~”

Connie grimaced, her gaze sweeping the landscape. He was right. “What I’m saying is, we don’t know this place anymore if they know about iron. What if it's easier for them to kill us now?”

“Then? We die.” He shrugged. “Who cares? It's nothing new. And, silver lining—we don’t need to keep our little appointment.”

The mention of that nebulous future moment in which they hoped to undo their past and themselves in the same fell swoop made her lips twist. 

“C’mon, man,” she said. “Drop the shtick for a moment, hm?”

“Look, it's probably fine. See?” He grinned and casually itched the side of his neck with it, the dull blade of course having no ill effect. But Connie wasn't watching anymore. She'd wandered over to another poor pile of bones nearby. It, too, was armed and appeared to be dressed similarly to the one Lars had just burgled. 

This one had a spear lying across it, but she had zero interest in touching it.

In the distance, the harried screeching of some prey animal. They stiffened, whipping their heads around in the direction of the commotion. Then, silence. 

A moment passed.

“Forgot about that whole food chain mess,” Lars admitted quietly, relaxing a sudden tight grip on the handle of the weapon.

Connie gave a nervous chuckle. Her eyes were glowing, her hand on her favorite sword which was already halfway drawn from her head. She pushed it back in.

“Good to know my reflexes still work,” she said, her eyes back to normal with the disappearance of her blade. “Been a while since I’ve felt, like… an instinct.”

“H’yeah. But I still don’t think there’s much on this planet that can hurt us—"

“Why are there two piles of well-armed human bones up here, Lars?” she interrupted him, turning back to the mess in front of her. “Shouldn’t their friends have carried them off before they became bones? Buried them? Honored them? Correct me if I'm remembering wrong, but that’s what humans do, right?”

Lars snorted. “Well-armed is giving them too much credit.” He offered the gladius to her, handle first. “Try it. See what you think.”

She wrinkled her nose at the corpse blade, giving him a look as though he'd offered her a live fish. “Absolutely not.”

“Okay. Well…” He flipped it, caught the hilt in his hand, and swung it around again. “You’d hate this thing. I can tell this is from the early days. Balance is garbage. Compared to your Bismuth piece, this is like they’re still just hitting things with sticks and hoping for the best. Too bad for them that us and the gems already tidied up a lot of the stuff left behind by the invasion and the war.”

“Except those giant things in what-will-be Norway…”

“Eh. They’ll be fine for a couple more millennia.” He sniffed. “I’m saying it looks like they could still use some decent weapons up here. So we’re probably safe.” He dropped the gladius. “C’mon then, let’s—“

It clattered noisily onto the soft ground, and instantly his thought derailed at how little sense it made to do so.

It was a gem. It was broken, its shards in a small pile in the unruly grasses, glittering where caught by moonlight. The gladius had struck a shard, glanced off, and clattered to the grass beside them.

A second later, the pile flared to life.

The post-humans staggered back, fight-or-flight slamming into them—that long-absent visceral anxiety. They dropped into defensive stances, eon-old sword and spear in hand. 

Wide eyed, they watched as each shard sent out a tangle of monstrous arms, hands, legs, claws—a disembodied mouth—grasping, kicking, raking, scraping, gnashing—

They’d fought corrupted gems before. But it was their first encounter with one that was also broken, and it was unsettling. Though they stabbed and cut and poofed the limbs as they came close, each shard steadily sent out new ones in their place. 

Connie soon realized the futility of it and backed off, but not before slicing and poofing the final two that tried to follow her.

Lars was still stabbing at the things with his spear. She watched from a safer distance and noticed something strange: while Lars was still being actively assailed, the limbs she was backing off from didn't seem interested in attacking anymore.

Strange behavior from a corrupted gem monster.

One long arm was even gathering up the fallen inactive shards, dragging them away from her—toward the others.

It was protecting itself.

She realized what was happening and darted around the writhing limbs to stop Lars.

“Fall back!” she called out.

“Huh?” Stab. Twist. Poof.

“It doesn't want to fight!”

He poofed the last claw that was trying to rake him and turned to face her, incredulous—and was promptly grabbed by one of the bigger hands which lifted him right off his feet and into the air.

“That’s your opinion!” he yelled in annoyance, struggling against the giant hand about twelve feet off the ground. His spear thudded into the dirt below. The thing had caught one of his arms against his body, so he resorted to punching it with his free hand, then reduced to biting when it proved ineffective.

Below, Connie sighed and slammed her blade into the base of the arm before quickly lighting up her eyes to stow the weapon in her head. Lars fell through the resulting poof-cloud with a loud expletive and straight into a portal, followed immediately by Connie who grabbed his downed spear and jumped in after him.

She extended her free hand to help him up from where he’d landed on his back, and gave him back his spear.

Lars groaned as he lit up his eyes to put the spear back in his head. “Little warning, next time, maybe?”

“I’ll leave you up there next time.” She pointed. “Look.”

Lars saw then that they had landed about a hundred yards away from the mass of tortured, segmented gem forms. In the moonlight, it was clear—the things weren't looking for them anymore.

This corrupted, broken creature indeed appeared to be gathering itself—all the pieces of itself that had been scattered and dispatched in the fight—back into that small pile, and once it was all together again in the dust amidst the grasses, the remaining forms simply released themselves.

When the mist cleared, it was as though nothing had happened. The two onlookers were stunned.

“Never seen one do that before,” said Lars.

Connie frowned. “It isn't just corrupted, it’s shattered. But that isn’t the end for them, so… each piece of itself is working to protect the whole. But it can’t really be whole—not in the way that matters. So it gathers itself, defends, and waits.”

“Until the next jerk comes along and disturbs it,” Lars said. “Oh shit. That’s sad.”

A short silence hung in the air between them.

“But it does explain why there’s two dead guys no one bothered to bury,” he added.

Connie clenched her jaw and turned, heading off into the nearby treeline. “C’mon. We’re going to help her, and bury them.”

The plan was to encase the sad jumble of shards in a batch of wood pitch glue and allow it to harden; an old trick from a time long ago when they beat Moldavite, the mad gem who had ruined their young lives.

They periodically checked on her gem and, despite occasionally needing some maintenance,  the small rock of hardened pitch it was encased in seemed to be holding up okay as a makeshift bubble even after all these centuries. So they figured it would work this night as well.

They walked a short way into the nearby woods, collecting sticks and branches as they went. There was coal and a rock of spare pitch sitting around in Lars’ head, which he summoned. They built a fire from the wood they’d collected as well as the coal and sat to wait for the pitch to melt down in an old stone pot. 

Lars had entire eras lying around in his head—leftovers from before Connie was brought back, and centuries worth of impulse collecting since. 

Fossils. Jewelry. Ritual chalices. Tools, gem weapons, pigment powders. Talismans and artifacts found in the dirt. More coal, rope, bone flutes, bullroarers. An early lyre. Leathers and furs. Blankets they didn't need. A bong he'd once made out of a gem vase. 

There was a burlap sack full of hourglasses they didn’t talk about. An array of tiny hand-carved 21st-century model furniture pieces. Cool animal skulls. A mammoth tusk. Board games. A lot of gold.

Anything, really. He even planned to stow the gladius when they returned to the hill.

He was likely going to be the one to store the shattered gem, alongside that of Moldavite.

Connie, on the other hand, liked to think of her own head as relatively neat and tidy, so she opted to stash only the essentials in there. Her sword, some old papyrus journals and maps, some other specially-chosen weapons, stolen spare clothes, sewing kits, a couple of lodestones, tinder, flint and so forth. Perhaps a few things that she just liked as well, but she was extremely picky.

But she was secretly glad Lars didn’t care as much. He usually was able to summon whatever unusual thing they needed at any given time.

Sitting around the fire, Lars and Connie couldn’t help but start reminiscing, if haltingly, about the last time they’d sat around a proper campfire such as this, back on top of a cliff above a beach, a continent away.

Before Obsidian crossed the Atlantic.

Before being forced to give up their home.

They’d lapsed into silence long before it was done. The sun would be rising soon—if humans were nearby, they’d be seen.

Lars stood up when it was melted enough. 

“So my main thought is, how are we gonna put the shards in this thing?” he asked as he picked up the pot using a thick cloth to shield his hands from the heat. Although he healed quickly, he still didn’t really want to get burned if he could help it.

“Hm?” she asked back, starting to kick out the fire.

“Y’know. When we upset her again and she tries to take form and kill us.”

“It’s a puzzle.” Connie shrugged. “We like puzzles.”

Then they were en route back to the little rise just past the treeline. The goop wouldn’t stay goopy for long. Lars had to pick up the pace a little, so he did an awkward half-jog behind her.

He pressed the issue. “Yeah, but, are you sure you want to do this?”

“I told you, yes.”

“What happened to, y’know, trying not to create a time-ruckus?“

“We’ve fought corrupted gems before,” she said without glancing back. “We built Stonehenge. We’re still here. Nothing seems to have changed.”

Lars frowned. “I’m still not sure ‘whether or not we exist’ is a good metric to go by.” But he knew she wanted to help. Truth be told, he did too. It was tough sitting on the sidelines, waiting in the wings. 

Just waiting. Watching. Waiting and watching and hoping.

But like every other crazy idea either of them had ever had, with no-one else to turn to for help or outside input, it was up to the other to play the contrarian. To provide the opposing argument—sometimes even the voice of reason—no matter what it was. It was an essential role, forcing them to consider more than one angle before doing what they wanted to do. And right now the job had fallen to Lars.

“You know this is a bad idea,” he said, “Because though it seems like we’d be helping a shattered gem find peace and some human souls move on, if you believe that… What if it actually really matters. What if someone else is supposed to do this? Someone not us.” He caught his breath, even though he didn’t need to. “Stop walking so fast. Maybe it’s important.”

“Who else is going to do it?” asked Connie. “Human versus corrupted gem. You know how that one always plays out. Fancy new weapons didn’t save those guys. That hill is going to become a mass grave.”

Lars hesitated. That was a good point. But he had more.

“You yourself, not very long ago, said we shouldn’t even be here.” He was met with silence, so, this time, he decided to just level with her. “Look. Every time something like this happens, we both feel crazy on-edge for ages afterwards.” He shrugged. “It’s kind of like, our routine.”

Her shoulders tensed. He wasn’t wrong. But she didn’t stop walking.

They were approaching the edge of the forest, the rise was starting to become visible in the lightening sky of the pre-dawn.

By now, Lars had given up. “Look, I was joking back there. I was hoping we'd last more than a few hours back on this rock without trying to destroy the future again.”

She stopped suddenly and Lars nearly spilled the still very hot pot of wood pitch. But he could instantly see why she froze; if they went much further, time would most certainly break.

The Crystal Gems were at the top of the rise to which they were headed.

It was a sight for sore eyes to see the beautiful quartet of powerful gems who were stuck on this planet alongside them.

But at the same time, it was utterly terrifying.

Lars threw the pot aside and grabbed Connie, who was transfixed, by the back of her shirt. He yanked her a few paces over toward a nearby tree before she came back to her senses and threw herself behind it after him.

The gems’ voices floated over, soothing and familiar and forbidden.

Connie and Lars didn't want to be there—or to listen—but they did both anyway.

“Amethyst, put that down! You don’t know where it’s been.”

The small purple gem wasn’t listening. She was instead checking out the gladius, throwing it about, parrying invisible assailants, causing Pearl to visibly cringe at her amateur technique and grinning when she did.

Pearl sighed. “Come on now. I can easily teach you—“

“Thrust, thrust, parry!” came Amethyst’s retort as she twirled the blade in the other’s general direction. “C’mon Pearl, spar with me then!”

“You’re just embarrassing yourself,” Pearl replied before turning back to the others.

“I’ll embarrass you! Come at me!”

“If we disturb her,” Garnet was saying in her no-nonsense way, “She will try to take form and retaliate. So be alert.”

Aside from Pearl, her words fell upon deaf ears. Amethyst was still being Amethyst, while Rose—

Rose Quartz was staring at the skeletal remains, idly rubbing her thumb to her fingers on one hand. She’d seen these things before, the leftovers of shattered humans.

Long ago she had been asked to bring one back from a similar state, although far less advanced. She hadn't understood it—still didn't—but it had worked. The spark of life had returned to its organic vessel.

And in moments like this she couldn’t help but wonder—could she do it again?

She wouldn’t dare. But she would always wonder.

“Rose?” Pearl’s voice finally cut through. “Rose, are you alright?"

“Yes.” She blinked and perked up somewhat. “Yes, of course. So, Garnet!” She smiled, arms akimbo. “What’s the plan?”

Garnet shrugged. “Iunno.” And when Rose stared at her, she adjusted her visor and added, “Most of the probabilities get awkward. Fast.”

Rose frowned down again at the little scene. “Well. That’s not great.”

Amethyst popped in, gladius discarded. “Can’t you fix her, Rose? You always heal my gem when it’s cracked.”

“Well if you’d be more careful…” started Pearl.

Rose hesitated. “I… I wish I could. She’s shattered as well as corrupted. There’s no real way of coming back from that, that we know of.”

There was a silence as Amethyst became despondent, which Rose promptly broke in her usual upbeat way. 

“But we’ll collect her pieces. We’ll keep trying. And someday, we’ll figure out how to help them. All of them. And, in the meantime—” She smiled again, softly. “—She’ll be waiting in her bubble.”

They continued trying to puzzle out how to get close enough to the shards to bubble them, without disturbing them too much. As they were doing so, Pearl caught sight of the gladius again.

“You know, what if the humans’ new metal broke this gem?” Pearl wondered aloud. “What does iron mean for the future? Are humans just going to go around picking fights and shattering corrupted gems from now on?” She sniffed, regarding the skeletons. “They seem like the sort of creatures that would.”

Rose’s demeanor dropped at the thought. “No. Surely not.”

“Not if they know what’s good for them,” said Garnet.

“Stop bringing down the mood,” Amethyst chirped. “Here, let me try my idea.”

It was less of an idea and more of an erratic charge that the shards immediately found invasive enough to take form over. Out came Pearl’s spear and Garnet’s gauntlets as Amethyst turned and ran from the mess of limbs that it was putting forth.

Rose cried out, “No, fall back! She’s only reacting to what we’re doing when we’re too close!”

With distance came peace, and the small pile released its physicality once more. 

“My fault, everyone. Sorry ‘bout that.”

“It's okay,” Garnet replied patiently, her gauntlets poofing away. “Don’t do it again.”

Pearl paced around a little. “If we get close, she takes form… forms. We can’t bubble her when she’s—to use a disgusting but strangely apt human term—spewing pieces of herself out like that.” She glanced at Amethyst. “Obviously, charging in isn’t the answer.”

Then, Pearl stuck the tip of her spear into the grasses, only to have it phase out. “Long story short, I… don’t know what we should do.”

Amethyst pretended to roll up nonexistent sleeves. “I’ll try yelling at her.”

But Rose gently put out an arm to stop her from marching back over. “No, no. We’re going to try something with a little bit more tact.”

Amethyst stopped and sat as she and the others watched.

Rose stepped gently towards the small pile, and again, slowly. Her gem glowed and with each new step, she watched intently. She could feel its growing apprehension, its fragmented madness, its voiceless pain.

She felt the suffering—even before having been broken—centuries of suffering. Every gem left on this planet had a story like this. This one was just a little bit worse than most.

Finally, she reached it and slowly dropped down. Behind her, both Amethyst and Pearl held their breath and readied themselves for what might quickly turn into a fight.

But, like Garnet, they shouldn’t have been worried. 

Rose, blinking back tears, held a rose-tinted bubble in her hands. Inside it, the shards. She stood back up and turned to her comrades, and shortly offered a smile as the others came over to give their support.

“Nice work.” Garnet smiled. “I knew you could do it.”

“Me too!” chirped Pearl, hanging off her arm. “Fantastic work, Rose!”

“That was… really anti-climactic,” said Amethyst as she hugged Rose’s skirts.

“Amethyst!” Pearl was shocked. 

Rose chuckled slightly and gazed at the bubbled shards in her hands. It was impossible to tell who this gem once was, but she had probably been a friend.

The vast majority of the corrupted gems they’d dealt with over the last two and a half millennia—since the rebellion and the invasion both came crashing to a halt—had probably been their friends.

“Do you remember when doing this used to really bother us?” Rose asked her last remaining friends.

Then she tapped the bubble and sent it off as they sombrely watched its departure.

Pearl stretched her arms up, fingers linked together. “Well! I suppose it’s time for a brisk walk to the human village before we warp back to the temple. The humans there may wish to know that their ‘angry spirit’ problem is no more.” She glanced one last time at the skeletal remains before beginning to walk off. “They may also wish to do something about their friends.”

The others followed her, Amethyst rhapsodizing about what kind of food she expected to be offered upon their triumphant return.

Rose started to follow, but paused a moment and cast one last look at the remains. A pang of the old guilt rang through her very gem, but she was used to this as well.

The forest beyond this little rise was waking up. The birdsong was escalating. It was still cold, but that didn’t bother a gem much. 

Something about the forest made her hesitate further. She narrowed her eyes, trying to figure it out, but her family were disappearing down the hill in the direction of the rising morning smoke from the village in the distant forest, and in a moment she pulled herself away to follow.

Unnoticed behind the tree at the forest’s edge, Connie and Lars held each other tight. They were wide-eyed, hair matting together. They pressed themselves into each other’s rags, into each other’s misery, as if that would ever help.

Neither could speak for a while, as if doing so would break the memory of the conversation to which they’d found themselves privy. 

Later on, maybe they’d remember the chance encounter fondly. Maybe they’d joke about it, half-convincing themselves that they were part of it. But for now, it was too raw. 

They’d felt the cool breeze in their hair, the wild grasses underfoot, the thrill of fight or flight.

The cataclysm of familiar voices.

Once they composed themselves, they jumped a portal to follow the pre-dawn west and stole new clothes from laundry lines to replace their rags, all the while reassuring themselves that it was fine. 

A few pilfered garments and boots wouldn’t break future history. Surely.

The Diamond Base and the moon were silent. But on Earth, crickets chirped, rats scurried, and the snoring of sleeping humans drifted to them through the walls of their huts as they hurriedly clothed themselves. 

They’d forgotten about dogs but were reminded soon enough. They escaped through another portal as the dogs fell back in surprise. They continued to jump west, following cooler stars, darker forests, more mysteries they'd swear not to disturb—as they continued to reacquaint themselves with this world.

They’d seen them. Rose Quartz. The Crystal Gems.

Neither had expected to have run into them in their first few hours back, but here they were, in the shadows of dawn, drenched in heartache and regret for once again having touched down on this rock.

This beautiful, painful fucking rock.

Chapter Text

2. Same Old Whine.

“We both drowned 
under the waves 
of the words 
we weren’t saying.”

—Ben Maxfield

~*~

As it turned out, this planet was designed to hurt them.

From the orb’s silent projection in the Diamond Base on the moon, it was easy to distance themselves from all that was going down on the Earth above. They were watchers, apart from it all. And that’s all they had been for hundreds of years.

Despite everything they'd been through, humanity had crafted a few more quality civilizations out of the rock and the dirt—bigger than before. They must have numbered in the millions now, a bit stronger and slightly more clever, continuing to spread throughout the continents.

To a casual observer, it would almost seem as though the species hadn't just been at risk of extinction by an invading geological force only a couple of short millennia ago.

From a distance, it was one thing, but up close, another thing entirely. It made Lars and Connie feel left out, but they were pretty proud of their ex-species all the same. 

And, given a little time, the hurt was…

Thrilling! 

In a way. So much so that they postponed their return flight to the moon over and over again as a decade flew by.

They opted to wander instead.

They couldn’t stretch their legs without bumping into Assyria, or the Olmecs, or China, or the Greeks—or some smaller startup just trying to find its way. Wild areas they used to retire to were now pastures, or cities. Or sliced through by roads. 

Corrupted gems were still present but, like themselves, they seemed to have been pushed back somewhat. They'd catch sight of the things sometimes and give them a wide berth. 

On occasion, tired of the wilderness and curious to boot, they would convince themselves it was okay to cloak up and steal into some built-up place like Memphis or Chengzhou.

Then, they would find the local corrupted gems had been mythologized in some fashion. Statues, fables, songs. They were monsters to slay. Malevolent spirits to fear. Protectors, sometimes, weirdly—guardians. Unknowable gods to worship.

The Crystal Gems, too, had gone through something similar.

So, when they found themselves staring up at a quartet of beautiful stone statues in an otherwise modest town square one night, they weren’t surprised.

But they wanted to know more.

So they crafted a hobby of seeking out archives and libraries—anywhere written information was stored—and visiting them in the dark of night, when the humans were asleep. 

There were quite a few around in this new age, and Connie and Lars had paid attention to enough lips and scribbles through their observations over the last few centuries, so they knew how to read many different scripts to some extent or another. What they didn’t know, they could eventually discern between themselves.

Accounts of gems in the written record of this time were easy to find. They were open to reading of human affairs of course, but their preference heavily leaned towards texts dealing with the subject of the corrupted, and of the Crystal Gems themselves.

“Hey, what’s this word? Purple?”

Connie leaned over from the scroll she was pouring over, eyes glowing to light up the darkness. “Uh… purple. Yeah.”

"Knew it." Lars snorted and leaned back in his chair. “This one describes Amethyst defending the oracle from a smoke monster like, two hundred years ago. Give or take.”

“Really?" She leaned further, reaching out to turn the scroll to a slightly better angle, where they could both read it. "Where are the others?” 

“I dunno. You ever know Amethyst to carry a burning lance, though?”

Connie blinked. “Never. Not once.”

“See,” he complained, waving an arm around idly. “They all just have something wrong with them. Even one tiny detail, and it instantly makes me doubt the whole thing.”

Connie smirked and turned the papyrus she was reading around the table so that he could see it in his own eyelight. “You want infuriating? Have a look at this.”

“…Pearl of the White Light?" Lars read. "Who dances with swords and disappears into mist?”

She thwapped it with the back of her hand. “This is a scroll full of children’s songs from a while back. And of course—because, why not?—Pearl has a whole five-verse ballad about her. Wish I could sing.”

“Can’t wait for our ballad." Lars muttered. "Probably called That One Time We Hid Behind a Bush.”

"One time?" Connie laughed as he went back to skim-reading the rest of the smoke monster story. 

“Oh wait,” he exclaimed suddenly. “Here they are. The Goddess of Many Eyes.”

She smiled softly. “Garnet.”

Lars continued reading. “The Sword of the Queen, and Mother of the Early Bloom. This ‘Homer’ guy seems deeply in favor of—“ He checked his notes. “—The Sisters of Starlight.” He raised an eyebrow. "Or like, deeply in love with them."

