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Pearl isn’t smart.
That’s her job though, isn’t it? To be Steven’s teacher, so he can be the best Crystal Gem this little wet planet has had the privilege to witness. To give information to her allies, info plucked from her many books and the thousands of years she has spent dwelling in this exhausting existence. She has to be smart, for the sake of those she loves.
But that’s just it.
Pearl doesn’t understand the full implications of love. She can’t dig up the answer of where exactly it comes from. She cannot decipher why it exists in the first place– it makes no sense. From what she can gather, all it does is cause trouble and everyone would be better off without the vicious ailment whipping up a dangerously distracting storm in their chests.
(Once upon a time, she might not have viewed it in such a negative light, like a condition that the races should evolve out of already before it causes more pain.)
(Once upon a time, someone loved her back.)
(“You’re just being bitter,” a nasty voice spits into her head. She stares out Steven’s window and watches a pair of children too young to understand the consequences share their first kiss by the sea.)
(She may very well be bitter. But she has a right to her feelings. That’s what she tells herself anyway.)
Love is so important. Love brought Steven bouncing and giggling into her life. Love brought Pearl to earth. Love gave her a family, a concept she didn’t really comprehend until she laid down one night to make sure Steven was still breathing in his crib, and Garnet seemingly appeared from thin air to reassure her he’d be okay.
If she can’t understand something so prominent and loud, she can’t truly be smart.
She sees a helpless and pathetic creature when she catches herself sitting and staring into nothing, a long gone woman managing to anchor her into place when she is nothing but a spirit.
The ghost isn’t even real, there is no pink spectral figure above Pearl except in her imagination. Gems cannot leave behind spirits.
Love has broken her and left her in pieces and she wants to be stronger for Steven, for her friends.
But she doesn’t know if she can.
Pearl reads books. She watches movies. She looks over every example of the concept of love and whether there is a solution for losing it. She becomes a sponge for any info she may find, regardless of the quality.
There are magazines that tell one how to get over a “break up” which she supposes is as close as it can get… But they are for humans. A thousand year relationship isn’t within their comprehension. Humans think a single year of companionship is impressive.
Many of these texts do, however, advise that one ought to move on and find other partners. There are ‘other fish in the sea’, which Pearl had to have explained to her as last time she checked, fish do not make for viable long term companions. Steven told her– There isn’t just one person in the world available for a relationship.
That’s true. But to Pearl, there are only two options. Humans might have appealed to Rose, but Pearl wants nothing to do with a creature that could so easily become damaged and lost.
So, not much better.
(She prays every day that Steven might grow a rock solid skin, something that no blade may pierce and no fist can bruise.)
Pearl cannot put her finger on why she would even seek it out again after what love has done to her.
(When she looks at the peaceful portrait of Rose hanging over the door, overlooking the gem family with a kind and sleepy grin, Pearl knows. But she doesn’t want to think about it.)
-
“Do you feel less whole when you’re apart? Do you… Not be anymore?”
Pearl isn’t smart.
She has fused with her fellow Crystal Gems many times. The first couple of tries resulted in a colorful mishmash of violet and red and pink and many screaming voices fighting to be heard at once. After those wobbly first steps though she got the idea. There was never any question to Pearl how to fuse on a physical level.
It’s the person. The consciousness. The creature that they form. A magnificent new person.
She knows she isn’t Opal or Sardonyx, she definitely isn’t Rainbow Quartz anymore if she ever was. She is Pearl. They are all gems who would not be them if they were not her.
But she looks at Garnet, this tall and powerful gem. An imposing figure to the unaware, a gentle spoken guide to the ones needing guidance. She is who she is and the idea that she goes away when she unfuses for one reason or another just… Pearl can’t wrap her head around it.
She doesn’t want to comprehend an existence without Garnet.
Garnet is patient when Pearl asks her questions. She understands that she just wants to understand, to better know the woman she has come to see as family.
Yet, as they sit together at the top of the stairs, waiting for Steven to wake up, she visibly bristles at the question. Pearl tries not to let her nerves get the best of her and chase her down the steps.
“Ah. Should I wait to ask later?”
“No. It’s. You’re fine. It’s just complicated. I’m sure you know that though.”
Pearl nods. Nothing about Garnet is simple. Maybe that’s what she loves about her.
(There’s that word again. Love. Is that what it is she feels, seeing this wonderful woman at her side, giving her every ounce of patience she needs?)
(Pearl hopes not. They need Garnet to stay.)
“The idea of ever not existing… Is horrifying. Because that would mean Ruby and Sapphire no longer love one another. Without that, I am not me. But in that they love each other, I still exist. Does that make sense, Pearl?”
She speaks softly, slowly, kindly. She speaks as someone of another species, in her own way.
Pearl understands.
She wishes she knew what she embodies when she’s Opal or Sardonyx.
Teamwork. Strength. Pure utter joy.
Or rather, what they embody.
She’s just a pearl. She embodies nothing. She can only
Garnet draws her in closer, a strong arm looping around Pearl’s shoulders. The pale sun skips across the ocean to climb into the window and paint the floors golden.
Pearl wishes she could sleep as peacefully as Steven. Her mind might stop for all of two seconds.
-
Pearl isn’t smart.
She doesn’t always listen to her brain like she ought to.
She’ll go with what pulls her chest forward. Whatever it is that might bring tears to her tired eyes. Whatever has her reaching with shaking hands and a glowing gem.
Garnet tells her she is important to her. That she is important, period. Garnet tells her she is strong. That she looks up to her.
Pearl shatters and doesn’t know what to do except do as she did with Rose. And Garnet accepts.
Out of pity? Because she cannot say no to someone so close to her? Does she feel the same insanity coursing inside of her?
(Love can’t be a terrible thing when Garnet is made of love.)
(Maybe the type of love Pearl offers is just of a poisoned sort. She’s broken forever.)
Garnet kisses her on a dark beach. The air is still and heavy upon them, humidity so dense they could corrode. Pearl doesn’t know why. Doesn’t know how. She sat with someone she loves on this beach before but she didn’t know then why she was kissing that person either.
It just happened. Beyond her control. Driven by her chest and not her head.
Garnet must taste the mistake on Pearl, as she breaks away first. Pearl could cry but she won’t.
“You have some work to do.”
“Am I that bad a kisser?”
The joke falls flat. Pearl really does cry now. She can’t hold it back. Garnet sweeps a thumb beneath her cheek, catching a tear before it can fall.
“You’re scared to do this. Why?”
Pearl begins to think Garnet let the kiss happen because she knew it would force her to think, to confess some things aloud. She doesn’t want to, though. She just wants to stomp her feet and cry more. What a child.
“You’re so good to me. It’s hard not to want it all the time but I’m… I’m scared.”
“Why are you scared?”
Such a gentle voice. She could turn to shards at the sound of it. Yet it hurts to hear her speak like that. That she feels she must be slow and steady. Like this might be a rejection.
“Last time I felt like this, I… Lost it. And once I lost it things just kept getting worse and worse and…”
Pearl can’t explain it as fully as she could with most matters. This is about Rose though. Rose is many matters at once, many moments lost in time and pain and longing.
She hates the creature emerging that demands to wear her skin. It blubbers and rubs balled up baby fists into her stinging