“Nice,” she nodded. “Soft. Remember the one that called her The Queen of Breaking Things Gently?”

“Heh. Amethyst the Dirt Child.”

They chuckled in lowered tones. ‘Twas a library, after all.

“What do you think they’d have called us?” Connie asked before she knew what she was saying.

Their relationship was such that they rarely, if ever, became awkward around each other, but right now, the silence that rolled between them in this darkened library somewhere in Greece was insurmountable. So they quietly went back into the pile of scrolls they’d collected for this night’s study.  

During their literary journey around the occupied globe, they came across tales, poems, epics and more. Some accounts of the gems' exploits seemed relatively truthful; most were exaggerated beyond the ridiculous.

Some saw the Crystal Gems as virtuous, others more villainous, and it appeared to depend on how much collateral damage they’d caused at the time and place of writing, and whether or not it was a first hand account.

At first it was curiosity, laughing at things that were obviously errors. But as time wore on, their discoveries only turned sharper.

On occasion, they glimpsed a hint of some Diamond or other.

There were writings in various places that spoke of a sky king with golden lightning in his hands, all judgment and fury.

The veiled goddess of mourning, elsewhere associated with sorrow, rain, and storms. Her tears could flood the world.

And a goddess of love, beauty, and new life—though more than capable of cruelty. Of war.

The names changed, but the outlines were clear in a myriad of written memories, all over the world. And every time they noticed a Diamond in the text, there was always the urge to flinch, or to rip it up and burn it. But they eventually got used to it.

Likewise, no matter where they were in the world, they would occasionally stumble upon some reference to a Brilliance. A Divine Light. A Cursed Light. The Howling Bright. A bleach that tore through the world, shredded the trees of their leaves, and then was Gone.

It was as though those writing the accounts didn't know what to make of this part of the oral history that had been passed to them from ancient times—the light that seared the terrifying division between the time of the destructive gems, and the time of the beasts.

Lars and Connie always quickly realized exactly what it was. And every time they did, it sent them straight back to the brambles where they'd hidden. Again, they were overlooking the vast plain, the fleeing gems. The smell of ozone as the sky tore open and ripped their minds wide, leaving them hollow—but never as hollow as every gem unfortunate enough to be caught in it.

Sometimes it was almost funny. Most of the time, it wasn't.

And over and over, no matter what, the Crystal Gems returned. They were the ones who had remained, fought, and continued on; they were misremembered, made into heroes. Into gods.

Over the centuries—and back in that distant future they were waiting to see unfold again—Lars and Connie had time and time again seen the gems fight, fear, destabilize, break, cry, question, and love.

It was hard to square those flawed, feeling people with the perfect beings described in the scrolls.

All this, while they themselves were the silent watchers. Undying. Unnoticed. 

Envious.

The Crystal Gems were misremembered, but at least they were remembered. And each one of them felt a purpose in a world that needed them.

Eventually the lonely nerds came to realize they’d done themselves a disservice and retreated back into the wilderness.

But they couldn’t hide among the wildflowers, the driven snow, or the distant atolls for very long.

After yet another long wander around the planet, they finally went back to being avid late-night readers.

They had no idea how long it had been, but it must have been decades. They quickly found even more libraries to choose from, and more material to wade through. This time they tried to pace themselves and focus more on studying humanity. Or humanity’s accounts of humanity.

But it quickly got boring. Humanity’s accounts of the gems were far more relatable, and so they went back to seeking those out instead.

They drank up what they could each night and then fled, drained and resentful, each morning. But they easily followed the night around the globe, and there was always an archive of some sort in every night which was usually empty of humans at some point during. They told themselves they were content. And they were.

Kind of.

The effortless way that the gems stumbled into human vision time and time again. It fascinated them.

And, gradually, it started hurting them again.

It was inspiring, sure. The Crystal Gems were living myths to the humans—protectors, literally shaping their worlds.

But no matter what, they kept coming back to the simple fact that the gems were exactly like themselves; Flawed. Trying. Stuck here. The only other constants in a world that didn’t belong to any of them.

The only difference was that the gems were free to flit around as they wished and be memorable enough to be mythologized, allowed to live their lives. Meanwhile, Lars and Connie—

Well. It didn’t bear thinking about. They had a timeline to protect. So they continued pushing it down whilst continuing about with their hobby.

After a while, they began to fear they were running out of material again until they found a cache of their favorite genre in another back collection of a temple archive somewhere in Europe.

They sat on low benches, scrolls and tablets sprawling between them. Lars read as Connie leaned in, eyes glowing in the dark.

…And so it was, battle won, when the smoke cleared and the writhing, formless, angry spirit  dispatched, that the radiant ones descended from the hill. The warriors of the village, finally able to lay their fallen kin to rest, wept and embraced them. The goddesses shed no tears and bore no wounds.

That night, a feast was held. Fires lit. Meat turned on the spit. Children danced, unafraid for the first time in so long—

Connie frowned. “Doesn’t this sound familiar?”

He glanced up. “Does it?”

“Yeah.” She nodded and pointed at the text. “Writhing, formless. Angry spirit. Fallen kin? Yeah. Pretty sure we were there for it. It was in this part of the world, near where we touched down.”

He blinked, and she mistook his hesitation as ignorance.

“The shattered and corrupted gem, remember?" she continued. "One of its arms grabbed you? You… started biting it for some reason?”

But the memory of their first night back on Earth had already flooded back to him.

"Ringing any bells?"

The memory of having to hide with her. 

“Shit,” he whispered, mostly to himself. His brow wrinkled, but Connie didn’t seem bothered.

“Easily eighty years since then?” she wondered aloud. “More?”

“H’yeah…”

“Well go on,” she urged him. “What’s next?”

Lars stared down at the letters, skimming it from where Connie had interrupted.

There was a description of a cross-legged Rose Quartz laughing and sharing the village elders’ wine. 

Of Garnet, standing at the fire. A soldier calling her a goddess, and the fusion accepting the flatbread he offered. Her taking a bite of it without correcting him. 

Of Pearl declining to eat but asking endless questions about kilns and bronze casting, delighting the local tradespeople.

And of Amethyst devouring more than what five men combined could and telling a joke so vulgar that the chief’s wife spit her wine, laughing.

His eyes stopped at the final paragraph, a short one. He read it silently.

We carved their likenesses in stone, so that we would not forget the night the stars walked among us.

He thought of their own aborted plan to subdue the gem shards.

“Lars?” Connie's voice cut through his thoughts.

"Huh?” He wrenched himself up from where he’d been stuck, barely. “Oh. I—"

But she’d become caught on something else. He stared, unable to believe her good mood as she interrupted again.

“Hey, here’s something." She tapped another scroll that lay open. “I think it’s about Rose."

“Uh, alright,” Lars said softly.

She cocked an eyebrow at him. “You okay?” 

He did that thing where you shake your head and nod at the same time. “Sure. Yeah. Fantastic. Go ahead.”

Her gaze lingered on him, but then she cleared her throat and lowered her eyes to read the account aloud.

You will not believe me, and I do not blame you. But I must commit it in ink before time takes me. 

I knew her, in every way a man may know a woman, and in none of the ways I truly hoped.

She called herself Rose. She stood too tall, and laughed too much, and cried every time as if it were her first. Her hands were soft, polished stone left in the sun. Her eyes the color of loss.

She kissed me as though I were real to her. And then, one morning, she walked into the forest, never to return. I followed—gods help me, I followed—but all I found was fog and glass.

I have seen her since. Always from a distance. On cliffs, in thunder, in dreams. I became weathered and worn while she never aged. Never changed.

She halted briefly before closing with the final paragraph.

I do not think she loved me. Not really. But she saw me, and I have not known peace since.

There was a silence. And then Lars noticed that Connie was crying. Softly, quietly, trying to swiftly put it away like she always did. Like they always had to.

“I’m okay, Lars.” She cleared her throat, frowning through the tears she was hurriedly wiping away. “I just. Old feelings. You know. The same old whine about not being able to socialize.” She managed a laugh, somehow. “Silly, isn’t it? Ridiculous…”

She continued speaking—disparaging, invalidating herself.

But it didn't matter. Lars wasn’t listening. He already knew.

The spectacular conditions of their non-existence had been pushed way down for far too long. 

He could only hear his own brain screaming at him. The whole thing was aflame—pleading, desperately, for him not to do the stupid thing. But the weight on his back pressed sharp through into his chest from wrong angles. It was too much.

Wordlessly, chair scraping across the stone floor, he stood. The sound that came out of him wasn't empathy. Or sympathy. Or even an explanation.

It was centuries of swallowed breath, and he flung it at the darkness.

A bright portal to nowhere specific ripped into being. The scrolls fluttered on the table, some clattered to the stone floor.

There were much quieter ways to raise a portal and he knew it, so Connie was about to chastise him. Surely every human and animal within a mile had been startled awake by this.

But she didn’t have time. He grabbed her hand—she trusted him, she always had, and she did now, even though she had not the faintest clue what was happening—

He dragged her through.

When the light faded, Connie found herself on her feet staring at Rose Quartz.

The gem was sitting on a fallen tree trunk, arms draped across her lap, not even twenty feet away from them, ringlets spilling down around her shoulders. The diamond, the core of her being. That she would one day pass down to her human heir. 

Connie's breath caught in her throat.

And Rose Quartz stared right back among the scattering birds, face mirroring her own confusion, glancing between the two of them. Trying to figure them out.

Connie attempted to get her bearings.

They were in a forest? Or something. It was, what? Daytime? Late morning maybe. Shadows dappled the moss in a way that didn't matter. Nothing mattered except the desperate way that Lars still gripped her hand. Except the words that he was speaking to Rose.

“Rose Quartz,” he stammered.

Rose blinked and stood. Connie started.

And Lars cleared his throat.

“My name is Lars.” He motioned toward his cohort with his free hand. “This is Connie.”

Connie’s jaw dropped. She yanked her hand back from him and finally gathered her wits enough to be utterly incredulous. 

“What are you doing?“ she whispered loudly through grit teeth. But the idiot had moved a step or two away from her, toward the gem.

Rose, too, was taken aback. She looked about to say something again but Lars—heart the pink equivalent of racing, obviously out of his mind—was still talking.

“H. Hi. Hey, man. Listen. You’ve offered us help before.”

He shut his eyes. If reality was going to break, he thought, it might be better not to see it.

“We want to accept it.”

The breath caught in Connie’s throat. "No—" she croaked as she slowly shifted her horrified stare from Lars to the gem who now knew more about them than what they’d agreed she ever needed to.

Rose scrambled, yet again, to say anything, her face a mess of surprise and confusion and joy—but Connie was stamping her boot on the ground. The first two were flustered duds, but on the third try, it worked.

The impact ripped open a portal which she and Lars fell through.

Rose lurched forward as it happened. “Wait—please!” But it was too late. The portal swirled out of existence.

This entire encounter had taken place in less than twenty seconds, and was suddenly over.

At a loss for what else to do, Rose soon decided to sit back down and watch the starlings returning among the evergreens. She waited there awhile in case her strange acquaintances were to return.

Lars thudded hard onto freezing stone. Connie stared down at him, wide-eyed, arms akimbo, and furious.

Thinking.

Which meant she was silent, for now, which also didn’t bode too well for him. But to his surprise she offered her hand to help him up, which he accepted after a moment.

Perhaps she wasn’t about to murder him.

She turned away and looked out into the purple dusk that had encroached upon the cold Galaxy Warp, one of the most isolated places they’d found, in the middle of what would someday become known as the Tunguska Sea. The stars were starting to dot the eastern sky, glittering between patches of cloud and billowing fog.

“I don’t know what came over me.” He hunched in on himself and pushed a rock around with his boot. “Guess my brain wasn’t fully developed when I bit it.”

After a long moment, he spoke again. “You know why, don’t you?”

She didn’t move. “Of course I know why,” she said quietly, continuing to pointedly stare at the dark, watery horizon. “You want to matter. So do I."

Lars winced as he heard the breath catch in her throat.

"But this… this is so fucking dangerous, Lars.”

A tear tumbled down his face and fell from his chin. “I know.” He rubbed an eye with the base of his thumb. “But, it might not be too late. All she knows is our names. If we just disappear again—"

“She knows our names, man. She can tell the others. What will happen then?”

“She won’t.” He sniffed. “She knows we can probably ruin her secret. Why would she tell them? Why would this change anything—”

“How on Earth could you possibly know that?” she asked, her voice clipped.

“We’re still here, aren’t we? Still us. Still stuck. Even if it didn’t somehow break time completely—they’d have saved us somehow, in the future. Right? That’s what they do." He inhaled deeply. “Either way, we wouldn’t be here if they knew our names. And I… Reading those things?"

He stared at the stars a while. "Connie… I can’t deal.”

She finally turned to shoot him a piercing glare. "Don’t forget that we still don’t know how any of this timeline stuff even works. You can’t be this sloppy—we’re trying to keep the future that we left behind intact. So he can happen—"

Her voice broke. Lars stood there miserably as she continued.

"So the Cluster doesn’t annihilate this world. Not to mention the Diamonds…!” She clenched her fists. “That’s what all this—" Her words caught in her throat again, after they dragged across her heart. “All this crap has been about.”

The last quarter moon was up and rising through the darkness. The sounds of the waves lapping at the island and the surrounding rocky outcroppings drifted up the cliff. A cold wind sprang up only to die back down a little.

“We’re what, two thousand years through our sentence?” Connie wondered aloud, tapping her boot on the ground in frustration. “Two and a half? We’re roughly halfway there, and you’re asking me to help you screw up our one job!”

“Yeah, it’s a long time,” he started slowly. “But, I keep thinking. What if the reason we’re still here is that we don’t make it.”

He shrugged, the adrenaline starting to wear off. 

“I don’t know how, I can probably guess why,” he continued. "But for whatever reason, we just don’t make it back to stop Moldavite."

"Lars—"

"No. Look. The fact that her gem is in my head right now makes me think we don’t do it. Like, why would her gem be in resin, in my head? How could that be true, if we stop her?”

Connie spread her arms wide, exasperated. “Again, we have no idea how any of this works. So logically the safest bet is to continue what we’re doing. Isn’t it? We have that no-interference policy for a reason. We’re not idiots.”

“I get it.” He grit his teeth. “I’ve lived it. And I’ve mostly been okay with it. There’s just this awful thing in my brain that says, hey, what if we’re less ‘doomed alternate versions of ourselves’ and more, like, ‘last surviving artifacts of a dead future’.”

Connie’s eyes widened as her troubled friend kept talking.

“What if some… new, unfamiliar future is happening right now? Isn't that way more likely? Everything we’re doing—all this hiding and building castles on the far side of the moon, sneaking around, avoiding everything and everyone—what if it's for no reason?”

He raked shaking fingers along eyes that were no longer watering.

Connie shook her head. “No. We’ve already discussed—”

“What do we owe such a future?” he asked, voice somewhat stronger now, flicking the wet from his fingers onto stone. “What do we owe any future? Our sanity? Our lives? Centuries of exile? You didn't ask for this. I know I didn't! Neither of us ever asked for this.”

Connie turned again to stare at the waves lapping the nearby rocks jutting out of the sea. She was silent a long moment, and Lars waited.

Suddenly she said, “It hasn’t been all bad.”

“Of course it hasn’t.”

She heard the small smile that crept his voice as he continued. “I’m happy, every now and then. I have you. And we make the best of things.”

They remained like that a short while, not really looking at each other or saying anything.

Then Lars inhaled.

“You can stop being the contrarian now, if you want,” he said. “What d'you really think?”

Connie turned to him then, and saw him seated upon a ruined warp pad nearby. She started to walk over to him. “I’m… extremely—" She huffed. “I really wish you hadn’t done that.”

He looked up at her with soft eyes as she stopped in front of him. “I can tell,” he said. “And I am sorry.”

She ran her fingers through her hair. “It’s been a… long time to start thinking about throwing it away now. If you’d have talked to me first—"

“We always talk. We never do anything. This is the first thing we’ve done in a long time besides sightseeing and reading. And I think we’ve seen all the sights.” He twisted his mouth. “I’ve read all I wanna read. Just sayin’.”

She folded her arms and chewed on her lip. Lars gazed up at her and patted the space next to him. When she sat, he wearily leaned against her side. Rested his chin on her shoulder.

“Like I said, I think we can still ghost her on this if we need to,” he said in a lowered tone. “Things might be okay. I'll… figure out how to deal.”

“But, what if you’re wrong?" she asked him. "What if everything breaks and we cease to exist? What if—"

“Then, everything breaks. We cease to exist.”

Connie leaned back in kind against her sole companion through these many strange and shifting centuries. She digested the prospect as they watched the last of the light fading in the southwest. The stars grew brighter, the waves kept up their ceaseless lapping of the rocks around them.

She'd spent so long keeping a lid on it, keeping it contained—this stupid little ember. And now Lars had gone and kicked it over. Set her on fire with it.

"Of course she was sitting on a log like some kind of forest oracle," Connie said quietly. "You think she knows they made her into a goddess of spring?"

"I don't think she'd mind."

They’d first met Rose Quartz on an ancient gem battlefield and ever since then, they hadn’t known peace.

“Stars help me,” she whispered into the quiet. “I think I want to do it.”

Lars lowered his gaze. Connie pulled a sharp breath. Suddenly the spell was broken.

“But we shouldn’t, right?” she asked.

“No,” Lars murmured. “Of course not.”

~*~

There is a crack in the pattern

Just one

Chapter Text

3. Trust This Universe.

"Slowly I am withering—
a flower deprived of sun;
longing to belong to—
somewhere or someone."

—Lang Leav

~*~

Lars and Connie disbanded the book club and started a fight club.

They didn’t want to be spotted—by human or gem—so they wandered south until they hit ice and snow.

Connie shielded her eyes from the flurry that was going on. They had walked over plains and treacherous ocean to get there, but still would have rathered real death over climbing anything. So the portal that brought them up the steep ice cliffs vanished behind them.

They weren’t dressed for it, decked out in stolen short-sleeves, light hide leggings, light fingerless gloves, boots and various other inappropriate things as they were. But it didn’t matter. 

It was summer here, so they knew it would be full daylight all the time for a while. The entire world was white and in a temper. It was perfect.

The perfect distraction.

“Here it is,” Connie said over the howling wind. “The coldest, driest, windiest continent on Earth.”

“And penguinniest,” Lars added with distaste as he lit up his eyes and pulled his really nice looking gem spear out of his head. “Seriously. It's like nature couldn’t decide if it was making a fish or a goose and gave up halfway.”

"You're being so rude to our hosts right now. I'm glad they can't hear you."

"No one ever talked about how smug they look.”

Connie rolled her eyes, but he couldn’t see as they were glowing bright white as well. “Smug or not, we are guests in their home.” She also pulled a weapon from her head—her favorite gem sword. “So try not to kill any.”

“No promises."

Connie inspected the blade, reacquainting herself with the feel of it after so long. She’d last used it against the shattered gem on the hill almost a century earlier. “At least penguins know what they are. What's your excuse?”

Lars smiled. “I know what I am—a begrudgingly majestic cryptid with great hair and too many unresolved personal issues. That's what.” He stabbed the spear into the ice at his feet and leaned against it, folding his arms around it. “Also? Incredibly co-dependent.”

Connie snorted. “So what does that make me?

He squinted at her through his medium-long hair whipping his face. “…Apocalypse heroine with the stamina of a revenge comet. A+ hair. Also, issues. Also co-dependent. Aaaand huge nerd."

"Oh, you're too generous."

"I'm underselling you, actually. Anyway. Sure wish the humans would invent their snow goggles already.”

"You should tie your hair back, like I do."

"Maybe later. But I am gonna need you to cut it again after this."

“No problem. Just remind me.”

“Sure.” He grinned at her. “So. Rules?”

“Your choice,” Connie said as she swished her blade around, cutting a brief, subtle path through the flurry. “I was Rule Mistress last time.”

“Right.” He looked blank for a second, then perked back up. “How about, no talking. Like, no vocals. At all.”

Even if I slice your arm off? Connie signed with her free hand in their silent outdoors moon language.

Lars scrambled to untangle his arms from the spear so he could respond in kind. He hadn't realized they'd be starting immediately. Especially then.

No excuses, no taunts, no apologies, she enthused silently. I love it.

Connie signed for more rules, so Lars gave a crooked grin and signed back. They could easily make each other out in the falling snow.

Two, we only use the weapons we have right now—if your weapon breaks, fix it if you can. And three, whoever draws blood first, wins. Winner gets a million dollars.

Connie rolled her eyes. She made the gesture to hurry it up.

Or, picks what we do next.

He paused for a moment to think as Connie watched with interest.

Match ends after a decade if no clear winner, he continued. That’s ten Antarctic days, and ten Antarctic nights. Thus spake the Rule Mistress. Good?

Hell yes, signed Connie, extremely enthused. I’m here for it.

And so the upcoming long days and nights were spent hiding, stalking, and sparring with each other across the entire frozen continent, again and again—all in perfect silence.

They employed the use of portals and concussive blasts liberally and creatively, but they were clicked, clapped, scratched and clawed and stomped and punched into existence, rather than springing from their vocal reverb, due to the rules of the game.

They used them to sneak up on each other, to perform midair acrobatics mid-duel, and to throw their charging assailant several miles away. There was no end to the shenanigans. 

Night or day, blizzard or shine, it didn’t matter. They fought whenever they happened to come across one another in this vast frozen wasteland. Long gone were the days of going easy, setting boundaries, or giving mercy.

There were only three rules, and these were much different times.

Seven Antarctic nights later, Connie found herself thoroughly overstimulated from the ice, the whistling winds, and the ribbon of the Aurora Australis fluttering beautifully overhead.

She was somewhere up in the bleak mountains, tracking her opponent through the wastes. And honestly? She was having so much fun.

Suddenly, after weeks of no Lars, there he was. He was maybe two miles off, further up the slope, adjacent to some ice cliffs. There was no real hiding from each other in moments like now. Both were shades of pink in darker clothing against a blank white landscape, lit up in this clear night by the otherworldly glow.

Besides—she couldn’t explain it, but she could sort of feel when he was near. She put it down to the powers that came with their condition, because what else could it be? Of course, that meant that Lars could also sense her, but maybe he wasn’t paying close enough attention.

As she squinted, she came to understand that he was resting, perhaps. Or watching the lights. Maybe the guy was distracted. 

A glowing portal would only alert him to her arrival, so she decided to continue on foot to see if she could truly surprise him. She smiled to herself. She would emerge victorious this night, she was sure of it.

She kept her eyes trained on Lars for any sign of him noticing her. There were none whatsoever…

Until suddenly, a portal opened beneath her.

It dumped her hard on the ground, somewhere else. Then, when she was halfway back up onto her feet, the ice beneath her shuddered and caved in. 

She fell through and dropped about ten feet to land on more ice below—a frozen cavern. This meant she was much closer to Lars than she had been, which was not ideal now that her perceived element of surprise was gone. She leapt up and took stock of her surroundings, her eyes lighting up bright white.

Unfortunately, it was just ice walls and a colorful sky above.

Silently cursing for allowing herself to be lulled into a false sense of security, she took one step and spotted Lars standing at the top of the trap he’d set, spear ready, grinning—all mischief, no remorse.

She scowled and ripped the air with her nails, putting every shred of herself into it. Tinder striking flint—it sparked a chain reaction, which crackled out and burst the icy pit wider, causing Lars to lose his smugness and topple down there with her.

But he was nimble and back up on his feet in a second, immediately dodging and defending himself with his spear against her sword.

After seven years of this, they didn’t need words to know what the other was thinking. It was all in body language, in breathing, the angles in which their weapons clashed—

And then something completely unexpected happened.

A massive roar shook the ice, causing more of it to fall around them. They stopped and, exchanging a quick nod, immediately turned to stand back-to-back, weapons ready, scanning the walls of the pit and the opening above them. But there was nothing down there with them save the ice that was still crumbling, causing the hole to widen out substantially.

Another ice-rumbling roar. More icy debris tumbling down.

It probably wasn’t the safest place to be, even for them, so Connie snapped her fingers and they were standing on the glowing surface once more, still back to back. Then she felt Lars slapping his hand into her worse-for-wear shirt, wanting her attention.

She spun to see what he was seeing, and her eyes widened. 

Three gem monsters, coming straight at them from a fresh, still crumbling crevasse in a nearby ice wall. Perhaps Lars’ trap had compromised the structural integrity of the area. Perhaps her blast was to blame. Either or both were likely, but they couldn’t dwell on that.

These huge beasts—six legs apiece and spikes at all angles—were free now, and seemingly ready to expend some energy. They were golden in tone, vivid in the glow of the aurora. Radiant against the ice.

The unspoken rule: If fight club were ever to be intruded upon, there would be an immediate and automatic truce for five minutes. But with no means of telling, and having developed a hideously warped sense of the passage of time anyway, this limit was vague and could mean anything.

There was a bag full of tiny hourglasses in Lars’ head but, aside from sand, they contained mostly bad memories…

Each of them had put enough effort into the long evening’s sparring to start feeling a little worse for wear, so when Lars punched the air to attempt to blow the monsters back, the effect was fairly minimal. Besides, there was no better fuel for a decent shock wave quite like a full, blood-curdling scream, but his own rules discouraged that. 

He mentally cursed himself for that one.

But the effort provided time for Connie to make another portal and pull him through with her, and they were suddenly watching from a distance away, at the top of a cliff.

So they'd accidentally released a trio of huge corrupted gems from an ice prison. So what? These games were more fun with obstacles anyway.

It felt safer here, being able to see for miles in this windy yet clear night. They figured it had probably been more than five minutes, so the sparring started up again.

They were so into it that they didn’t see the monsters catch sight of them, despite the distance.

They also didn’t see them fuse.

The monstrous multi-legged glistening fusion beast began to run towards them from miles away in massive leaps and bounds, shaking the frozen ground beneath them—A creature built for extinction-level tantrums.

Lars and Connie stopped sparring and glanced back as something that sounded like thunder cracked the air. The massive fusion had caused an avalanche on the mountainside next to theirs.

The situation had their full attention.

They barely had time to lurch back in horror at the behemoth’s alarming speed, even in the distance, when yet another thing happened, just to pile on.

The avalanche exploded.

To their utter dismay, it revealed a warp pad, glittering in the ice and lights. It had been buried for who knows how long, but they could instantly tell it was active. Lars and Connie barely had time to hide themselves in the ice before the Crystal Gems materialized. 

The truce was back on.

But the avalanche was still coming down, so Rose grabbed the others and leapt into the air, narrowly avoiding being swept off into chaos. She alighted gently on a nearby rocky outcropping and set the others down.

They were fairly close now to Connie and Lars, and once again the unfortunate duo were able to hear their conversation.

“What on Earth is that?!” cried Pearl. “It’s… massive!”

Amethyst squinted. "Looks mad."

The monster’s approach was causing the icy ground beneath them to shudder, and it was getting worse.

“A fusion,” said Garnet. “We have to shut it down, quick.”

“Where did it come from?” asked Rose, full of concern. “We should have gotten to this sooner, if it’s been here this whole time!”

Garnet shrugged. “As far as I could tell, it appeared out of nowhere.”

“What? Just now?”

Garnet nodded, solemn. “Just. Now.”

At this, Lars and Connie glanced at each other, adrenaline coursing through them.

“Is this what the big rush was for?” asked Amethyst, looking a little irate. She made a show of stretching out. “Can’t this wait until after lunch?”

“No,” Garnet said, flat. “This creature is capable of eroding and quaking all the ice on this continent into the ocean.”

“And that,” added Rose, “Would be bad.”

Pearl’s jaw dropped. “Oh, my stars...”

Amethyst sighed and folded her arms. “So it’s a weather catastrophe thing. Where was this kind of talk four hundred years ago when we accidentally set off this huge worldwide cold snap, huh?”

“Amethyst,” Pearl singsonged. “We prooomised never to speak of thaaat~”

The thing was getting closer. There was only one thing for it. The decision was made. They fused.

And from the white light, Obsidian unfurled into being—fire eyed, roaring like the ferocious lava beast she was.

If having the behemoth corrupted fusion rushing at them was bad, being this close to Obsidian was pure terror. Having wormed themselves into a position from which they could watch, Connie and Lars were again reduced to clinging to each other.

Again reduced to quietly witnessing the last extant Crystal Gems do the thing they do.

They were on high alert, ready to duck back down as soon as they had to. But in this moment, Obsidian seemed to exist for one thing only. 

The corrupted fusion, approaching fast, was undeterred by Obsidian summoning her spear, shield, gauntlet and whip. 

It was completely uninterested in the impossible hilt the quartet created when she smashed them all together, only to swallow it in her upper maw.

It also appeared not to perceive the disgustingly large fire sword that resulted from this whole display.

An instant later, she was preoccupied with battle. Her back was to the two silent onlookers as the avalanche continued, absolutely unnoticed, around the hooves and claws of both monstrosities.

The corrupted fusion put up a pretty good fight, but was soon dispatched by way of gigantic sword through gigantic face. The poof cloud billowed out like a bomb going off, but Obsidian was unbothered. The avalanche was coming to an end and, with nothing left to fight, so was Obsidian.

Her sword dematerialized, her movements slowed. She seemed almost lost at the sudden loss of her opponent.

But only for a moment.

As they watched—hiding as best they could with heads and faces camouflaged in ice crystals they'd scraped up—Obsidian suddenly appeared to come alert again. The massive fusion grunted loudly in the auroralight as she slowly started to turn. Head first, body following.

Abject horror flooded Lars and Connie, for they were alone.

With Obsidian.

At the bottom of the world.

No other living thing existed, not for hundreds and hundreds of miles in every direction. And, for an agonizing moment that seemed to stretch on forever, she appeared to be looking directly at them. 

For the first time in seven years, they felt small. Utterly insignificant.

And when she roared, it felt like it was aimed at them. It may well have been.

But before anything else could happen, the bonds of her being snapped abruptly. Four much smaller and more relatable gems fell from the fading poof cloud to face-plant inelegantly into the new layer of glacial ice—the avalanche had already mostly settled.

Lars and Connie took this moment to drop down further. They tried to pile more snow on top of them to hide themselves even better, but they needn’t have bothered. The gems had no need to climb back up onto this particular slope.

Perhaps it was wishful thinking.

They could make out far less of what the gems were saying at this distance, but a lot of it still came through somewhat clearly—they were trying to talk above the wind, after all.

But there wasn’t much for them to say. The new bubble was dispatched, and then the gems cast about but could not see any sign of the warp pad they’d arrived on—buried again somewhere under the displaced snow on the other slope as it was.

“Oh well, I suppose we’ll have to walk back,” Pearl said, cheerfully. “I don’t know about you, but I could use the cool down."

Amethyst groaned as they started on foot, but Rose hung back, once again.

She paused, scanning the surrounding bleak mountainsides for—what? She couldn’t pin it down.

"No, no. Wait a moment.”

The other gems stopped and looked back. Lars and Connie thought themselves discovered.

But as they watched, Rose knelt and pressed a palm to the icy ground. For a long moment, she was still. Her eyes were closed, face unreadable, as if listening for something beyond the wind, the creaks of settling ice, and the aurora's silent hum.

She opened her eyes. “There,” she said, raising her head.

The air trembled and something burst through her hand, jolting the ice. A long, jagged crack snaked its way up the slope, through the ice of the settled avalanche. Then, a specific section of the ice exploded out and tumbled aside.

Beneath it all, glinting in the light of the aurora, lay the warp pad.

Rose exhaled and stood, brushing her hands off onto her skirts. “Found it.”

Amethyst grinned and started toward it. “Saved us a walk through an entire ocean!”

Pearl clapped a little too enthusiastically. “Brilliant as always!”

Garnet just nodded. “Let’s go.”

With that, the Crystal Gems soon stepped onto the pad. In a shimmer of light, they were gone.

Lars and Connie sat a while. They waited for much longer than five minutes in the half-imperceptible, half-imagined hum of the aurora.

Connie finally glanced over at Lars. He was just sitting next to her, spear still in his hands. She glanced to her sword, but it was lying in the ice several feet away, glowing in this beautiful night.

He caught her look, but he left it up to her—whether to continue the game or not. But there was no way. Not after that.

She held her hand out, palm up.

Spear tip nicked flesh.

A single drop of dark pink welled up, slid down her hand, and splattered onto the ice as they watched.

“Guess that’s it,” he said quietly.

Connie cleared her throat. “Guess it is.”

Seven years. One cut. A winner. It didn’t matter.

“Did you notice that we are violently not on Garnet’s radar?” she asked. “Like, at all?”

He nodded, stricken. “What about Obsidian’s?”

A long moment passed between them. Not for the first time, they had no answers for their questions. 

"…Good to talk to you again, dude,” he whispered.

"Yeah," she whispered back. "You too."

They ignored the beauty rippling the sky and spent the rest of the Antarctic night and the following Antarctic day spiraling.

The wind howled on, as it always had.

A familiar sound caused Rose Quartz to glance up. Again, in front of her, a mysterious portal. And then her mysterious pink acquaintances.

Rose thought they landed quite professionally despite their chaotic mode of travel. The portal blinked out behind them.

She noted the change in mood from the last time she’d seen them many, many moons before. They both seemed… apprehensive. Which, to be fair, wasn’t unusual for the various instances in which they’d crossed paths in the past, but it was a nice change from the rather unhinged encounter prior. These strange humans were so endlessly interesting to her. 

She stood up from where she’d been sitting on a cliff across the bay from the Crystal Temple, admiring the day.

They glanced about for the others, but it was just Rose and the trees.

“Hello,” she said carefully. “I’m… glad you’ve returned.”

There was a silence where she expected some kind of response to be. So after a moment, she prodded gently.

“Last time we met, you were… asking for my help?”

Connie and Lars exchanged a brief glance. 

This is the moment, the thought occurred to both of them at once, not for the first time. This is how we ruin the future.

But the trouble with Rose was that they liked her. They had always found it so hard to hold back when given the chance to speak with her.

Lars looked at Connie, and Connie nodded slightly. 

“Yes,” she said, looking back at Rose. 

“Connie, right? And Lars, was it?” Rose clasped her hands together, trying and failing to contain her excitement. “Oh, I’m so pleased to finally know your names. Thank you for telling me. It’s so hard to tell what a human’s name will be, there are so many names now, and so many humans!” She smiled softly. “My stars, listen to me—I don’t mean to ramble. How may I help you?”

Lars, already feeling on-edge in the clear light of this beautiful day, fully expected to blink out of existence at any given moment. His guard was up, shoulders tense, as though that could possibly help. 

So Connie took a step forward. ‘Pretending to be normal while experiencing deep anxiety about the permanence of reality itself’ was not in her skillset either, but they had committed to this, and she tried it anyway. 

“Well. Ah-ha…" Connie cleared her throat. "We just want to—just to talk.”

“About the weather?” chirped Rose, still trying to be careful. “Or…”

“Yeah,” said Connie, breathless. “Or.”

Rose's eyes widened. This was the furthest she had ever gotten with them. Part of her wondered what the hell was going on, but the other part was deep into this. Given their lost humanity, she suddenly realized what they probably wanted to talk about. Humans were social creatures, but these two were weird.

Probably isolated.

She knew a bit about that, too.

Rose’s smile left her. “It’s not easy, is it?”

Lars blinked, and Connie stalled. Rose gestured towards them. 

“Living among them." She lowered her voice. "It’s… not easy.”

“It’s impossible,” Connie exclaimed, eyes wide. “Humans are a disaster.”

“They only live, what, forty years?” Lars ran fingers through his hair. “What are you supposed to do with that?"

Connie wrinkled her nose. "That’s a sneeze, not a life.” 

As if they ever felt like they had the option of trying to cohabitate with members of their ex-species outside of the occasional hypothetical, but the gem didn’t need to know that. 

Rose frowned. “I suppose it's harder, since you used to be...” She trailed off, then said, “Did you know—the first time I met you, Lars, I thought you were a gem?”

His eye twitched a little. “That wasn’t lost on me, no. You even told me as much.”

“Oh. I did too.”

“We’re not gems,” Connie said, feeling a little more at ease, now. Reality wasn’t rearranging itself, at least. As far as she could tell.

“But I guess we’re gem-like?" she continued. "We have powers…” she exchanged glances with Lars, who gave her their hand gesture for ambivalence. She looked back to Rose. “But I suppose they’re different from gem powers.”

Rose nodded. She’d definitely noticed their portals.

“We keep everything we have in our heads,” Lars added, which earned him a confused glance from Rose. Perhaps it was a metaphor, or an in-joke. Regardless.

Connie gave a crooked smile. “And among other things, you can maybe tell we’re probably immortal.”

Rose smiled softly. “That wasn’t lost on me, either.” Since they were answering her questions at last, she felt like she could chance another one.

“Where do you live?”

“Nowhere,” said Lars.

“Everywhere,” said Connie.

“So it has been only the two of you for all these hundreds of years. You’re lonely.”

Connie, wet-eyed all of a sudden, nodded. “Yeah.”

It was an understatement.

Rose decided now what she wanted to do. How she could help them.

“I want you to meet the others—my friends,” she told them with unbridled earnestness. “Both of you. And I want them to meet you, too.” 

Then, she hesitated as reality caught up with her thought. The earnestness diminished. An unsaid ‘but’ hung on the air.

Here, Rose swiftly became the most awkward and ashamed that they’d ever seen her, and suddenly it dawned on them why.

All the secrets, of course.

Lars and Connie were wide-eyed, racking their brains. Just one secret let out would soon send all the other boulders rolling down the hill. Then what would happen to the future?

Nothing great, was usually their general consensus.

They surprisingly hadn’t thought it this far through. In the heat of the moment, in the brashness of this insane decision they had made to put the future—whatever it may look like now—at risk, they were all over it. The catch was that they didn’t want to reveal their true origins. But that was okay. It was a puzzle. They liked puzzles.

“Okay, okay. The rebellion…” Lars scratched the side of his face. “Alright, picture this. We’re in this abandoned gem ruin, right? One of those classic ‘don’t go in there’ situations. Weird glow, unnatural wind, strange feeling of being watched...”

“Yeah,” Connie continued. “Statues missing heads, glowing vines, some ominous inscription on the wall in gem glyph that definitely told us to leave.”

Lars snorted. “But did we? No. Why? Because we’re dumb. We're so dumb.”

Connie nodded.“We found some kind of artifact. Touched it, naturally. Did we mention we were dumb?"

"It exploded. We died."

"—Briefly! Maybe for like, eight seconds. Or whatever, we were dead, so who knows! Not us!”

“Then, whoops.” Lars spread his arms wide. “We got magic in our guts. We’re magic now.”

That was all it had to be. No talk of anyone using some unfathomable power to bring back the dead, of being from the future, or even some dead and buried future that had forgotten to take them with it. It wasn’t even much of a lie—they’d both indeed been messing with gem stuff when they were killed.

The details didn't matter.

Rose was staring. Since this Lars had interrupted her with his friend’s mortal affliction and appeared to know far more about her own powers than she herself did, she again wondered how much they actually knew, and how. 

But it didn’t matter. While she didn’t understand much about these two, she understood implicitly that they were all secret keepers. All grasping those secrets tightly to their chests, white knuckled, tense, often gasping under the weight—

What an odd way to build trust, she thought, not for the first time.

She smiled again, softer. Sadder than before. But at least it was over.

Then, Rose perked up.

“I’ll introduce you,” she said.

And it was time to pull the plug.

This time, Lars stomped his foot, driving the heel of his boot right into the dirt. Space itself ripped open, and he and Connie fell through.

Rose lifted her head and let an exasperated sigh into the sky above.

They were back at the Galaxy Warp, a liminal ruin. The cold sea breeze that didn’t chill them, the ceaseless waves that didn’t bother them, a vast sky full of glittering stars that they ignored as the light sea mist swirled around them.

Lars paced around one of the broken warp pads, pulling at his hair. Connie reached out a hand to his shoulder in the quarter moonlight, which would have reminded them of the last time they were here, if they’d bothered to notice. He stopped.

“Lars,” she said. “I won't pretend I wouldn't have sidebarred if you didn't. But this was your idea.”

"This time it was your idea, dude!"

She pulled a deep, patient, breath. "You told her our names—"

“Okay, okay." He winced. "Point made, goddammit. Doesn't stop the doubt.”

Connie chuckled. A hollow noise. "Don't we all know it."

He pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes screwed shut. “We’re about to quote-unquote meet the others. Rose thinks we can all be besties. Which sounds great on the surface, don’t get me wrong; They’re the only others trudging this world besides us and the corrupted, so it should make sense to. But… Is this a stupid mistake?” he asked. "It totally is, right?"

“Well…” Connie tried a smile, even if it had a tremor. “Probably? But. We can’t keep living like this. We’ll go crazy. I think you’re right. I think eventually we’ll hit rock bottom, or an even rocker bottom under that, or something worse… and miss our appointment. If we even have an appointment anymore.”

“We’re already crazy.” Lars waved an arm about. “We spent seven days—seven years silently fighting each other in Antarctica for something to do. Look at what we’re trying to do now!”

She sighed, tsk’d. “They definitely keep themselves more grounded than we do,” she said with a touch of envy. 

“Yeah.” Lars narrowed his eyes at nothing. “It’s because they’re not fucking drowning.” He turned to her. “Listen. I'm sick of myself. I'm sick of you."

"Aw, buddy." She smiled despite everything. "Feeling's mutual."

"Yeah, it's the best. It's why I wanna do this so bad. But I’ve got some what-if’s. D'ya mind? I just need reassurance.”

“To be fair, me too.” Connie felt ready. “Hit me.”

“Like, what if there’s really no appointment anymore? Or… what if the future isn't dead, not yet, but we’ll for sure deal the final blow right now if we do this? What if everything unfolds wrong from here on out? What if, because of us, Steven never happens? What if the cluster—Or the Diamonds…?"

He took a deep breath in and out again. “Just. What if? That’s all it is. That’s the whole thing.”

He watched her weigh it all in silence.

“I don’t know what we owe the future,” she said eventually. “Or anything about being last living artifacts of dead ones. It feels like the future—whatever it is now—owes us. Big-time. I want to scream. I want to shatter something. I want to look Garnet in the eyes and ask her if anything we've done, or haven't done, has ever been worth it.”

“But here’s what I do know: you and me, Lars, we gave this world Stonehenge. Not the cool, mystical Stonehenge we may've thought it was—just a bunch of giant rocks because we were bored out of our minds and too over it to care. But it's still Stonehenge. And, as much as we hate to admit it, we… maybe caused the Bronze Age Collapse?” she said with an upward inflection.

Lars winced again. 

“Point is,” she continued quickly, “These are things we did. And they were real things that really happened. In the timeline we remember. The same one with Steven and Sadie and our parents and everyone else we used to know. Will know.”

“So I have to believe that somehow, that's something I can cling to. Somehow, we still have an appointment to keep. We will have an appointment to keep. That we’ll fix everything then and destroy this loop. So in the meantime—"

Here, she smiled. Wide, earnest. Trying.

“Don’t you think we should try to trust this universe? And try to do some good in it?”

Lars wanted to believe her. Connie wanted to believe herself. But she was merely the contrarian. She was supposed to say these things.

“We can’t, though,” said Lars, quiet. “Can we?”

“No,” she affirmed. “Absolutely not.”

A few years on, another strange new way to distract themselves.

First Connie, then Lars, looked up from skipping stones across a misty alpine lake nestled among pine-draped hills, and noticed a plume of smoke in the distance. It was thick and dark, roiling upward before being dragged in a slow, sinister streak across the sky.

One portal later, they’d found an active volcano. There'd been a few of them around over the centuries, but they hadn’t noticed any being quite this angry in some time. It was volatile, the air around it tense.

Lars recalled his last visit to an active volcano—not fondly—but curiosity won out. His best friend was (some kind of) alive and powerful like himself, now. And she was even gently coaxing him to get closer with her.

Besides, it fascinated him—more proof that Earth was alive, breathing, fierce. Nothing like this ever happened on the moon, except for the odd moonquake. But those had always felt like death throes. This, right here and now, was life at its loudest.

They didn’t climb anymore. They weren’t about to start now, so they placed a portal and emerged far up in the sky above the caldera, upwind of the dark ashy plume it spewed forth. It smelled like burning stone and sulfur, sharp enough to sting the back of the throat. 

They plummeted together, laughing through the wind, shouting back and forth, daring each other about getting a little closer…

And soon they were playing chicken.

They dove toward the seething rock dome and super-heating ash, only to drop through their portals, getting bolder and closer to impact each time.

The ash and the very air stung, but didn’t hurt. Not really. The real danger was the molten heart beneath, the red glow only just visible through cracks in the dome—so they danced closer, their exit portals flirting more and more recklessly with destruction.

It was intoxicating, and not because the thin air was laced with fire. With each new reentry high above, their hearts did the pink equivalent of racing, their bodies soaked in adrenaline—

Suddenly, something shifted.

Connie’s laughter cut off first. Not from fear, exactly, but she became quiet, listening. Watching.

The volcano had been venting ash and smoke for hours, but the plume thickened suddenly. Its gray edges became darker, denser. Black.

The column surged upward with new force, like something had changed just beneath the dome. Sparks danced—lightning, maybe?

Lars blinked against the new sting in the air. His grin faded. He wasn’t sure why he felt this pressure in his gut, but it was the kind you only notice too late.

Everything changed. 

They saw it mere seconds before they heard it—a sudden collapse within the caldera, a part of the lava dome cracking, falling inward like a slow-motion rockslide.

With that, all the pressure that had been building beneath finally had somewhere to go.

K̷R̵R̸R̷A̷C̴K̸

The blast hit them.

They were hurled up and back like leaves in a storm. 

A moment later, the clouds above also rushed away like the sky was being torn apart.

Connie flailed around madly in the turbulence, all arms and legs, the world a spinning smear of land and sky and clouds and ash and smoke. 

She caught herself, finally, at the apex of her flight. Head ringing, chest aching, she anxiously scanned her surroundings for Lars as she felt herself plummeting again.

There he was—probably miles away, a pink speck in the rapidly increasing ash smoke. She knew he'd seen her too when she saw the flash of a portal.

And suddenly, he was falling alongside her.

Something caught her eye and she pointed. Lars saw it too: streams—torrents—of glowing rock, surging through charred trees. Far from a lazy lava river, these were fast molten slides that tore through everything in their path.

Movement. Down below, tiny figures they hadn't noticed until now were running for their lives.

They hesitated.

As they watched, silent, still falling, everything quickly blotted out, overtaken by the flood of ash, smoke, and fire.

This time, Rose could see that something had changed with them. Lars and Connie were somber, bag-eyed. Quiet.

Their nervous edge was gone.

They kind of smelled like… dust? Old papyrus? Even their portal wasn’t as energetic as she’d come to know them to be.

In the frozen wastelands, they’d interfered. They’d shaken free a rampaging monster that could have ruined Earth considerably, if not for the gems’ interruption.

At the pyroclastic volcano, they’d made a game out of hell breaking loose, and their non-interference policy had led to death.

Stonehenge, moon castles, whatever role they had played in the collapse of the bronze age—infraction after infraction. And where they hadn’t interfered, there had been death.

Always, somehow, there was death.

In the aftermath of it all, they’d spiraled again. Which were they supposed to do? Could they be part of this world that they longed for without breaking it? Or were they obligated to keep hiding from it until their appointment? Doomed to keep failing at that simple task?

Another handful of years were spent looking for answers but unfortunately, as always, the universe offered nothing. The stars wheeled overhead without judgment, the trees swayed impassive in the wind. 

Scrolls and tablets and oracles full of stories, fairy tales, philosophy, fables—all but pretty poetry. Esoteric scribbles, all blithely contradicting each other in ink, stone, clay, and wood.

Surely if the universe had wanted them gone, they’d already be gone.

There had been no great epiphany, no single spark. Just a slow, aching gravity building up like sediment in their lungs—a guilt and a longing that by now was so great that neither of them could bear it anymore.

But they didn’t go to Rose for answers.

She was the threshold.

They wanted to see if the world truly would shatter when they finished playing chicken and finally stepped into it.

Rose, of course, had no way of knowing what had happened to them since the last time they spoke. But they had come back to her, which was good. They had even picked up where the conversation left off.

“Please, if you're ready,” Rose said quietly.

They felt that they finally were. This last portal had placed them on the beach in front of the Crystal Temple, built into the rock of the would-be Delmarvan cliff. Above it, long ago, was where their old home used to be—and along the shoreline from it, an even older home still.

A golden dawn was rising over the familiar ocean.

“They’re looking forward to meeting you.”

~*~

But now that it’s there

You see it everywhere

Chapter Text

4. Super Normal Thing.

"There is a candle in your heart, 
ready to be kindled.
There is a void in your soul, 
ready to be filled.
You feel it, don’t you?"

—Rumi

~*~

Garnet stood off to the side of the temple door, even more unreadable than usual.

Lars and Connie felt naked in front of her. They imagined she was looking at them, studying them. Seeing through them. But she hadn’t said anything yet, so the two newcomers tried to focus on the other things that were happening around them, by the gleaming warp sheltered by the hands of the gigantic Statue of Obsidian.

Connie stood straighter than normal. Lars hunched forward slightly, arms folded nervously. Both were rigid, ill at ease.

Amethyst couldn’t stop staring, peeping out from behind Rose’s skirts. “So these are the strays you were talking about, Rose?” she asked.

Rose nodded, arms akimbo. “Lars, Connie—meet Pearl, Amethyst, and Garnet." She smiled. "Everyone, meet Connie and Lars. The gem-like humans I was telling you about.”

Pearl blinked, glancing between them. Garnet, from over by the wall, nodded in acknowledgement but remained silent.

Slowly, Amethyst came out from where she was lingering behind Rose, and suddenly beamed up at them. “Hey!”

They had to pretend they'd never met them before, in the future long since passed, so Lars barely suppressed his nervousness. But he noticed that Connie was perhaps a scoche too rigid and uneasy to speak, so he felt it was up to him. 

“Hey, Amethyst. Uh. I’m Lars.” He silently murdered himself even as he said it—the first social faux pas of the day.

“I knew that already! But I didn’t know humans came in pink." She looked them both up and down. "What kind of names are Lars and Connie anyway?”

“Amethyst,” Pearl cautioned before either could answer. “Don’t be rude. Obviously they are human names. Not ones we’ve ever heard before...” She then turned to the two strangers that Rose had brought to the temple. "But humans do keep changing. And so do their names."

She’d been taken aback at first by their appearance and demeanor. Pearl knew humans, and humans weren’t usually this… pink. Or this strange around her and the other gems, standoffish and quiet. Humans, as she knew them, were loud and kind of annoying. 

But these were clearly not your everyday humans, which slightly endeared them to her.

And presently she noticed that one of them appeared to be a man.

Her eyes widened as she glanced between Lars and Rose, and back to a confused Lars. But Rose, smiling obliviously, made the ‘thumbs up’ gesture at her.

Encouraged by this, Pearl bowed slightly. “Well, welcome to the Crystal—“

“Ma’am!”

The gem blinked at the hand Connie was suddenly holding out. The gesture made absolutely no sense to her and, seeing the confusion in her face, Connie quickly reeled her hand back in. Her face turned an even darker shade of pink.

Pearl hesitated, but soon continued. “…The Crystal Temple. Rose has told us so much about you.”

“Not really,” chimed Amethyst, who didn’t need any prompting from Rose or otherwise. Amethyst was everywhere at once, all around them, checking them both out.

Connie fixed on her as a distraction. She didn’t want to stare at her old mentor’s younger self. So Lars, catching this, tried his best. 

“We haven’t exactly been, uh… forthcoming.” He cleared his throat. He didn’t want to lie more than he had to, so he said, “We’ve, uh. Been alone a while.”

He said it like it explained everything, even though it explained nothing.

“Obviously,” remarked Amethyst.

Rose clasped her hands together. “Isn’t this amazing? These two have both been around since the Rebellion. They're an entirely new kind of human.”

Amethyst blinked. “You’re older than me? No human’s ever been older than me. Except the ones that are dead now." She squinted at them. “So you, what? Skipped dying?”

Connie gave a small shake of her head, and Lars tried to keep it simple. “No," he said. "No one skips dying—”

"Gem magic in our guts,” mumbled Connie.

Lars had just kind of accepted that Connie was going to be no help by this point. “We’ve been… whatever this is, far longer than we were humans.”

Pearl’s jaw had dropped. She was still trying to recompose herself.

“Well… I suppose living a normal lifespan on such a temporary planet would be difficult for… for any human who became like you.” She stroked her chin, studying them. “But still, if you’ve been around this long—why wouldn't we have ever crossed paths before?”

"Oh, yeah," said Amethyst. “We’ve all slogged this Earth for so long and never bumped into each other?"

Lars and Connie meanwhile exchanged glances, silently daring each other to answer first. Then they both decided to.

“We were—” Lars began.

And Connie spoke over him. “Underground.”

Lars glanced at her, horrified, and she turned a deep pink. But the Yes, And had begun. It couldn’t be stopped.

"Under… the ground?" queried Pearl.

Connie nodded uselessly.

“Not literally underground,” Lars scrambled, now at a loss. “Just... Emotionally?”

It wasn't much better. His mind was ticking over furiously, still working on the save. Unfortunately, Connie was still trying to be helpful. "Yeah but sometimes caves.”

“…Yeah.” His eye twitched. His hand had been forced. “Also caves.”

Pearl cocked an eyebrow and Amethyst smiled widely before piping up again.

“Wow. Can we keep ‘em?”

Rose giggled.

“These are human people, Amethyst," chided Pearl. "Not some shells you found on the beach.”

“Please? Part of our whole thing is that we defend all human beings, right? Even the ones we don’t understand?”

“Well…” Pearl said thoughtfully. “These two certainly fit the shape.”

Lars and Connie both blushed deep pink this time. Pearl looked to Rose again, who shrugged but still seemed happy.

“What we’re trying to say is…” Connie stared at an imaginary point on the rocky floor to the side of her. “This world is a big place.”

“I suppose.” Pearl said. “It is a big enough planet. With lots of… caves… that one can get lost in.”

Lars fidgeted. "But also… We didn’t know how to approach you. I mean, we've read a lot about all of you—big fans, by the way—but we weren’t sure if we were something you’d want to… deal with. There’s no guide for whatever we are."

Connie chimed in again. "No way could we just walk up to the Crystal Gems and say, 'Sorry we exist. Please don't bubble us.'"

Pearl softened a little. Garnet remained unreadable, leaning against the rock.

“Eh. They're right." Amethyst shrugged. "We probably woulda bubbled them. Lucky for them we've never all been at the same place at the same time!"

But this prompted another glance exchanged between the two weird humans. The gems had no idea how very wrong they were.

Amethyst then gave them a sly look. “So are you two… friends? Siblings? Lovers? Or what?”

Lars, blindsided, snorted. "We, uh—"

"We don't not love each other," Connie said quickly.

Lars shrugged. "But it's not, like… a thing." He glanced at Connie. "How would you—?"

Connie spitballed a trio of words. "Esoteric life partners?"

"Well…" Lars blinked. "That actually sounds like a thing."

"Looks like a thing to me," muttered Amethyst, grinning.

Pearl clasped her hands together. She didn't know squat about human relationships but she felt qualified to understand this. "Esoteric life partners! Very good! And Rose said it was some kind of magic artifact that made you this way?”

Connie and Lars nodded. “Yes ma’am.” “Yeah.”

“Oh my stars. Do you think it was an experiment?” Amethyst pulled her hair in excitement. “They’re pink, so maybe it was something to do with the evil Pink Diamond—"

Rose's eyes hardened slightly at the mention, but Pearl clutched her forehead dramatically.

“Amethyst, really.” Then Pearl became thoughtful. “Hm. We knew about the lizards. Oh, and the swimming creatures near your favorite island, Rose. But I had no idea that gem magic could affect a human being—or anything—like this. That a human could become like us.” She looked over at Rose. “Did you ever imagine this could happen?”

Rose smiled softly. “I didn’t know this could happen. But, we all knew gem magic could and has changed this world, so I’m not surprised. Humans, on the other hand, have always surprised me.”

“It’s—" Lars glanced at Connie, but she was still ill at ease as she stood in front of the mentor who didn’t know her. 

She tried reminding herself that this Pearl was different from the one she once knew. Younger. Not the one who trained her. 

She tried to tell herself that she only knew that Pearl for a single drop in a ocean of time, and that it was silly to seek some spark of recognition from this earlier version. But it didn’t really help. She wanted to say something, but couldn’t trust herself. Not after the ‘caves’ incident.

So Lars put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s been a trip,” he finished.

“H’yeah,” said Connie, encouraged by this and deciding to try. “I’m sorry. Like he said… Big fans.” She tried a smile. “Sorry. Nerves. You know.”

“No. I don’t know,” Pearl said cheerfully. “But it’s nice to finally meet others like us on this planet. Regular humans, you know them—" She waved a hand around. “They keep dying and replacing themselves and dying and replacing themselves and so on and on the whole horrid affair goes—"

“So we can keep ‘em?” Amethyst asked again.

Rose laughed and picked Amethyst up in a football carry. “They can do whatever they please, but I think we’ll be more than happy to see more of them.” 

She glanced over at the last member of the Crystal Gems, who had been keeping back, leaning against the rock wall of the statue base, by the temple door. She’d been quiet the whole time, listening. Lost in her thoughts.

“Garnet?” she called. “What about you?”

Presently, Garnet stood up from leaning, walked over, and addressed Connie and Lars directly. She voice was cool. She was still completely unreadable, and they were high-key intimidated by that.

“You know of me,” Garnet said. “So, you understand my power.”

They nodded dumbly, unable to fathom where this was going. Garnet lingered on them a long moment, then hummed briefly and turned to the other gems.

“For some reason, these two elude my vision.”

Lars and Connie both found themselves reflected in her visor again. And then she said something terrifying.

“When you walk by, the future closes its eyes.”

A short silence descended upon the meeting.

“Garnet?” asked a surprised Rose. 

“W-what?” stammered Pearl.

Connie’s jaw tensed, her eyes widened. She didn’t trust herself to say anything else, so she didn’t.

“Great,” Lars muttered to her, teeth grit. “Super normal thing to hear.”

“What does that mean?” Amethyst screeched from under Rose’s arm.

Garnet held up a hand. “For now, it simply means that I would like Lars and Connie to be where I can see them.” She gave the newcomers a small, warm smile. 

“With my own eyes.”

They had spent a little more time with the gems, until Garnet advised of some corrupted gem-related business in another part of the world to which they needed to attend. They parted ways then, but not before being invited to hang around.

The gems warped away as Connie and Lars watched. The warp pad fell silent. For a long moment, there was nothing besides the ocean and the gulls.

Then, Connie and Lars exploded. 

Not loudly, but in a tangle of whispered expletives, mad gestures and incessant pacing. Lars gripped his chest. 

“Oh my stars,” he was saying. “Garnet stared at me and I forgot who I was.”

“Pearl bowed to me, Lars!” Connie grit her teeth and rubbed her palms together in a sort of insane nervousness. “I’m not qualified for that! I barely know what century this is.”

“My whole brain was crying!”

“And. And then I tried to shake her hand. I never shook a hand before in my life!”

“Oh shit. Oh shit. The look on her—" Lars wiped a hand down his face. “Does Pearl think that Rose is into me?”

“Does Amethyst think we’re cool!?" Connie was reeling. "No, right? We cannot be cool. Cool people don’t time travel and then cry in a bush.”

“Cool people don’t wordlessly hunt their trauma buddy through Antarctica for seven years because they’re bored to death!”

“Emotionally underground? The fuck was that?” Connie wheeled around, trying to pace the embarrassment away.

“Caves?” he shot right back.

He was right. “CAVES?!” she cried out as the embarrassment crashed back into her.

Lars mimed digging with a shovel. "You made them think we've been living under the fucking ground, dude!" He was gasping by now. “I need air.”

And so Lars and Connie jumped a portal to the top of the hill, above the temple. Something about it made it possible for them to breathe deeply again, even though they didn't need to. Even though that breath still came shakily to them.

Their age-old cabin and canoe were both long gone, but a bunch of rocks that maybe used to be part of their fire pit remained. The forest stretched off down the slope. The trees themselves were different, but it was still the same forest.

They took a moment to appreciate it all. This was a much-needed breather after what they’d just been through.

Connie kicked at the rocks while Lars walked over to sit on the edge of the cliff, legs dangling over. He motioned for her to join him, which she did soon enough.

The forest behind them was the same, but below them now was the mask-like upper face of the Statue of Obsidian, which was new. Her many arms and open hands were visible from where they sat. They remembered most of them as ruins on the beach, but today they were intact and only lightly worn from the elements.

Connie said, “So. Weird day, huh? Weird being here again.”

“H’yeah. Did you ever imagine it could go that smoothly?”

“Never. Look.“ Connie held out a hand. “I’m still shaking.”

“It feels wrong to be able to talk to them. But good. Is that a thing? Wrong-good?”

Connie smiled. “I know a lot of things that fit that description. Thanks for giving it a name.”

“Also. Did you notice how we’re still here?” Lars asked after a moment. “I for sure thought we were gonna blink out of existence any moment.”

Connie nodded. “Nice to be here. It’s a nice day. Birdsong. Lovely view. Great company.”

“Heh." Lars indicated the statue below them. “Kinda starting to look like how we left it in the future.” He squinted. “I think. It's been… so long."

“Yeah,” added Connie. “Watching from the moon doesn’t do it justice—" 

Lars then pointed abruptly, interrupting her thought. “Did they fully just dump a warp pad on one of the hands? Lazy!”

Connie viciously fought away a memory. It was of a different time. It didn’t belong here with her. She instead focused on the ocean breeze and looked away.

“We portal everywhere, man,” she gently reminded him, her chin resting on a hand. “We used a portal to get up here. Just now. You yourself made it. On purpose.”

“…That’s different and you know that that’s different. Don’t be difficult."

Connie smiled at him and turned back to the ocean. Lars sighed and leaned back until he was lying there, legs still dangling over the edge.

Her eyes were lost in the ocean while his were in the sky. 

"Listen," she said suddenly. "Sorry. About… Caves. I dunno. Just, seeing Pearl—"

"Hah. You're good. Seriously. I know how you get when you see Pearl. 'Sides, at least this time it was funny."

"Really?"

"No. But… funnier than the other time you saw Pearl."

Connie sighed deeply, watching a gull soar over the water.

This time, Lars piped up. “Hey, dude?” 

“Mm?” 

“Know what pisses me off?”

She looked at him. “What’s that?”

“Everything.”

She sighed. “Yeah…”

“But let’s narrow it down. Every time I almost start to feel normal, I remember I don’t even know what I am. No one explained it to me—not Steven, or the Off Colors, not even those guys… I don’t think that anyone could’ve. Clearly not even Rose. And then, of course, I couldn’t explain it to you! So we became anomalies just wandering around cluelessly, and now over in Europe it’s the Iron Age—"

“Do you have a point there?"

"Huh?"

Her voice betrayed her amused smirk. "You said you were going to narrow it down.”

“Oh. Yeah. Like, what do you think Garnet even meant, anyway?” he asked. “She tried to spin it like it’s fine and chill. And I know we’ve always been outsiders—”

She snorted. “One way of putting it.”

“Like, Garnet literally sees the future, right?”

“Possibilities,” corrected Connie.

“Sure. And she’s saying we don’t even factor into these ‘possibilities’.” He frowned. “So then, what are we? Are we, like, ghosts? I know I’ve asked this before. But kinda feels like I’ve been living in purgatory. We even died. So, then—what? Do we not matter? Or does this mean we’re free?”

“Free from what?”

He thought a long moment. “I guess… Fate? The timeline? Like, if she can’t look into us or figure us out that way, does that mean we’re getting some kind of cosmic pass? Despite our constant infractions?”

He brought his hands up to look at them against the blue of the sky. “Or is this just because we’re secretly riddled with diamond magic and she doesn’t know what to make of us?" He balled them into fists. "Gah! I almost miss when my biggest problems were acne and school and having to go to work. Almost.”

“I dunno, Lars.” She thought a moment. “I don’t think we’re free, though.” She sunk at the shoulders. “Her vision—it’s like a compass, or something, for the gems. Even Rose. They all steer by her. If she can't see us, I’m thinking stuff like ‘what are we doing here?’ and ‘what are we risking?’”

A long moment passed before Connie piped back up, her voice small. “And then I think… well, now that we’ve decided that we owe the future goddamn nothing, what is going to compensate for us this time? Is the future we came from actually Dead?” She huddled into herself. “Can it ever be fixed?”

Lars stared with wet eyes up at the blue sky above them, but the answer still wasn’t there.

Some other day, pale light filtered through thin, blurry clouds. The tide was low. Wet sand glistening like glass. The call of seagulls, the lapping of waves—it was quiet otherwise.

Until Garnet and Pearl entered the shallows.

“Try not to go too easy on me this time,” Pearl called with a smirk, pulling a spear from her gem. She turned to face the fusion, twirling the weapon with a dramatic kind of grace.

“I’ve never gone easy on you,” came Garnet’s flat reply as her gauntlets flickered into existence. She widened her stance, the water flowing around her ankles.

“Then try it, if you think it'll help. You might win.”

Garnet gave a tiny smile as Pearl lunged.

She was quick, theatrical, her spear arching through the air—Garnet sidestepped it and the spear tip passed mere inches from her arm.

Pearl pivoted like an attacking ballerina, swiping again. Garnet dodged again—another close one.

“I didn’t mean literally!”

Pearl thrust again only to have Garnet catch the spear between the fists of her gauntlets and yank. Pearl quickly became off-balance but instead of stumbling, she pirouetted gracefully with the motion and ended up midair.

She landed in a pose some feet away in the water, the spear raised above her as if to strike.

“You make everything a performance,” Garnet said.

Pearl smiled. “Well thank you! I do make it look good, don't I?”

They clashed again, this time faster, with Garnet blocking every strike, and Pearl dancing out of reach with an exaggerated flair. Their movements were graceful enough that the glittering waves hardly splashed around them.

Amethyst sprawled on a rock on the sandy shore, languidly eating cornbread and berries from a woven basket that sat beside her and watching her teammates sparring.

It had been a nice day so far, though the sky was just now starting to gray, threatening rain. No one was bothered by the thought of it, however. Even if the cornbread were to get soggy, Amethyst didn’t mind. She loved and accepted all mouthfeels. Soggy, crunchy, weirdly grainy—each had its place in the great buffet of life.

She glanced up as she noticed Rose’s arrival.

Rose stood beside her and joined in spectating. After a moment, Amethyst held a partial loaf of the bread out to her. Rose declined it.

“I thought you were going to save some for the next time our new friends visit,” Rose said with a smile.

Amethyst stopped mid-bite. “I was, wasn’t I?” She placed the half-eaten loaf back in the basket and frowned at the amount of food that was left. “Aw, I hope the humans from the village bring s’more offerings soon. This is kinda tragic.”

“Oh, I don’t know that they come here for the food,” said Rose, thoughtfully. “Since they’re somewhat like us, I’m not even sure they need to eat. I wonder if they also get what they need from the radiant energy surrounding us all.”

Amethyst brightened. “I’ll add that to the list of stuff I’ll ask them next time!”

They turned their eyes back to their comrades in the water which curled around the combatant’s feet before they leapt apart again.

Pearl held her stance just a moment longer than necessary. She then darted forward, poised to strike. Garnet didn’t move at all, she merely blocked the attack with a gauntlet.

“You’ve changed your stance again,” Pearl said, brushing her hair back from her gem. "You seem… wider. Less precise."

Garnet nodded. “I’m trying something new.”

Pearl arched an eyebrow. “I like your usual style. There’s more elegance to it.”

Pearl moved again, twirling her spear and tilted her head as she started circling Garnet in the water. “Are you looking ahead right now?” she asked her.

“Nope,” said Garnet, moving with her.

Pearl hesitated. “Reckless, isn't it?”

“That’s the point.” Garnet’s smile was soft, almost imperceptible as she rubbed the fists of her gauntlets together in readiness. “I’m trying to get used to not knowing.”

This time, Pearl moved forward quickly and without warning. Garnet was only just able to dodge. Pearl’s eyes widened. The fusion really wasn’t looking ahead.

Pearl leapt back and spun to face her again and they circled once more, the water swirling at their ankles. A distant rumble of thunder rolled through the atmosphere, low and slow.

“Not knowing… has its charm,” Pearl admitted. “Though it is uncomfortable. Is this because of the strangers?”

Garnet swiftly dodged Pearl’s spear and held her gaze for a moment longer. “It’s not not because of them. They shouldn’t be. But here they are.”

“They’ve made you uneasy,” Pearl said quietly. It was an observation, like pointing out a shape in a cloud.

“They’ve made me curious,” Garnet corrected, her voice low. “That’s not the same thing.”

Pearl twirled her spear in her hands. “I don’t know what to make of them," she admitted, readying herself to lunge again. “There’s something… off. And yet…”

“And yet,” Garnet echoed.

“Well me an’ Rose like them!” Amethyst called out from the shore, interrupting the sparring which had gradually taken a backseat to the conversation anyway. “They’re so weird!”

“They are really weird,” Garnet agreed as her gauntlets phased out.

Pearl twirled her spear again before letting it vanish into light—the sparring session was over. “Oh, thank the stars,” she said. “I thought I was the only one.”

Garnet smiled again. “But whoever—whatever—they are, I think we should give them a chance. They’re like us, after all.”

“Yeah," Amethyst chimed in. “Plus, none of us are going anywhere. Since we’re gonna be sharing the same planet forever, why wouldn’t we wanna be friendly with them, y’know?”

The two fighters started moving back in. 

“I think they’re lost,” Rose opined.

Pearl glanced up from flicking droplets from her skirt. “How do you mean?”

“Well, I suppose this may not be how they expected their lives to go. They once expected something much, much different. Something else entirely. Something that never came to pass.”

Rose thought of the ideals she had held aloft back during the rebellion—that she and Garnet and Pearl had all held. And how quickly this idea of a beautiful utopia for the Crystal Gems and humanity alike was swept away in an instant. 

By the light of the Corruption—a sound. A song that broke their world.

She thought of the mess still lingering in the wake of it, which they were working to clean up. Of how she’d also expected something much, much different.

“But they’ve reached out to us, and they’re trying,” said Rose. “And don’t you think that’s wonderful? Don’t you think we can relate?”

Garnet placed a hand on Pearl’s shoulder. “You don’t have to trust them straight away, Pearl. Just keep it in mind. We all expected something different, once. Even me. Even you.”

Pearl’s expression softened, then tightened. “It’s not that I don’t want to trust them. I do. The idea that there are others on this planet who might almost understand what we’re going through—it’s…” Her voice trailed, then she frowned. “I just… I don’t know what they are. I’m not even sure they do. They hesitate in all the wrong places—"

Amethyst tilted her head. “So what? They’re weird. We’re weird.”

“It’s not the weirdness,” Pearl said, eyes distant. “It’s the feeling I get from them. Like something’s going on, just below the surface. Something they’re not saying.”

“They’ve been through something,” Rose said again. “Something they can’t put into words, perhaps. But maybe, with time, they’ll share it.”

Behind her, the wind picked up. The tide was rising.

Pearl nodded once, uncertain. “Maybe.”

Lars and Connie became regular visitors to the Crystal Temple. 

Too nervous and socially awkward to ingratiate themselves too much or too fast for fear of being annoying, they held back and tried to slow-ball their growing familiarity with the gems. Even though they’d become quite desperate to do exactly the opposite.

But every time reality didn’t collapse around them—every time they noticed their continued existence hadn’t abruptly ended and been replaced by something unknowable—they grew a little bolder. A little more confident.

Still not the best metric to go by, but it was all they had.

The erstwhile humans were as careful as they could be. The gems could never know about their secret home in the Diamond Base on the moon. They couldn’t know about the future, or how much Lars and Connie feared they may have killed it. 

They couldn’t know their true origins. 

But Lars and Connie had many other stories, lifetimes of them. Centuries worth. They were confident about keeping their secrets.

Even if it ate them alive.

~*~

Every sound stutters

Every shadow lags

Chapter Text

5. When Someone Belongs.

"I suspected, however, that I wasn't homesick 
for anything I would find at home when I returned. 

The longing was for what I wouldn't find: 
the past and all the people and places there were lost to me.”

—Alice Steinbach

~*~

Amethyst leapt down from one of the statue's open palms.

Lars and Connie jolted as the gem landed directly in front of them, the impact sending sand up in every direction. The portal blinked out as if it, too, were surprised.

“Hey! What’s going on?” she asked them casually.

“Heeey Amethyst!” Lars scrambled to recover with fingerguns, which he quickly put away at the confused look he received for the anachronistic gesture.

“Were you, uh, waiting for us?” asked Connie, more than a little touched by this greeting.

“Yeah! Garnet didn’t know, because her future vision still hates you, but I had this feeling deep in my gem that you’d stop by sometime soon. So I hung around while they went to try to find some brain-melty thing. And I was right!”

Connie blinked. “Brain melty… thing?”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it.” Amethyst waved it off. “I saved you guys some food.”

She smiled widely and gestured for them to follow. She led them up the sloping path to the temple door as she continued.

“Sometimes the local humans come over and give us this stuff. I guess they think we need it, which we don’t, but I like it. Sometimes Rose and Garnet eat it with me, but I figured you guys might like it too.”

A woven basket lay near the door. She picked it up and flipped it open.

“I just like the way it passes through my body. Upsetting—in a good way.”

The basket’s contents were gross by now. The bread was late-stage moldy, and what were once berries were now covered in a white fuzz. Amethyst noticed the way they recoiled and glanced at it.

“What’s wrong?”

Connie cringed. “Amethyst, food goes bad after a while. This is covered in mold. You shouldn’t eat this.”

Amethyst stared down at it, mystified. “Is that why it smells?”

Connie frowned. “Um. Yeah.”

The light of sudden realization hit her. “Is… is that why it made me feel glitchy?”

“Yes!” Connie exclaimed while Lars gave her a you sweet summer child look. 

“Oh. No one told me.” She blinked. “Well, maybe Pearl did. But what does she know?”

Connie grinned. She suddenly grabbed Lars by the arm and yanked him forward. “You’re in luck! Because Lars here is an excellent cook.”

Amethyst gasped, delighted.

“What?” Lars was alarmed by this turn of events. “No I’m not!“

“I distinctly recall that you are.”

He flailed. “Maybe I was okay at it, but it’s been millennia at least since I last did anything like that. I’m not going to be able to make anything remotely edible now—I’m weird now!“

But Amethyst was pumped. “Oh please please please make something! I don’t care if it’s inedible!”

Lars looked from the pleading, hopeful Amethyst, then to the smiling Connie (to whom he shot a quick glare), and back again. He turned a darker shade of pink in the face.

"You really don't care, do you?" he asked quietly, but it was more of a statement than a question.

She shook her head once, pleading eyes glittering up at him.

“…Fine. I’ll try. Later. Not now.”

Amethyst fist-pumped the air. “Yes!”

“Don’t mention it,” Lars muttered. “But seriously, throw that away. And don’t eat stuff like that again. I know it can’t actually hurt you, but… it’s the principle of the thing.”

Amethyst effortlessly chucked the entire basket and its contents clear across the beach and into the ocean. It splashed down with a distant splorp. “Done. Agreed. What are you gonna make for me?”

“I have no idea,” Lars mumbled. “I’ll think.”

“Where do you guys even go when you’re not here, huh?” she demanded suddenly of them. This caught them off guard. 

Lars rubbed the back of his neck. “We, uh… wander. Mostly.”

“Wander,” Amethyst repeated, unimpressed.

Connie crossed her arms. “Well, where do you go when you’re not here?”

“Missions, mostly." She stretched her arms out, as if dropping some lore. "We subdue the corrupted, you know. It's our main thing. Sometimes we hang out with humans. But I suppose that’s boring too.”

“No way,” said Connie. “That’s the exact opposite of boring.”

“Well, when I’m away, I usually can’t wait to just get home.” She blinked hard and looked up at them. “Wait. Are you saying you don’t have a home?”

Connie shrugged. Lars made a non-committal noise.

“Oh. That’s pretty awful. I used to not have a home… but now I do.” Amethyst jabbed a thumb at the temple door behind her. “Wanna see my home?”

Lars perked up slightly as Connie tilted her head. “The… inside?”

“Oh, you’re coming inside right now.”

She began practically shoving them toward the door.

Lars hesitated. “Wait, don’t we need, like, permission?”

“Nah. I live here. You’re with me. And Rose said—well, actually, Rose didn’t say anything, but she’s not here, sooo…”

Connie glanced at Lars, wide-eyed. “We’re doing this?”

“I guess so?”

Amethyst closed her eye. Her gem glowed bright. The corresponding gem on the door pulsed in kind. The door slid open.

She turned to them with a grin that was just this side of wicked.

“Welcome to the inner sanctums of the Crystal Temple," she proclaimed, her voice taking on a kind of performative quality. "No mere human has ever been granted access before. Try not to destabilize your form.”

“This is my room.” She ushered them in. “Why save the best for last, right? Welcome, welcome.”

Crystals, geodes and rocks jutted haphazardly from the ground in what appeared to be an underground chamber. Streams and little islands with piles of hoarded items surrounded them as the door closed and disappeared behind them. Connie was aghast at the mess, but Lars wasn’t bothered in the slightest. 

In fact, he was impressed. “Cool horde, Amethyst.” 

He had started to feel a lot more comfortable around the gems. They both did, now that they couldn’t help but note that they continued to exist despite this glaring and ongoing infraction. This escalating familiarity.

The potential implications of all this plagued their minds, but only sometimes. Over the course of their long lives, they had both become good at finding distractions from things like broken timelines and dead futures.

Hanging out with their old new friends was a novelty, but still a good distraction.

“Cool?” Amethyst asked, confusion in her voice. “I don’t think it’s very cold in here, but I could set some of it on fire if you want.”

Lars broke into a wide smile while Connie scrambled to say, “No! Don’t set anything on fire. Cool just means… We like it. I mean, Lars likes—” She waved a hand at the mess. “—this.”

Amethyst stared blankly for a second, then grinned. “Oh. Cool! Cool cool cool. I was confused because you said you don’t really ever get cold, like humans usually do. They’re so weak, it’s funny. But that’s cool!”

“Yeah.” Connie said, some encouragement in her voice. “You got it.”

“Us gems don’t get cold, either,” Amethyst went on as she wandered towards her ramshackle piles of belongings, splashing through the watery areas as she went. “We can tell if it’s cold, but we don’t start complaining and shaking and dying from it. Nothing against humans, though. I like them. They’ve got some neat stuff.”

Lars and Connie, who had on the whole stopped thinking of themselves as humans long ago, followed her over. Amethyst noticed that they walked quite comfortably on the surface of the water, but that was just another interesting thing. She didn’t think of them as humans, either. Not really.

Amethyst picked an errant crown up from the ground and turned to show them. “I got this off of a king!” She threw it back onto one of the heaps.

Said heaps were comprised of gold coins, chests, barrels, wooden furniture. A pile of bricks. Weapons, jewelry, cushions, clothing. A plow. Pottery, a lot of it broken. A pile of ritual masks. A few statues and a sarcophagus, among other things.

A whole tree, and—

“Amethyst?” uttered Lars, in complete awe of the intricate siege weapon that he’d spotted half-buried under a mountain of trinkets. “Is that a trebuchet?!”

“Yep.” Amethyst sniffed proudly. “My collection really is coming along. Did you know that the humans fling rocks at each other with these things?”

He whistled. “Y’don’t say. How’d you even get it through the door?”

Amethyst shrugged. “Amethyst finds a way.”

“Oh my stars.” He jumped through a portal and a second later was swinging in the sling which was suspended from the upright arm. “This is so cool. We have to try this bad boy out.”

“Hah!” Amethyst leapt up to join him. “Me first! I found it, it’s mine!”

“Wait, where’s the counterweight bit?”

“The who?”

“What?" Lars blinked. "These things use physics, right? They’re supposed to have a huge rock or something heavy—"

He began to gain an inkling that this was perhaps an early version of the trebuchet, and trailed off awkwardly. Amethyst didn’t notice.

“No,” she was saying, “The humans I saw just get a bunch of their lesser humans to yank those ropes really hard and yelled a lot.“ But her eyes were wide with excitement. “Where are you getting this counterweight idea from? I love it!”

Connie smiled up at her friend as he talked trebuchet with the excitable gem, but her fingers kept twitching as if trying to rearrange something invisible. Looking around, every mismatched stack and crooked pile grated on her in a way that she couldn’t verbalize.

Lars, even from up there, eventually noticed Connie’s discomfort when he’d stopped swinging and he knew why.

“C’mon, Connie. It probably looks exactly like this in your head with all the shit you’ve put in there. It definitely looks like this in mine. At least this mess has an awesome trebuchet!”

“It really bugs me that I can’t organize it,” Connie admitted as, despite herself, she started looking at a couple of nearby weapons. Human-made, a lot of them already ancient. She pulled one of the newer-looking swords from the pile and began to test it.

Amethyst noticed and started rambling. “Oh that. The humans figured out iron a while back, maybe you’ve seen it around. Pearl doesn’t like this what-she-calls the ‘New Age’. She never likes new ages. But I do. Hah! You should have heard her when everything they made around that big pond across the ocean was bronze. She almost danced when it suddenly all fell apart.”

Lars and Connie couldn’t help but exchange a guilty glance, but Amethyst was oblivious to this.

“You wanna continue the tour? Or d’you wanna give up and be part of my horde?”

They were keen, so Amethyst motioned for them to follow her. And she led them to a puddle.

“Down here.”

“Ah—" Connie stammered awkwardly. “What?"

Amethyst winked and pressed her index finger to her lips. “Shh. Not a real puddle.”

With that, she jumped in it. It was much deeper than it looked like it would be, and she disappeared into it with a splash.

Connie looked quizzically at Lars, arms spread wide. Lars shrugged at her and gingerly tried to step in it. She watched as reality didn’t match up with expectation and he immediately lost his footing and fell straight through with a yelp.

Connie blinked, pinched her nose, and jumped in after them.

“Pearl’s room!” Amethyst exclaimed, gesturing dramatically at the impossible waterfalls. They were all standing on the surface of a large subterranean pool that seemed infinite, but surely wasn’t.

Lars and Connie were busy wringing out their clothes and laughing dizzily. They hadn’t been able to do anything like that in centuries. When they’d needed to bathe, there were millions of waterfalls all over the globe, all at their disposal. But this was nice. Different.

Then Connie looked up. “Oh. This is better.”

Amethyst rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well. Technically, I’m not allowed in here. She’s got some neat swords in here, but I can never get to them. And besides—" She glanced about. “It’s so boring. We should go.”

She herded them off through a secret passage in one of the waterfalls. Lars jumped in a lot more confidentially this time, while Connie followed reluctantly, casting one last lingering glance at Pearl’s perfect room as she went.

“And this…” she said with dramatic flair. “Is Garnet’s room!”

If Pearl’s room was a cathedral of waterfalls, Garnet’s was the exact opposite. They stood atop a rocky island floating in the air above a bubbling expanse of churning lava.

“Wow,” breathed Connie.

"Don't fall in," Amethyst cautioned. "I can't save you from lava."

Lars’ jaw dropped as he took it all in. “The fuck is up with Garnet?” he muttered.

Amethyst smiled widely. “Yeah. I’m really not allowed in here.”

There was an upsettingly arterial-looking tube jutting out of a gap in the rough wall and passing across the rocky ceiling. Amethyst jumped and caught onto it.

“C’mon!” she called out, beginning to travel along hand-over-hand for all the world like a kid playing on monkey bars. “I got a couple more things to show you!”

Next up was Rose's room. Of course it was peaceful. Of course it was soft and cloudy and inviting.

Connie bit her tongue as her heart panged. She'd forgotten, but the second she stepped foot in here, she was transported back. Her breath caught as she attempted to keep from letting on that she'd been here before, a couple thousand years ago. A couple thousand years from now.

Lars noticed, because he always did. “You okay?”

She flashed him their hand signal for ‘later’. Lars nodded and dropped it immediately, going back to gazing around this idyllic apparent skyscape that surrounded them.

If it had just been her and Lars here, it would be no problem. They talked about everything, because who else could they have possibly talked to? He knew her through and through, and vice versa.

Amethyst was a different story. Things could break. Or maybe they wouldn’t? They considered themselves incredibly fortunate so far. Or incredibly stupid. It all depending on what time actually was, and so far? Still no answers.

The gem in question, completely oblivious, shook her head. “Don’t even try asking for anything, it won’t work.”

Connie's jaw tightened, though this statement mystified Lars.

Connie hadn’t been here before. She and Lars stared up at it—a giant thing suspended high above them all by more twisting arterial structures. The room itself resembled a large cave which had been roughly hewn out closer to the floor, which was a beautiful, smooth and polished feature that juxtaposed nicely against the walls. 

A ring of obelisks guarded the pulsating yet crystalline mass. It seemed to radiate out a pinkish glow which saturated the room.

“The Crystal Heart,” Amethyst announced, waving a hand in the direction of it. “This thing powers the entire temple.”

“Uh, yeah.” Lars glanced down at her. “I’ve been meaning to ask. Like… Amethyst?”

“Yes, Lars?”

“…What is this place?”

Amethyst frowned back at him. “These are the inner sanctums of the Crystal Temple. I thought we covered this.”

“No, no, no. I mean, like, how does it all work?”

Amethyst gestured at the heart, again. “Um. This thing? The Heart? It powers the temple? I definitely just told you that. I’ve taken time out of my busy schedule of smashing rocks for this tour, and you aren’t even paying attention?”

“I. I was, but—" Lars floundered, gesturing helplessly around him. “How?”

He looked at Connie for help but she merely shrugged at him. She even smirked, unable to help being amused by his obvious confusion, even though she shared it. 

Presently, Amethyst perked up. She realized what he was really asking.

“Okay. So. Remember the temple door?” she began. They nodded. “Well. It’s this thing where these rooms all grow from it when you place it in the rock somewhere. Gem magic, you know of it? Well, I suppose you do know. Look at you!”

Lars and Connie exchanged glances. The idea of gem magic altering things wasn’t new to them, no.

Amethyst continued. “The others told me that they were used when elite gems were sent by the horrible Diamonds to oversee their early colonies, back in the old days. It’s a makeshift base that can be moved if it needs to be. They’re sort of real, but also not real?” She shrugged, gazing back up at the heart. “I don’t know. Apparently Rose found this one somewhere after the war ended. It notices when someone belongs here, and expands for them.” She softened. “And now, it’s my—our home.”

“Thank you!” Lars exclaimed, relieved to find that none of this had been lingering inside this hill, back when he and Connie had been living on top of it. “That actually makes sense!”

But Connie also had a question, one that had been rattling around in the back of her mind ever since they were forcefully evicted from this hill. “What made you choose here? To embed this place—the door—into this one specific hill, I mean.”

Amethyst paused to consider the question, and shortly she shrugged. “I dunno. Because our fusion led us here, I guess? Sensed something about the place? Like there was… a pull.” 

Lars’ eyes flicked to Connie, who already had an eyebrow raised at him.

“Yeah. A force of some kind.” Amethyst sucked on her lip briefly. “We were looking for somewhere... Well, corrupted gems kinda gravitate to us, y’know? Gem senses I guess. And Rose didn’t want any humans getting caught up in that kind of stuff anymore. I don’t blame her—none of us wanted that. Sometimes it got gruesome.”

The vivid memory of witnessing Obsidian crossing the ocean—heading straight for them as they watched from the top of this very hill—flooded right back to them.

And so did the memory of a certain Antarctic night…

“And so, somehow, we ended up here.” She smiled. “It's quiet. And beautiful! And there are humans around, but they don’t live anywhere close by. They still have stories about this hill being ‘haunted’, so they’ve always stayed away I suppose.”

This made their eyes widen.

“What d’you mean, haunted?” Lars asked, his pitch perhaps a little higher than he wanted.

“Yeah, they’ve got old stories of strange tremors, sounds… unusual figures hanging around the place before we even got there. I guess they thought it was their dead, if you can believe that.” She started to chuckle, but suddenly stopped, noticing the way the two ex-humans were staring at her—their eyes wide, jaws ajar. Tense.

“Oh.” The little gem became awkward suddenly. “I… I guess you two can believe that.”

But it wasn’t too long before she was laughing and shepherding them off again, to the next item on the temple tour. Lars and Connie followed, signing furiously at one another, stopping only when she disappeared down the arterial tube leading from the heart into a gap in the floor below it. They needed their hands for that, instead.

The only reason the top of this very hill had been their home for so long was because of their attachment to the place, before they were hurled to the cusp of pre-history. So, Connie had been intrigued by the question of why the gems came here in the first place.

Now, she thought she had been better off not knowing.

They would have been more interested in the basement and its silent population of bubbled corrupted gemstones if only they hadn’t just learned about the brand new bootstrap paradox that they may have created.

“Okay, Connie. I’m just gonna say it. I’m starting to feel like I’m in one of those stories where, like, a guy digs up his own grave by accident.”

Connie sat cross-legged in the sand. The ocean was lapping away nearby and there was only a little breeze. The sky was blue, not a single cloud. She was attempting to relax, and she honestly felt that it would have worked and been nice, if only Lars hadn’t been noisily pacing around the damp sand in front of her.

“Like, ‘Oh, look at this spooky hill where the dead walk—whoops! Guess that’s me!’” he continued. “Nice. Sick. Haunted by my own ghost, great job everyone. A+ work. Because of course it’s not enough that we got time-looped into loitering around the entire Earth-Moon system forever and being fucking sad all the time, nooo. We also had to become part of the local mythology by camping on the hill near where we grew up, didn't we?”

Connie attempted to say something, likely to correct him on some point or other, but he threw his hands up and carried on.

“I mean, it’s nice to know we’ve been remembered in some small way, by someone. But do you realize we might’ve inspired the Crystal Gems to pick this spot just because we were homesick?! Obsidian being all ‘ooh, spooky feelings, better build the base here, this rock’s got that sweet, sweet ennui energy!’ Like Rose’s vague connection to us was amplified by Sapphire’s whole deal, and then Amethyst went feral about it. Pearl and Ruby bein’ dragged along like kids in the backseat.”

A pause. But this time, Connie knew better than to try to say anything, so she didn’t bother. It was better to let him burn it off when he was like this. She was proven right a second later when he gestured behind her, in the direction of the temple. 

“That door? The one back there? The one that leads to the infinite expanding real-but-not-real Crystal Gem commune where I remembered that I’ve forgotten how water works? That door might only be there because of us—” His eyes widened. “And because some gigantic no-thoughts-only-vibes lava fusion decided we smelled relevant. You remember how she shrieked at us in the Antarctic? ‘Cuz I do. I remember that so hard.”

He actually seemed like he was finished. She tilted her head at the hills across the bay as if listening for the echo of his rant through the air. He frowned hard at her and quit his pacing.

“What are you—"

“You do realize you just solved the entire paradox by yelling at it, right?” she asked, deadpan. “Oh, no, wait. It's back. I guess Obsidian heard you in five dimensions. Somewhere in the past, she just snarled and pointed at this hill like, ‘That one. The one that tastes like a Lars having a crisis.’”

He raised his eyebrows. “This should be your crisis too, y’know. We should be having a shared crisis right now. It’s our one thing that we do. Why on Earth aren’t you crisising with me?"

“It’s because… I’m tired.” She exhaled. “I’m so tired, Lars. Like, are we even people anymore? Feels like we’re just the universe’s stupid little joke that it’s playing on itself.”

She waved a hand in the air briefly, as if trying to bat the universe away. “I just want to relax. For once in my insane, boring fucking life, can’t I just… relax? Pretend like maybe I belong somewhere, somewhen, and forget about all the—” She waved an arm around again. “All the Stuff?”

Then, her lip curled in quiet distaste. "Say what you will about Moldavite, she at least knew when she belonged."

Lars winced lightly at the mention. He slouched his way across the sand to stand in front of her. “It’s a lot of Stuff,” he agreed quietly. “Could do with a vacation from the Stuff.”

"Well, that's what this is, right?" She wiped sand from her hands and rested her chin on a fist. Gazed thoughtfully up at him. “I really think we deserve it, after everything that's happened. Don’t we? I can’t think of a reason why not. Like, we’ve been thinking about time as a straight line. But maybe it’s not.”

He blinked. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Why can’t time just be… say, a string."

"What?"

"Yeah. Piece of string that someone dropped into a puddle and forgot about. It floats around, loops in on it self, knots up. Maybe none of it makes sense—but as long as the end stays in roughly the right spot, maybe it’ll all be okay.”

This was odd talk, coming from Connie. “…Are you okay?” he asked.

“I just. Please. Please don't be having regrets. You were right to want to do this. I’m tired, Lars,” she reiterated. 

He bit his lip. "Yeah… Me too."

“But, hey," Connie mumbled, glancing away. "At least you have your answer now. We’re totally ghosts. Congrats.”

He hesitated. That question of his was supposed to be rhetorical.

“Well enjoy the vacation while it lasts.” He folded his arms and tilted his head at her. “Someday we’re gonna have to come clean to them about the Stuff.” He hesitated. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Someday.” She scrunched her face up. “But not soon. Right?”

“Nah. I think we have time.”

~*~

Loops fold wrong

The tide forgets

Chapter Text

6. About Inconceivable Paths.

“It is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in this broken world.”

—Mary Oliver

~*~

The wild bergamot had come back.

Rose had found it by accident a few years prior, in this lonely patch of land half a continent away. The humans from the nearby city hadn’t found worth the trouble of getting to yet, but there was a warp pad nearby, so it was a short hike at most for a gem.

The tiny purple flower was assumed gone forever after a wildfire ripped through the area, but here it was, billowing out further and wider with every new year. Garnet had decided she liked it. She liked its moxy, the idea that something so fragile could come back bigger. And she liked to return to it every spring.

The blossoms swayed with the warm breeze, and Garnet found herself thinking about recent events. As golden rays crept over the distant mountains in the quiet of the hillside, she felt the bonds of her being gently come apart.

She exhaled as she disappeared into light.

Then, the two of them sat side by side, cross-legged in the grass. Ruby gazed at Sapphire a long while, until the blue gem twisted her mouth and gave a small bemused noise.

Ruby knew what that meant.

“So. They still don’t show up,” she surmised, glancing away from Sapphire.

“I’ve tried every conceivable path on my own,” Sapphire said calmly. “You know Garnet has. They’re not on any of them. And no—neither is the memory core."

Ruby huffed in frustration. The ensuing silence was soon broken by Sapphire.

"But it was a good idea to try.”

Ruby plucked a blossom and turned it over in her fingers. “That’s… not how it’s supposed to work.”

Sapphire didn’t answer right away. Her eye was fixed on the horizon—sky turning blue as the sun rose higher. “No," she said eventually. "It’s not.”

Ruby frowned at the flower and it caught fire in her grip. “They’re not dangerous. I know it. I know it. They’re just… people! Human people, or at least they were.”

Sapphire nodded. “Before gem interference ended their lives. Then rewrote them.”

The red gem spread an arm wide. “That’s exactly what I mean! Gems messed them up—just one more thing our kind has done to this world. How dare we not see them for the last two and a half thousand years! How dare we not see them now!”

She let the ashes fall from her fingers, into the wind. 

“So… why can’t we see them, Sapphire?”

All Sapphire could do was shrug. “I don’t know.”

Ruby rubbed her eyes with the heel of one hand. “Maybe Pearl's right and they’re hiding something. Maybe they’re, I dunno, from another planet?”

Sapphire giggled suddenly. “Ruby. We’re from another planet.”

The other gem frowned. “I know, I know. And also, how can you be so okay with this!?”

The other gem smoothed her dress around her legs and just smiled softly. “Not all things worth trusting show up in a potential timeline.”

Ruby’s eyebrows raised. “What?!“

She watched as Sapphire moved closer and gently reached over. She took Ruby's hand. “Well, you know… I never saw you in one.”

Ruby drew a breath, then exhaled. She leaned against Sapphire. Then she smiled too.

“How do you always know what to say to me?”

Sapphire stoked her hand with a thumb and rested her head against Ruby’s. Eventually, Ruby piped up again.

“It’s not that I don’t trust them, you know,” she said, quietly. “It’s—"

“It’s that we don’t understand them,” Sapphire said. “I know.”

The sun kept rising. Somewhere, a bird called. The grass bent as the breeze shifted. A few petals drifted across Sapphire’s lap. She plucked one up and tucked it into Ruby’s hair with precision.

Ruby raised an eyebrow, then grinned. “Are we doing flower crowns now?”

“If that’s the future you see,” Sapphire said, “Then we must be.”

They adorned each other’s hair with the tiny blossoms, silent for a while before Ruby tilted her head. ”You said they aren’t on any conceivable path. But what about inconceivable paths?”

Sapphire hesitated, her lip twisting.

“Maybe Lars and Connie are just, you know, stuck in one of those pools we talked about,” Ruby wondered aloud, shrugging, as she pulled her hand away from the latest addition to Sapphire’s flower crown. 

“I thought about that,” Sapphire said, glancing down. “But I don’t understand how we’d be in one without being able to perceive it.”

Ruby exhaled and added another little flower to her long hair. “Yeah, it was a stupid idea…”

“Not necessarily.” Sapphire hummed to herself. “Still water, no current. Pockets of probability, so distant from the main streams that they may as well not exist... But they might. And they might be closer to us than we think.”

“They might be swimmin’ around in one.” Ruby smiled widely. “Well, not really—they don’t do water. You know what I mean. Maybe we're angled differently to them. Say, maybe we can see them, but not the pool? Could that be a thing?"

Sapphire hummed a small noise of doubt. But the true nature of time was by-and-large still an hypothesis, even to her, and she started to seriously consider the other's hypothesis.

Ruby added to her crown. "I still think we should try to look."

Sapphire must have agreed because, without another word Garnet rose back to her feet, purple flowers in her hair.

Garnet dropped the pebble in the water. Just enough to stir motion.

She watched Lars perk up at the distraction, Amethyst leap at the excuse, and Connie gasp at the horrifying potential.

She hadn’t built it, but she’d encouraged it—not because she needed a weapon, but because unpredictability was her only map to the edge of a pool she couldn’t see. 

Garnet needed to make waves. Any ripple might show her the way to something new.

And thus, Amethyst’s trebuchet stood atop the hill above the Crystal Temple. 

How? Amethyst had found a way.

Then, she and Lars, along with a lot of reluctant input from Connie, had figured out how to retrofit it with a working counterweight system. It had taken a few days, some repurposed junk from Amethyst’s horde, and a lot of the tools that Lars had been carrying around in his head for literal ages.

Now, after much trial and error, it was up and ready. The counterweight was set, primed for release.

They stepped back to admire their handiwork—A monument to questionable decisions.

“This is gonna be great!” Amethyst crowed. “We don’t even need, like, ten humans to work it anymore. Just, I dunno, two or three to reset the weight every time.”

“Pfft.” Lars grinned as he jammed the last of the tools back into his head. “You never needed any humans for this thing. You coulda easily just yanked the ropes yourself and hit whatever blindfolded.”

“I dunno, Lars. I probably woulda rounded up some humans. I’m pretty lazy.”

“Hey, me too!”

“She is usually really lazy,” came Pearl’s dry voice from further back. She and the others were gathered nearby out of morbid curiosity now that the alterations were complete. “I’m shocked that she had the follow-through to finish this absurd project.”

Rose gave Pearl and gentle nudge. Then she clapped, cheerful as ever. “Great job, you guys!”

“Go! Go! Go!” Connie fist-pumped the air. She'd given up a couple of days ago when their pleas for help had become too irritating and was now choosing to embrace whatever this was.

Meanwhile, Garnet’s lip twisted. Despite all this, she continued to see neither Lars nor Connie in any of her futures. But now, she could see at least a dozen disastrous (though low-probability) outcomes in which this modified, deadly siege weapon found its way into human military applications. 

However, she was also deeply impressed by the innovation. And honestly? She really wanted to see it in action.

“Fire it up,” Garnet said. “Let’s see what it does.”

“Yeah! What’s the holdup?” Connie called out. “Who’s going first?”

Purple gem and pink guy glanced at each other. Their smiles vanished. They both lunged.

Amethyst spin-dashed with a whoop and won by a landslide. She launched herself into the makeshift sled they’d rigged up in place of the rope sling—a wooden thing, smooth and greased on the underside, meant to prevent splinters and friction burns. Although they were both effectively immortal, neither pink flesh nor hard-light were immune to such things.

“Release me to the skies!” Amethyst declared dramatically as she grabbed on tight.

“Y’got it!” Lars, a graceful loser these days, gave her an excited fist-bump and straightened up.

The sky was blue. The breeze, mild. The ocean calmly lapped away at the shore below. It was the perfect day for launching someone into orbit.

He pulled the lever.

KATHUNK

The counterweight dropped and the sled rocketed skyward, releasing Amethyst at its zenith. Her howl of delight echoed out over the ocean as she flew in a perfect arc.

“Majestic,” Connie whispered in awe as she watched from the cliff’s edge, shielding her eyes from the sun. 

Rose applauded as though she were at the opera. Next to her, Pearl clutched her face with both hands. “This is completely irresponsible.”

Garnet gave a single nod. “I’d give that arc a nine.“

Rose beamed. “Nine and a half, at least!”

“I’m okay!” came a distant yell from somewhere offshore.

Lars squinted into the distance. He snapped his fingers, and a sopping wet Amethyst flopped out of the portal that cracked open a moment later.

“Whoa,” she said as she regained her footing and began to shake the water from herself like a dog.

“How was it?” asked Lars, doing his level best to contain his excitement.

She met his eyes, hers burning furiously into them. “That was… amazing!”

“Yesss!” he hyped, hands now fists. While Amethyst wrung herself out, he lurched back to the trebuchet and set about using the pulley system and his considerable strength to reset the arm and the weight. He dragged the sled back into position.

“Who’s next?” Lars asked, already folding his lanky limbs and lowering himself awkwardly onto the sled, elbows brought in close to avoid snagging the rigging. “Oh, me? Sure!”

Connie waved a rag at him. “It was nice knowing you, Lars.”

Pearl pointed dramatically at him. “You! Do you have any idea what kind of structural strain you’re putting on that joint? You didn’t even reinforce the sled rails. If you splinter mid-launch—"

She met his eyes. Big. Round. This was going to happen no matter what she said.

She sighed and walked over. “…I’ll pull the lever.”

It was one of those bright days, although not very warm.

But temperature didn't matter much to a gem, so they lounged on the beach outside the Crystal Temple. With nothing pressing them to be elsewhere, they'd decided to enjoy it.

Pearl and Rose were laughing about something or other while Amethyst sprawled in the sand.

"And of course," Pearl was saying," If you don't angle the facets exactly right, the beam scatters—"

"Explodes?" Amethyst interrupted with a sudden interest.

"It would not explode," Pearl said sharply. "It misfires. Very different."

"Well, what if we made it explode?"

Pearl sighed, a little exasperated. "Then the warp pad would also explode. That's not what we're after."

Rose snapped back to the conversation. She'd been somewhat zoning out, watching a pod of dolphins playing in the distance. "What exploded?"

Pearl shook her head. "Nothing! I—"

But Amethyst's favorite pastime was annoying Pearl. "One of the humans' statues! Totally destroyed. Lightening."

"Oh! Oh no. Was it the new one? In Olympia? If so…" Her eyes narrowed. "The irony."

The conversation, which had been utterly derailed, continued on.

But Garnet found herself adrift. The streams of possible futures vanished and she stood alone in a strange, vast quiet.

The past sprawled out behind her, thick and heavy. Ahead—nothing.

She removed her visor. Blinked.

Behind her, one of the familiar portals swirled into being. Connie stepped out with a hand held up in greeting, followed closely by Lars.

Garnet got up.

Before anyone could do anything, she and a very confused-but-not-unwilling Connie stepped onto the warp pad.

As they dissipated into the warp stream, Lars' head snapped back to the others.

"What was that about?" he asked them.

Pearl hummed her confusion while Amethyst shrugged.

"I have no idea whatsoever," said Rose. "But I can't wait to find out. Come." She beckoned him. "Why don't you join us? We were just talking about…" She frowned and looked at the others. "What were we talking about?"

As Amethyst launched into some half-made-up summary, mocking Pearl in the process—"...Something about the structural integrity of sandstone versus limestone for, uh, pillar-making. Really important stuff, really boring…"—Connie's sudden and unexplained departure sat on Lars like a rock.

He'd never been alone with the three gems before, and the instinct to leave crashed over him. He thumbed over his shoulder. "Uh, I might head out…"

And he saw in Rose's eyes the expression she made in the moment she knew a portal was going to open up and escort him and his cohort out of her sight, into parts unknown.

The trouble with Rose was that he liked her. He reminded himself that there was no reason to run this time. Whatever they had done to the timeline didn't appear to matter. Things were stable. He had friends outside of Connie. Friends who simply wanted him to join them for a chat on the beach. Well, except for Pearl. Her friendship was more of a tolerance, he felt. But Rose had always seemed genuine. And Amethyst was fun.

But whatever the case my be, he felt ridiculous. Suddenly he was far too aware of how long he'd just been standing there, the orbs of their eyes trained on him. Finally, he took a step closer to them, and another, until he sat in the sand, legs crossed, stiff.

Rose beamed. Pearl's smile was halting and reluctant. Amethyst immediately flopped down next to him, her arm brushing his. "That was a tense moment for no reason, wouldn't you say?"

"That's me," he muttered. "Always good for a tense moment."

Pearl folded her arms. "At least you're self-aware."

"Aw, Pearl, be nice," chirped Rose. "He just sat down. Don't scare him off."

"I'm not scared," Lars muttered, but it was most assuredly a lie. "I'm just… not sure I got anything worth saying."

Rose laughed, and it seemed to deliberately dissolve the tension. “Then you’ll fit right in! Most of our conversations are about nothing at all. Just yesterday, we spent an hour debating the best way to stack rocks.”

Pearl gestured toward Amethyst. “She was wrong, of course.”

“Hey!” Amethyst protested. "My rock stacking ability is second-to-none in this world, and every other possible and impossible world."

The conversation about nothing continued on as Lars slowly, gradually, allowed himself a long moment of ease.

Meanwhile, Connie silently followed Garnet along a stone path bordered by trees, soaking in the afternoon sun. Past people—human people—who noticed as they walked.

"Garnet?" she eventually asked, quietly, doing an awkward half-jog to try to keep up. "Why did you bring me here?"

"I found myself outside of what I thought I knew to be possible."

As Connie attempted to parse this inscrutable reply, Garnet started ascending the steps toward a temple. Then, she had a revelation. Her face lit up.

"Oh! Are you trying to find me and Lars in your…"

Suddenly, her heart thumped. She was suddenly aware of how easily she had fallen into the groove of having friends outside of Lars.

Of not being afraid.

"…Vision."

Garnet nodded, turning toward the towering statue before them. Connie followed her gaze without really seeing.

"Why just me? Why not him too?"

"You are always with Lars," Garnet observed.

It wasn't an accusation—just a fact. A fact Connie had never really appreciated before. So she blinked and leaned against a column. The day here was warm with a subtle breeze creeping in from the open temple entrance and, after a moment, she found she could properly take in the scene.

Before her sat bearded figure of ivory and gold upon a massive throne. The temple wasn't crowded, but there were people around. A couple of people were kneeling, kowtowing, before the statue. Others were staring up at it in quiet reverence. Another group of people were engaged in a quiet discussion, their words too soft to catch.

"Are we still…" She didn't quite know how to phrase it. "Outside?"

"This moment is truly unprecedented."

Connie nodded once like she understood. She squashed the instinct to flee through a portal—a very real possibility she figured Garnet was blind to.

But despite everything she was doing, she understood consequences. The act of fleeing would make Garnet uneasy. Connie didn't want that. She wanted to trust and be trusted in turn. So she chose to stay in this moment with Garnet.

Soon she became more aware of the nearby conversation. Connie looked over to see the small group gesturing at herself and Garnet. They seemed to be talking about them.

"Don't mind them," Garnet said gently.

"You know," Connie started, leaning back against one of the columns, staring pointedly at the depiction of a lightening bolt in the hand of the god. "This reminds me of someone. They got the eyes right, anyway."

Connie noticed the fusion's lip twist.

"It's strange," she continued, "To see her destructive power still echo. Not only through the monsters, but through human myth like this. I've done… a lot of reading—I knew they were still on their minds.I even knew about this. But to see it—"

She waved her arm up at the imposing form.

"Like, their planet was nearly destroyed, and they just—" She glanced over at one of the groups of humans with distaste. "They worship."

When she moved her eyes back to Garnet, the fusion smiled.

"How can you smile like that when they've lumped you in the same category as them?" Connie asked, gesturing up at the statue.

"They haven’t lumped me anywhere."

Connie gestured toward the kneeling humans, frustration in her voice. “They’re worshiping something that almost destroyed their world. Then, they worship you, and you saved it!"

"They're not worshiping her, or me," Garnet said calmly. “They’re trying to make sense of something bigger than themselves. That’s what humans do. They tell stories about Diamonds and call them gods. They tell stories about monsters and call them warnings. And sometimes…” She glanced at the statue again, “…they tell stories about people like me.”

Connie folded her arms. “So, wait… Doesn’t it bother you?”

"Well, It used to. I thought being remembered for the truth was all that mattered. The truth does matter, but when we're talking about humanity, the stories—ideas—last much longer than the truth.” Garnet looked down at her. “When you've tasked yourself with undoing the damage of the past, as we have, what matters more is making sure the next story they tell isn’t one of destruction.”

Connie gazed up at Garnet, and then back to the statue.

And she tried to see it as that—a statue.

Another day, Garnet said it offhand like she wasn’t trying to set something in motion.

“Lars. Amethyst is still waiting on the thing you promised her.”

He’d winced. He’d forgotten. But apparently Amethyst hadn’t, and was so drenched in anticipation that she’d been chatting about it to the other gems. He didn't like that.

Then, Lars watched Garnet simply walk away like it hadn’t meant anything. But it had.

It meant a whirlwind tour of the world for ingredients.

Between the three of them, Lars, Connie and Amethyst were able to track down and barter for tomatoes from South America, flour and yeast from Egypt, sugar from India, a couple of chicken eggs, a little bit of salt, some mushrooms, fresh herbs, and a block of cheese Lars vaguely guessed would later be called Swiss—not ideal, but it would do in a pinch.

"You see?" Amethyst laughed. "I told you they love me in Egypt. I'm the shape-shifting trickster in their funny little stories." Then she frowned. "But now they think I'm friends with scared people. What was all that?"

"We… told you. We're not used to being around humans," Connie sheepishly explained before swapping a look with Lars.

"Right. Well, we're going to change that," Amethyst promised them.

Lars walked over to the door with the burlap sack of ingredients. “That was a little vignette, huh?”

Connie merely raised an eyebrow while Amethyst frowned questioningly up at him. Then she activated her key. The door slid open.

“You know.” He shrugged as the door closed and disappeared behind them. “A moment. A tiny chapter. I’m just saying. We’re living in an anthology now.”

“Oh no,” said Connie. “It’s happened. I was beginning to suspect you’d read way too many scrolls for your own good, but here’s the proof.”

Lars rolled his eyes.

 “So!” Amethyst popped up. “What are you making for me?”

Ever since the gentle push from Garnet, he had agonized for months about how to fulfill Amethyst’s request for him to make her something, edible or not. But today he had a solid concept with which he was certain he could follow through.

“Pizza,” Lars said.

“Peat-sah?” echoed Amethyst, wide-eyed.

Pizza seemed simple. Easy, even. 

Anachronistic as all hell—Connie had jumped at the chance to point that out—but at this point neither of them really cared. From what they could tell, the universe appeared to be offering them a pass. 

They were tired, so they were taking it, all the while promising themselves they could deal with whatever that meant... Later.

But for now, Lars scratched his neck awkwardly. “Or, more likely, something based on what I remember about pizza from actual centuries ago…”

“Sounds amazing,” the purple gem enthused. “How do we start?”

“We have to make dough,” Connie remembered.

“No. I gotta make dough,” Lars corrected her. “Because I don’t recall you ever doing anything like this, back when it still mattered. So you can just watch. Not that I’m complaining about always cooking! I loved it.” He blushed. “Loved… it. Past tense.”

Connie held her hands up. “Okay, okay, just relax.”

“I’m not even sure I can do it without screwing it up anyway. So don’t expect much.” He turned his attention to the gem. “Where’s this oven we were talking about?”

Amethyst smiled and dove into one of her junk piles. While that was happening, Connie took the bag from Lars and started setting the ingredients out on a nearby flat rock. 

She found herself distracted by the contents of a little bag. “Lars?” 

“Hm?” he asked, eyes aglow as he began pulling a couple of ancient ceramic bowls of different sizes and various utensils from his head.

“The guy said something about the yeast being alive… is that right? Are we supposed to kill it first?”

Lars narrowed his eyes at her as the glow faded. “I genuinely can not fucking tell if you’re serious right now.”

She furrowed her brow at him. “So… Yes?”

“No!” He dumped everything on the rock and spun on her. “It’s alive on purpose!”

Amethyst reappeared with a large stone oven in her arms and dropped like it weighed nothing, next to the rock they were about to use as a counter-top. 

“One ‘oven’, as per your insane request.”

Between this unbelievable statement and that of Connie’s, Lars was high-key alarmed. “So neither of you have ever—wait, what am I even asking? Of course you haven’t.”

He took a deep breath. 

“Okay,” he said, louder. “Yes, yeast needs to be alive. Yes, we need the oven. I can’t with you guys.” He pulled some coal from his head as well as some kindling and passed it to them. “Get a fire going—” Then, terse: “Inside the oven.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Connie said as she went to do just that. “I at least remember that much.”

“Thank the stars,” he muttered mostly to himself as he turned to the gear on the rock and opened the sack of flour. “Hm. No idea how much of this I’ll need.”

Amethyst popped up alongside him again. “Just guess! I’m starving!”

“No you’re not,” said Connie with a short laugh as the fire roared to life and she shoved the tinder and flint back into her head.

Soon, Lars had something resembling a dough. Between them, Connie and Amethyst had managed a passable sauce by smashing some of the tomatoes and adding the salt and herbs into the smaller bowl, a task he had only entrusted them with to get them to stop hovering.

“Guys,” he asked them. “Does this look like a dough or a cry for help?”

His question was met with silence.

“I think it… feels right?” He poked at it. “Let’s just go with it. Why not.” 

He set the lump down in the biggest bowl. “Now it rests. Just like I want to.”

“What?!” shrieked Amethyst. “But I’m hungry now. How long does it rest for?”

“I—” His eye twitched. “I don’t know.”

Connie knew Lars like the back of her hand, and she became very serious. She could feel another crisis incoming. 

“Jeez, Lars. Breathe. It’s just a pizza.”

Lars’ voice was low as he stared at the lump. “It’s not just a pizza.”

Amethyst furrowed her brow. The sudden mood shift was inescapable. She didn't really understand, but in an attempt to be helpful anyway, she pinched off a little piece of the dough and put it in her mouth. 

“Well, pizza tastes fine to me.” She clapped him on the back as he watched her chew the bit of raw dough. “You’re great at cooking, Lars!”

The guy leaned forward until he had planted his face into the rock bench with a muffled groan. “I used to be good at this stuff. Now I can’t even tell if it’s too wet or too dry.”

“Oh.” Amethyst picked at her teeth. “Definitely too dry.”

Lars lifted his head slightly only to bring it back down with a small thud as if trying to crack an egg.

Connie stepped around to the opposite side of the rock counter-top and crouched in front of him. “Lars. Hey. Look at me.”

He didn’t move.

“C’mon. Just for one second.”

After a moment, he peeled his cheek off the rock and made something resembling eye contact.

“Listen. You remembered the ingredients and made a dough from scratch. No recipe, no help—especially not from either of us. That’s impressive.”

“That’s literally the bare minimum,” he croaked. “I used to do this kind of stuff with my eyes closed.”

“Yeah, but that was more than two thousand years ago. You’re trying to summon something from a life that doesn’t exist anymore. I know it sucks, and I know you’re in mourning. But look, you have this dough. You made it yourself. Sure, it’s dry, but it’s… definitely dough.”

A long breath escaped him. “I’m gonna cry into this dough.”

Connie raised an eyebrow. “That’ll probably fix it, right? Too dry, add water. You’ve got good instincts. See?” She gave him a small, encouraging smile. 

“Yeah!” added Amethyst. “You may be really, really old. But I bet you’re still good at this!”

Lars finally cracked a crooked smile. “I hate how comforting this actually is.”

“I know you do, buddy.” Connie tilted her head at him fondly. “C’mon. Get your shit together. Amethyst’s hungry.”

A while later, a pizza came out of the oven.

It was lopsided. The sauce had migrated to one side. The cheese was a little overdone in the middle and barely melted around the crust. A couple of tomato skins had blackened and curled like old paper. Fresh from the oven, it already looked like it had lived a hard life.

But it smelled divine.

Amethyst immediately launched herself at it like a starved rat. Lars stopped her with one hand. “It has to cool down.”

She froze in place. “Why?”

“Because it’s lava.”

Amethyst groaned and flopped backward onto the rocky floor. “You people and your food rules. I’m a gem warrior! The worst it could possibly do is poof me. And it won’t, because it smells so amazing that I’d fight to stay out here, if it even could.”

Lars wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and sat down. His hands and shirt were still dusted with flour. He looked at the pizza like it was something he couldn’t quite remember doing. Connie plopped down beside him. “It’s awesome.”

“It’s a mess.”

She nudged his knee. “Proud of you.”

He was quiet for a second. Then he looked over at her. “Thanks. For… all of that, earlier.”

She shrugged. “It’s what I do.”

“You still didn’t help cook.”

“Also what I do.”

Amethyst sat bolt upright. “Can we eat it now?”

Lars poked the crust with a fingertip. “Sure, if you wanna risk that poofing.”

That was all she needed. She tore off a chunk, made an incoherent noise of joy, and began chewing with the abandon of someone who did not fear consequences.

Connie watched for the theatrics to pass before cutting herself a slice. 

“It’s been so long since I’ve eaten anything…” She took an awkward bite, but she needn’t have been worried. She chewed it like a pro. Her eyebrows rose in surprise. She spoke as she chewed. “Lars… this is actually good.”

He blinked. It was easy not to believe Amethyst, who would happily eat mold, but this actually meant something coming from Connie. “Wait, really?”

“Weirdly good.”

Amethyst gave a thumbs up with her mouth full.

Lars took a bite of his own, chewed, and stared down at it. Then he swallowed. A smile threatened to spread across his face. “Disaster pizza lives.”

“It’s thriving,” Connie agreed.

They ate slowly, the pizza warm in their hands, the embers in the oven behind them crackling gently. 

It wasn’t perfect. But also, it was.

Lars' eye twitched at the vaguely familiar face staring down at them in the flickering torchlight.

"Wow. They…" He frowned. "At least they got her eyes right?"

Connie had brought him, via portal, to the Statue of Zeus in the night. It was lit up by torchlight for night worship, yet they found themselves alone with the god.

"I mean… that's impressive. She hasn't been to Earth in a while. Wouldn't've expected anyone to remember. "

"Uncanny, right?" Connie said. "Hard to say if it's based on her, or if they just kind of superimposed her influence on the pre-existing idea…" She shook her head. "Stars. Lot to unpack there. Not what I wanted to talk about."

Lars snorted, amused. "And here I thought we were sightseeing. Ulterior motive, huh? What are we here to talk about?"

She sighed. "Garnet. She's still trying to figure us out."

"I wondered," Lars said. "But, y'know—" He shrugged. "Can't pull the pin now. Bit late for that option."

Connie exhaled. "I'm still wondering what's going to swoop in to compensate for all that we're doing. For all the… Counterweight trebuchets and anachronistic pizzas we invent—"

"I gave this world pizza," he muttered darkly. "You gave me a pep talk."

"All the pep talks in the world won't get us out of this," she said. "I swear, Lars… every time we do something, it feels like the universe is just sitting back. Smirk on its big dumb face. Waiting to slam a ‘balance’ hammer down on us.”

Lars gave a dry laugh, looking up at the colossal statue. "You're waiting on a hammer now, huh? To me, feels more like something’s scribbling little corrections in the margins of our lives. Someday soon, the whatever-it-is will decide this whole thing is unfixable and dump everything in the trash.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him. "Still on the book metaphors, huh?"

"I've read too much, Connie."

"Hammers, cosmic trash bins—" Her hands fluttered in exasperation. “I don’t even know if we’d recognize the thing that hits us. Will we even notice it?" She gave a nervous little laugh. "Hope not. Might be better not to see it.”

“Then I guess we… keep ignoring the contrarian, right?"

"RIP The Contrarian," Connie agreed with a sigh. "You lived a good long life."

He draped an arm around her shoulders. "We'll keep… inventing anachro-pizzas and counterweight-action trebuchets and hope the universe doesn’t get too creative.” Lars shot her a glance. "I still really like your Time as Piece of String thing… Really hoping that one pans out."

"Yeah," said Connie, leaning into him, staring up as the vague likeness of Yellow Diamond stared back at them.

"You and me both, man."

The warp pad activated and they touched down.

Connie and Lars suddenly found themselves in a place that they had distinctly decided to avoid during their travels, before they’d abruptly remembered the long-abandoned Diamond Base on the moon that they could escape to. 

At the time, they couldn’t say exactly why they felt they needed to steer clear. Maybe it was the faint static charge in the air as they’d approached it.

Maybe it was the general don’t touch this vibe that it gave off.

Nothing about this place had changed one iota.

Garnet stepped down off the warp pad without fear. Lars and Connie followed, less enthusiastically. The energy of this place still crawled under their skin as it had millennia ago.

Then, the fusion deftly slid down the side of the crater with ease. Lars went after her, less gracefully, more a series of controlled stumbles. Connie lingered, eyes locked on the black stone half-sphere that jutted from the center of the crater like a ruptured tooth. 

Then she too slid down the edge as best she could and caught up with the others.

The sky happened to be gray. There was no life here in this ancient impact crater save for the three of them.

“What is this place?” asked Lars, feeling the hairs on his arms standing upright.

“The Geode,” said Garnet, her tone even. “A synthetic storm, sealed in stone.”

She paused, lowering her gaze toward the embedded sphere. “A weapon. From the war.” 

Lars nodded slowly, immediately not really wanting to be here even more.

Garnet turned slightly. “The objective is simple. We’re here to ensure the storm is still contained.”

Connie had her arms folded across her chest. She glanced at the thing again, nervously. “And if it’s not?”

“All three of us will be vaporized immediately.”

Lars made a noise in his throat that may have been a laugh or a cough. “Cool,” he muttered. “Great.”

“And then it will destroy this world.”

Lars and Connie exchanged a look. Weary. Resigned. Unsurprised.

“So… the war, huh?” Lars offered, a little weakly. “That was… intense, right?”

“Yes,” was all that Garnet said on the topic for now. She started to walk the perimeter of the half-buried geode, one hand brushing the air above its surface like she was feeling for something.

They trailed her in silence for a moment.

“I can’t see it. But if either of you are thinking about touching the geode, do not,” she warned them without turning.

Lars shoved his hands back in his pockets. “Wasn’t gonna.”

Connie elbowed him in the ribs. He glared and elbowed back.

Soon, they were finishing circling the Geode.

“It’s stable,” Garnet murmured.

Lars exhaled. “Cool. Cool, cool, cool.”

Connie tilted her head at it. “So… I’m guessing it’s a weapon that didn’t go off. Fortunately. For everyone.”

Garnet nodded. “It was designed to detonate on impact. To fracture the crust, trigger tectonic collapse. But something malfunctioned. Or someone miscalculated.” She paused. “We never figured out which.”

They stared at the Geode in silence.

“It fell from orbit like a meteor,” Garnet went on, voice steady. “We saw the trail in the sky. We were sure it was the end. But, when we reached the crater… it was silent.”

Connie frowned. “So why didn’t the Crystal Gems just destroy it?”

“We didn’t know how,” Garnet said. “Still don’t. Trying is likely to trigger it. It’s about eighty-twenty.” She shrugged. “Not worth risking, as long as it’s contained."

"Well… can't Rose, like, heal it or something?" asked Lars. "If it does crack open or explode?"

"Possible." Garnet nodded once. "Luckily, we haven't had cause to test that theory.”

Connie gazed at the thing. “It’s just been… here. All this time. A sleeping doom nodule.”

Lars rubbed the back of his neck.

“Some things don’t go away. They just wait until you forget." Garnet looked up at the gray sky. "We won’t forget.”

“It’s strange to think that something so destructive can lie still for this long," Connie said quietly. "And now, it’s even a part of the landscape? Almost like it belongs here.”

“It doesn’t belong here,” Garnet replied.

Lars crouched near the edge of the crater, keeping a healthy distance from the weapon. “You ever think about how many things on Earth aren’t supposed to be here, but here they are anyway?”

"Lars. C'mon." Connie wrenched her eyes from the geode to glance at him. “You know I do.”

Garnet didn’t answer right away. When she did, her voice was almost gentle. “I think about it all the time. I saw what they tried to do to this planet. What they almost did.”

Connie gave a short, humorless laugh. “We stayed away from it. Kept our heads down, eyes forward. Ran when we had to. Fought when forced. I still feel like… we should’ve done more?”

Garnet stared down at him through her visor. “There is no shame in survival, Connie. It was never your war—neither of yours. Gems caused the problem, and so it was up to gems to fix it. But…” She trailed off. “We never quite did. The war ended, but the damage lingered. Homeworld always had the advantage. They still do.”

Connie folded her arms around herself. “Well, our planet isn’t a dead husk of a gem-controlled colony, and that’s thanks to the Crystal Gems. You didn’t win everything, and you lost so much. But nothing native to this world would or could have survived without you.”

Garnet froze—a stillness deeper than her usual calm. The future had disappeared once more.

She glanced between the two of them. They were absent from her futures. They always had been. So she was utterly unprepared for this moment, for what she saw here with her own eyes.

“You… believe that,” she said quietly, not a question. 

“Hard not to." Lars shrugged. “We saw the ruins. We were caught up in the Corruption like everyone else. We saw what could have happened.”

Connie nodded. “It was a full-scale invasion of a world that couldn’t defend itself. And you—All of you—turned on your own kind and stopped it.”

“Yeah, man.” Lars blinked. “That’s insane.”

He thought a moment, back to the thousands of accounts he’d read a while back. Only then did he feel he could finally pin down his feelings.

“People—humans—talk about the Crystal Gems like you were gods, or heroes. I don’t think either fits. Gods are perfect, more or less. Infallible. No offense, but you guys aren’t that. You’re messy. You broke yourselves over and over. You saw how hopeless it was, you saw there was no Plan B, and got back up anyway to win or lose again the next day…” 

He twisted his lip and glanced at Connie. “Like, what would you even call that?”

“It’s love,” she said softly.

He released a breath he was unaware he was holding. “Yeah. What she said."

Garnet lowered her visor slightly, studying each of them more closely. She still didn’t understand how or why neither one registered in her sight. But now, she felt like she could begin to understand them.

“Humans don’t say things like that,” she said slowly. “Not to us.”

“Humans don’t live long enough to see the big picture—they’re gone before the dust settles. But they still can’t see a world without themselves in it.” Connie said simply. “We’re not that.”

Garnet put her visor back on. She turned toward the warp pad. “We will return in a decade. The Geode remains contained, for now.”

Lars stood, and they started heading over.

“Neither of you are supposed to be here,” Garnet said before activating the warpstream that would take them back to the temple. “But I’m glad you are.”

Twilight settled gently over the beach.

The sun left streaks of lavender and deep rose glowing along the sky, and the ocean mirrored it as best it could—darker, rippled with deep violets.

The hill cast long shadows across the sand, the ancient stone of the temple wearing smoother by salt and time. The air smelled faintly of smoke, a tiny bit of burning, and something else, warm and comforting.

Garnet sat, as she often did, alone and cross-legged by the water.

Somewhere behind her, a low light flickered by the temple door. The others laughed—Rose’s bright and warm, Amethyst’s wild and chaotic, Pearl’s a little more reluctant. Connie’s voice cut through with a twinge of dry exasperation, followed by a bark of laughter from Lars. Then a giggle from Connie.

The fusion didn’t join them.

Instead, facing the lazy ocean, she closed her eyes under her visor and let the possibilities unfold.

Some branched cleanly. Others dissolved midstream. In one, the ocean swallowed a city. In another, the hill above grew wild with bergamot.

Garnet breathed in. Despite all her efforts, despite the tiny pools she had discovered, there was still no sign Lars or Connie. No rupture that could’ve explained it. No static to indicate that they were supposed to be there. Just absence.

Despite this, she could hear them behind her, in the distance—Connie laughing, Lars swearing about something. The smell of wood-smoke drifted up, as did another swear. A pizza crust had been burned again.

She didn’t turn toward them, just listened.

For so long, she’d thought of sight as certainty. The power to see forward was the power to protect this world and the people she loved. Lars and Connie were something her vision couldn't account for but, due to some unknowable cosmic fluke, they had not brought danger—only complexity and kindness. Not to mention the same battered love for this ever-changing world.

She turned back toward the others and made her way back across the sand.

The smell of fire-roasted crust hit her first. Earlier in the day, the oven had been dragged out through the temple door and placed outside. 

Someone—most likely Amethyst, judging by the debris—had made another pizza. She and Lars were deep in discussion regarding work-shopping the attempt.

Connie smiled up at Garnet as her shadow fell across the scene. She swallowed the slice she’d been chewing.

“She says she made it,” she said, gesturing at Amethyst. “But that’s generous. Want some?”

Garnet opened her mouth to say something, but Amethyst chimed in, wiping soot from her face. “Rude. I made at least seventy percent of it. All Lars did was the flour and stuff. Connie just poked the fire.”

Pearl stood a little ways off with her arms folded. Her attempt at being quietly unimpressed failed when Rose offered her a slice on a small clay plate and smiled at her like she’d hung the moon. 

Beaming back, Pearl declined the offer. Rose nudged her fondly, but didn't push. She took it back and happily bit into it herself as Pearl gazed up at her, just watching.

Garnet watched for a moment, the way Lars gestured with hands still lightly floured, the way Connie tilted her head to listen as she sliced another piece from the haphazard pie on the pizza stone, only to have it stolen by Amethyst before cramming it into her face.

She cut another slice and placed it on the last clean plate and held it out to Garnet, who accepted it.

It was a little burnt, the sauce uneven, the crust somehow both too thick and too thin.

She bit in.

“Hm.” Then, “Not bad.”

Amethyst beamed like she’d just won a competition. Rose, too, was delighted. “She likes it!”

“No, she loves it,” Amethyst corrected her. “That was a ‘not bad’, but with feeling!”

Garnet took another bite, then glanced at the remains of the pizza on the stone. She tilted her head, considering the future.

“If the coals are moved to the edges next time,” she said, “The pizza will get better heat distribution.”

There was a silence, as if no one could parse what Garnet was getting at. Then she gave a warm smile.

“Crust will rise more evenly.”

Connie gasped. Lars smacked the palm of his hand into his forehead and ran it down his face. “Aaa, of course.”

“This is good,” Garnet said. “But next time, it will be even better.”

~*~

Silence shatters

Peace ignites

Chapter Text

7. To Start Over.

"Nothing is lost.
Everything is transformed."

—Antoine Lavoisier.

~*~

Pearl stood in the shallows with her arms folded behind her, watching the morning mist rise from the water.

The waves lapped in and out, like the ocean itself were also lost in thought. She preferred it this way. The quiet. Time to think.

She bent down and plucked a shell from the water. She felt its ridges, then let it fall again. The tide took it at once and it vanished into the murk.

Pearl had always hated how temporary everything was.

It started well before the Light of the Corruption. It started with the Battle of the Ziggurat.

And ever since, it seemed like nothing stayed.

The utopian Earth she had dreamed of with Rose—vanished in an instant. The Crystal Gems she had once felt kinship with—corrupted.

Human empires billowed out, only to collapse. Oceans swallowed coastlines.

And now, two strange humans had appeared.

Humans were fine. Kind of annoying, but inventive. Pearl liked speaking with the more insightful ones when she had questions about their curious little worlds. But unlike Rose, she had never considered them worth forging any meaningful connection with.

But as the years went on, she'd started to understand that these two weren’t passing visitors, nor fleeting distractions. They would endure well beyond the typical lifespan of a human, just like the other gems.

So she should have been grateful for these two new constants. The others were coming to embrace them as new friends, and deep down she knew they were right to do so.

These two could help to make things easier, make the march of years feel less lonely in this fleeting world, full of monsters. But instead, they reminded her how long it had been since anyone new had stayed.

Perhaps they wouldn’t vanish like other humans. Maybe they’d keep coming back, century after century, asking questions, pulling them all into plans, laughing like all of their worlds hadn’t already been lost over and over.

On paper, in theory, they wouldn’t wash away. That was the thing, because if they stayed, then losing them wouldn’t be easy. Like very nearly everything else she’d dared to love.

Then, of course, there was Amethyst.

Pearl let out a slow breath through her nose.

It also hadn’t been easy, with Amethyst. Many times, Pearl had been certain she couldn’t do it. That she couldn’t let someone new in. She didn’t know what it was, exactly. Perhaps the differences were too wide, the wounds too fresh.

But she had.

Not all at once. Not without mistakes. But she had let her in, piece by piece, and in this moment she realized Amethyst had become something permanent.

Pearl blinked down at the lapping tide. Amethyst hadn't washed away. Maybe Connie and Lars wouldn't either.

The only problem was that she wasn’t sure she had it in her to start over again.

Connie knew about Lars’ experience with the moss—they literally knew everything about each other. So it was no surprise to her that he opted to hang back on the beach rather than come with them.

But despite his warning, Connie was curious. And Rose would be there. She was sure it would be fine.

She’d offered to portal them to the hill in question, but Rose had made an excellent case for walking instead. By the time they got there, it was mid-morning. Cloudy but fine. Birdsong. A light rustle in the nearby trees.

Soft moss blanketed the sloping hilltop like velvet.

Connie knelt down and poked at it with two fingers. “This is… honestly, this is nicer than I expected.”

“It’s perfect,” Rose said, settling nearby with her legs folded underneath her, her skirts billowing out around her. She began to tend to the moss. “This is where the dew collects. The moss loves it. It told me once that it likes this spot best.”

Connie blinked. “It told you?”

Pearl, a few paces away, rolled her eyes without looking up from her pruning. “Metaphorically, Connie. She means metaphorically.”

Connie hesitated, a small knot forming behind her ribs. Pearl always spoke to her like that—gently superior, half-dismissive. As though she were a problem waiting to be solved.  She reminded herself this was a different Pearl. One who didn’t know her. A Pearl who hadn’t had time to come to grips with humanity.

It brought her little comfort, but it was comfort nonetheless.

“I might mean metaphorically,” Rose said breezily, oblivious. “But it did sort of hum at me.”

Connie pressed her hand flat into the patch. It squished up between her fingers - squishy and cool to the touch.

“I mean. It kind of does feel sentient, I suppose.”

Rose beamed. “You think so too!”

Pearl sighed and shook stray bits of lichen from her fingers. “I’ve never heard it hum. And it doesn’t ‘feel’ sentient to me. It just… grows. And dies. And grows again. Like everything else on this planet. And if we don’t tend to it every spring, it will overrun this whole hill.”

Rose took a short break from pruning and leaned over to speak quietly to Connie. “Pearl pretends it’s work, but I think she enjoys being bossy in the sunlight.”

“I heard that~” Pearl singsonged fondly.

“Good!” Rose grinned.

Then, the clouds parted. Sunlight spilled down. All at once, the moss began to bloom.

Pink flowers unfurled from the green like they’d been waiting to show themselves all morning. Connie sat up straight as they began to take flight in the light wind.

“Oh!” she said. “Is it—"

Rose had stopped pruning to lean back on an arm and watch. “Pearl, come here! Look at all this! We missed this last year.” She glanced at Connie. “We were only a week too late. If I had a human heart, it would have broken.”

Pearl smiled softly and walked over to sit with them. “Whether it’s sentient or overly chatty—or not—it is wonderful.”

One of the flowers landed on Connie’s lap. She picked it up to see a tiny pink gem in the center of it. She smiled and placed it carefully in her hair above her ear.

The hillside and the bay sprawled out below—a field of pink stars traveled the space in between.

“I think it knows we're here,” said Rose.

Connie slowly nodded. “I’d bloom too if someone came all this way just to take care of me.”

“Like I said,” Pearl singsonged again, “Moss doesn’t care. It just grows. And when you’re not looking—"

Rose closed her eyes and turned her face toward the sun. “You’re right. The moss doesn’t care, or want, or wish things were different. It simply is. Like we should be.”

This gave Pearl pause. She glanced at Connie briefly, the flower in her hair, the softness in her smile, the way she watched the display.

And Rose—the way she accepted everything, and everyone, exactly as they were.

The three of them watched the last of the blossoms vanish into the sky.

Lars was elbow-deep in prep, lost in what he was starting to think of as his cooking revival era. To be fair, he only really got into a rhythm like this once every year or so, if not longer, but time was meaningless and something was better than nothing.

He was so focused on grinding herbs with a pestle and mortar that he didn’t notice Amethyst until she dropped an armload of stuff onto the makeshift counter-top next to him.

A couple of lumpy rocks, a worm-ridden turnip, and a candle? Maybe a lump of soap. Lars froze and stared at the pile, then his eyes darted to Amethyst.

“…Why do you bring me these things?” he asked, voice flat.

Amethyst grinned. “You said you liked surprises.”

Lars blinked. “Surprises?”

“Yeah!”

Suddenly, the loading screen in his mind resolved. “…Spices! I said spices!”

“Ooooooh,” Amethyst said, eyes widening. “I thought you said ‘surprises’ but with an accent.”

Suddenly it all made sense to him—The smooth geode, the armload of papyrus, the charred stick, the silver coin, the rather deadly-looking mushrooms, the live rat—all this and the dozens of other unhinged things she’d been bringing to him for seemingly no reason whenever he’d been in the mood to make anything.

He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He felt whatever was left of his soul leave his body to scream into the void for a moment.

Suddenly, he was back.

“Do you want this meal to pass through you,” he asked calmly, “Or do you want it to not?”

“What’s the difference?”

She actually seemed genuinely curious, which made it worse. Lars turned away slowly and pressed his face into his forearms.

She blinked. “What’s wrong? Lars?”

He sighed. “Nothing. I’m just… sore inside.”

Amethyst hopped up to sit on the surface beside the chaos of her own making. “Is this about the candle? Because I don’t think it smells that terrible.”

“How long have we known each other?”

Amethyst thought a moment. “Maybe… thirty? Forty orbits of the star by now?”

“I love you,” Lars mumbled. “You know that, right?”

Amethyst grinned. “Yeah, and you’re welcome."

“I’m firing you.”

“What?!”

Suddenly, footsteps in the sand. Amethyst glanced up to see Connie walking into view.

When she got close, Connie could tell immediately what had happened.

"You broke Lars?"

"Yeah, but I don’t understand how."

"Next time? Wait for me. I wanna break him too."

Lars took another deep breath and decided to ignore everything prior to this point. He eyed the flower in Connie’s hair. “Stupid moss trip went well, then?"

Connie smiled. “'Course. We got there, gave it some love, and it bloomed—Awful. Absolutely horrendous display. You’d've hated it.”

Lars grunted and pretended to fuss with the herbs again, but he snuck a glance at the blossom in Connie’s hair.

“You, uh…” He cleared his throat. “Suits you.”

Connie blinked. “What?”

“The flower,” he muttered. “Brings out your eyes.”

"Thanks," she said after a moment. Then she grinned. "That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me lately."

Lars scoffed as he sliced through something. "What?! I say nice things all the time."

Amethyst, who had been suspiciously quiet, suddenly leaned in between them.

"Woooow. Look at you two. Connie looking fantastic, Lars here complimenting flowers, what’s next, Lars? A little poem?"

Lars groaned. “I fired you, remember?”

"If you did, you did a terrible job of it."

Connie laughed. Lars frowned. "What?"

Amethyst rolled her eyes so hard that it might've hurt her. "I think I'd notice if I was on fire, Lars."

They’d been invited.

Sure, it was probably because it would have been rude to just leave them at the temple and bounce again, but the two weird magic humans were ready all the same.

"Now," Pearl had said, "I want to be clear. This is not training, or a test run. And it is certainly not an excuse to throw yourselves into danger."

Connie was vibrating with excitement, and Lars wasn't much better.

But Rose knew the tone that was coming out of Pearl. It meant her own invitation for them to come watch had sounded much too eager. "Oh. Oh! No, of course not. We'd never presume, or put either of you in any danger—"

Amethyst burst out from nowhere. "It took a couple centuries at least for them to let me get into any kind of fun danger!"

Pearl pinched the bridge of her nose. "And we should have waited a couple of centuries more."

"Aw, come on!"

Pearl cleared her throat and moved her gaze to the small gem. "I'll kindly remind you that you got poofed three minutes into your first mission! Not even Garnet saw it coming!"

Garnet, nearby, shrugged. "The possibility was there."

Amethyst and Pearl kept arguing, so Rose took over the briefing. She turned back to Lars and Connie. "Pearl is so dire sometimes. All that to say… would you like to accompany us on this simple mission to poof and bubble a corrupted gem? You shouldn't feel expected or required or needed to do anything—just watch. If you want to."

Connie nodded so quickly she almost gave herself whiplash. Her fingers itched for the hilt of her sword, but she kept them as still as she could. "Absolutely! I can stay out of the way. No problem, ma'am!"

Lars attempted a little more nonchalance. "I watch stuff all the time. Can do." But his chest felt tight.

It would be nice to see the Crystal Gems do what they do without feeling the intense need to hide while silently crying, for once.

Rose beamed, arms akimbo. Then, in a rush of bright light, all six of them disappeared into the warp stream.

The site wasn’t far from the warp pad they touched down on—it lay one valley over, just past a series of steep escarpments and eroded terraces.

These surroundings looked like they may once have been steps carved into the hills by some ancient civilization, now buried. There were no trees. Just sky, rock and wild grasses. Visibility was excellent.

As they made their way through the plain, they soon glimpsed the corrupted gem. It was large, slinking through the terraces like a drifting scrap of cloth. It had wings that were folded against its back, its body glinting pale green and mauve. It appeared vaguely moth-like, also possibly snake-like—but they were too far away and unable to get a great look.

"Looks sluggish." Pearl narrowed her eyes at the presence from their vantagepoint. "Ungainly, even. This won't take long."

“Yeah, nothing major,” Amethyst said casually. “We poof it, we bubble it, we go home and eat stuff.”

“Routine,” Rose called it, her normal cheerfulness somewhat subdued. “We’ve done this kind of thing before. Thousands of times.”

“It’s perfectly safe, as long as neither of you try to get involved,” added Pearl as a reminder.

Despite the touch of passive-aggression from Pearl, Lars liked that plan. Connie didn’t say anything, but her shoulders dropped the way they did when she was deliberately trying to relax.

Rose, sword in hand, cast a strategic glance around before addressing Garnet. “Where would be the safest place for our guests?”

Garnet appeared deep in thought for a moment, then shrugged. “They continue to evade my vision.”

"So… you don't know?"

"Precisely."

Rose frowned, but she knew better than to push. She glanced around once more, taking in the surrounding terrain, and made the best decision she could come up with.

“Lars, Connie—would you mind hanging back on that ridge?” she asked, pointing to a flat ledge halfway up a nearby rise a mile or so away.

They happily complied. They weren’t about to argue. It would have been a easy walk and a short climb but they jumped a portal anyway and sat side by side on the rocks to watch the gems move gracefully through the far side of the ruins.

From their vantage-point, they watched the Crystal Gems fan out and weapon-up. Pearl with her spear, Amethyst and her whip, Garnet's gauntlets. Rose had her shield up now, a compliment to her sword.

The monster—gemstone glinting from the beast's forehead—had been circling, low and quiet, just like Garnet said it would. After a while, its movements began to seem predictable. Tired. The Crystal Gems began to approach it in slow, deliberate movements from all sides, closing in with measured grace.

And then it moved—sudden, jagged and fast. The opposite of tired.

It unfolded, all limbs, wings shimmering like an upset lake. It made a shrieking sound that soon hit Lars and Connie like a wave of pressure. Its wings caught the sun wrong as they flared. Then the creature shot upward, faster and higher than any of them could have expected.

It came down, straight at Rose.

The ground exploded around her. Debris and grass flung skyward. The others shouted. For one awful second, neither Lars nor Connie could see her.

But Connie was already moving.

She didn’t say anything, didn’t check in with him, didn’t wait. She instead launched herself off the rock and into a portal, hand already closing around the sword hilt springing from the space between the atoms of her head.

But Lars was two beats behind, spear sliding free from his head as well. He leapt in after her, before his brain caught up with his body.

The monster had already moved again—battering Rose backward into a boulder with a sickening crunch of stone. Garnet and Amethyst were halfway there, and Pearl was in full sprint. But none would reach her in time.

Connie didn’t aim for the corrupted gem. She aimed for its trajectory—the arc of its path as it pulled away from Rose and wheeled around in the air above for another strike.

She intercepted it midair.

There was the flash of her sword catching the sun just before impact, and then a crack as she collided with the creature. The momentum slamming them both sideways, out of the air and into the dust.

But Connie was still on it, sword buried in its side—not enough to poof it, but enough to make it angry. All it needed to do was orient itself, take flight and wheel around yet again.

It flared its wings wide again, ready to lift off—and that’s when Lars was there, his spear leveled at the beast.

It was not an unhinged, desperate strike. There was no scream or grunt or a panicked cry. Just a clean jab that pierced one of the monster's wings, staggering it midair.

It crashed again, back into the dust and the dirt. If it was mad before, it was furious now. It reared up, its long neck thrashing, the anger shrill in their ears.

Lars and Connie landed in tandem and stepped apart.

The corrupted gem shrieked again, lurching toward them. But this time, Amethyst intercepted it in full crash tackle, her whip wrapping around a section of torso. She whooped as she wrestled it to the ground.

Then Garnet planted her gauntlets in either side of it like a cage. Pearl followed with ease, her own spear flashing in the sunlight. And just like that, the corrupted gem was poofed.

The gemstone hit the ground and rolled to a stop in the dust.

The aftermath was silent. Deafeningly so.

Lars glanced over his shoulder.

The Crystal Gems—Amethyst mid-way through shaking dirt out of her hair—froze. Rose slowly sat up where she’d been thrown, blinking. She looked at Lars and Connie.

“Huh,” she said.

“Rose! Are you okay?” Connie asked, starting toward her.

But the leader of the Crystal Gems raised a hand, still seated half-buried in the rubble. “Wait.”

The command had weight, the way Rose’s words sometimes did when she didn’t mean to make them heavy—and everyone stilled.

“That—" started Rose, "Was very impressive.”

“I didn’t know humans could fight like that!” Amethyst exclaimed, pulling enthusiastically at her hair.

Lars blushed hard at this as Connie fidgeted. Rose leapt free of the rubble and came to land gently, softly, on the ground amidst the small gathering of fighters. For being pummeled into the ground moments earlier, she seemed fine.

"We—" Connie bumbled at Rose. She wanted to be proud and hide in the dirt, both at once. "Sorry, ma'am, You told us to only watch, and we promised we would! But—"

"Nonsense," Rose chided her. "You saw I was in trouble, then you two came in and—wow." She actually seemed breathless. "Incredible! You'll have to tell me where you learned how to do all of that."

Garnet by now had more-or-less accepted her inability to see neither Lars nor Connie in her future vision as a matter of fact. She soon noticed the gemstone itself had been forgotten in the excitement and went over to contain it.

"When you flew out of that portal, I thought I'd lost my mind!" Amethyst was gushing. She grabbed Connie by the shoulders and shook her, grinning widely. "Do you know how cool that was!? You sliced that thing like it was nothin'!"

Connie's face went hot. "I. It wasn't—"

"And you!" Amethyst spun on Lars, pointing straight at him. "That spear move? The way you jabbed that thing a new one?" She mimed the way he'd speared the thing. "Ice cold. You didn't even yell! I always yell!"

Lars blinked, then gave a nervous chuckle at the attention. "Well…"

"Great work, you two," was all Garnet said.

Rose was practically bouncing as though her words weren't big enough. "Marvelous! You two—you moved with such clarity, such purpose."

While all this was taking place, Pearl stared quietly. She glanced from Connie, flushed and glowing, to Lars' awkward smile. And then to Rose, delighted and oblivious.

Just another thing of which she didn't know what to make.

Connie rubbed her arm anxiously.

She’d been trying to avoid being alone with Pearl. But Lars had run off with Amethyst for some reason, Garnet vanished into the sea like she did sometimes, and Rose had said something about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon before warping away.

Now it was just her and Pearl.

Pearl stood a short distance away, hands clasped neatly behind her back, staring at nothing in particular. Connie thought maybe the gem would out too, just disappear in a shimmer of light fragments like they all seemed to do when things got quiet.

But to Connie’s surprise, Pearl turned slowly and took a step toward her.

Then another.

“Hello, Connie,” she said in her formal way. “I… I just wanted to say, the way you handled yourself on the mission. With the blade—”

Connie blinked. “Oh.” She stiffened automatically, like she always did when she was near Pearl. “Yeah. Thanks. Sorry. Again. We didnt mean to disobey." She felt awkward, so awkward, and tried to rein it back in. "I was—I mean, yeah. It wasn’t much. I just kind of… panicked.”

She cleared her throat. She hadn't meant to say that—it wasn’t true at all. She realized that she’d only said it because she was somewhat panicked right now.

She supposed that Pearl noticed, because the gem had a slight smile playing on her features.

“Not at all,” Pearl said gently. “You didn’t panic. You studied your opponent, and chose your moment quickly but carefully. That is the mark of a true swordsgem.”

Connie swallowed. The compliment sat awkwardly with her. She hadn’t had any proper tutelage in sword-fighting since a millennia-old distant future she was never sure she’d see again, and her teacher had been none other than Pearl herself—an older, wiser version. One who had let her in within months of meeting her.

This Pearl, whom she had known for several decades now… hadn’t.

But here Pearl was, standing in front of her, doing something completely unexpected. She unclasped her hands, one arm coming forward in a small gesture.

“There was a movement you made, right before the strike” Pearl was saying. “It was bold. Wild. In a way.”

"Excuse me?" Connie blinked again. “You saw that?”

And Pearl hesitated. Her voice lowered. “Would you show me?”

Connie stared at her, and Pearl looked away as if she regretted the question. “Only if you want to, of course. I understand if—"

“No! I mean, yes!” Connie tripped over herself. “Yes, of course I can show you!”

Her eyes lit up. She pulled the blade from her head.

Pearl's eyes widened, locked on tbe sword. The familiar handiwork of it. She hadn't noticed during the fray. "Is that a—"

Connie stared at her sword blade for a second, before flipping it and offering Pearl the hilt. Connie figured she suspected it to be a Bismuth piece, but both understood that now was not the time to discuss it. So Connie danced around what she really wanted to say, like she always did, as Pearl tested the weight and balance of it with something akin to nostalgia in her eyes.

"It's a gem sword," Connie said. "I found it somewhere, long ago."

Pearl silently handed the weapon back to Connie and watched intently as she demonstrated the move again, her foot doing a slight pivot before the twist of her wrist toppled her imaginary opponent. Soon, Pearl had her own sword in hand, and the demonstration became a light sparring session.

"Yes," Pearl said when they were finishing up. "A little rough, but in a polished way. Does that make sense?"

Connie surprised herself by the sound her laugh made. "It absolutely does. It's a long time since I've had any, er, formal training."

Pearl blinked and considered her sword blade idly.

"During the war for Earth, we stopped enlisting humans the instant we realized how easily they could… perish." She glanced up again. "A gem trained you, once, I suppose."

And Connie's smile faltered. "Yeah." Another non-lie.

Pearl hesitated, her eyes lowered to the ground. "I realize I may have come across as distant, Connie. Cold, even."

"What? Nooo—"

Pearl's mouth twisted slightly. "It's not intentional. I've lost so many people. Friends I once fought alongside… And it is so hard to let new ones in."

Connie had no idea what to say. He mind raced to come up with something, but she needn't have bothered.

Pearl had hesitated briefly, lost in her own thoughts. Then: "It started with Bismuth."

As she spoke, her gemstone produced a little light display, a little circular screen flickering to life midair. On it, in tones of pale blue, grinned a portrait of the burly gem in question.

The name and the face hit Connie like a rock. She kept her posture still, her expression neutral. She knew exactly what had happened to Bismuth, of course. She knew more than she could ever tell Pearl. She couldn't tell her that Rose had the gemstone bubbled, hidden somewhere, a secret from Pearl herself—without everything she knew to be real and tangible unraveling around her.

She opened her mouth, and closed it again.

But Pearl didn't notice. She stared at the image a moment. "Bismuth made your sword, you know. She was—"

Then she exhaled. She lowered her gaze to the sand, waving away the image . It fizzled out like static and was gone.

"Well," she continued. "It doesn't matter. That's where it started. And then… then it never really stopped."

Connie also stared at an imaginary spot in the sand as Pearl continued.

"When you've lived and laughed and fought for freedom alongside someone and then had them—" she searched for the right word, "—Taken, you learn to be careful. Perhaps too careful."

There was a heavy silence. Connie swallowed. She finally knew exactly what to say.

"I know what it's like to lose people, ma'am," said Connie. "I know what it's like to walk this planet wishing things were different."

The look Pearl gave Connie told her that she believed her, and the gem immediately softened.

"I know you have." She sniffed. "You're a human. Were a human. Of course you have. Please, call me Pearl."

Tears brimmed at the edges of Connie's eyes. "Pearl. I—"

Pearl drew a breath and shook her head. "Connie. I want to start over with you. With Lars. Will you… I mean, would that be okay?"

A tear slid down Connie's face. She nodded. "I'd really like that, Pearl."

"Oh, stars," Pearl said as she wiped her eyes with her bare forearm. "I really need to say something like this to Amethyst too, don't I? I wonder what she thinks of me…"

After a second's hesitation, Connie smiled faintly. "She thinks you're… complicated. Maybe? But she likes you more than she lets on."

At Pearl's look of deep disbelief, she continued. "Well, she wouldn't go out of her way to annoy you so much if she didn't."

Pearl groaned softly and shook her head. "That's probably worse than what I imagined. I'll never understand her."

Connie couldn't help it. She snorted—then broke into laughter before she could stop herself. Pearl joined in, and the natural, easy way the laughter came surprised both of them.

A portal opened above the temple warp pad.

They were still laughing about the last mission as the bright gash in space swirled out of existence behind them.

Pearl clasped her hands together and smiled. "Well, that went better than expected. No casualties, no mess—just a clean sweep. Great job, everyone!"

"Yeah!" chimed Rose. "What a rich, full day."

Amethyst jumped down from the warp pad first, but froze mid-step the moment she laid eyes on the temple door before her.

There was something different. Something had changed.

"Um. Guys?"

Pearl landed slightly behind her, already groaning. "Stars. Don't tell me those horrible children came back." She pulled a cloth from her gem, as if expecting to clean up graffiti.

Amethyst frowned and stepped closer. "No, no. It's the temple. It's… changed."

Then the others saw it. On either side of the bejeweled star in the center, two new embellishments had seemingly been etched into the door—two little flowers, glinting pink in the sunlight.

Lars recognized one of the flowers after a moment. It tugged loose a memory of a little pink sprig an old friend had given him, once. It had been plucked off a tree that had existed in the once-bright world beyond his head that he knew now to be dark and silent, devoid of life.

"Narra blossom," Lars whispered, loud enough for Connie to hear. Her eyes widened.

The other flower, her one, was a beautiful little mystery to both of them.

"Gorgeous," Rose breathed. She glanced at the two pink people, then at Pearl. "Does this mean…?"

"I—" Pearl's voice faltered, the cleaning cloth forgotten. "I don't know. They’re humans, so it can't be. Can it? Garnet?"

The fusion felt everyone's eye land on her. She adjusted her visor. She hadn't seen this. Nothing, of course, had prepared her for this. But that didn't mean she didn't know what it was.

"The temple has noticed that Lars and Connie belong here."

In the quiet that followed, in the bubble of unspoken questions that surrounded them all, Amethyst turned to the two pink ones to see that they were just as stunned as everyone else.

"Lars, Connie?" She smiled up at both of them, warm and bright.

"Guys. Welcome home."

~*~

You can't unsee it

You see it everywhere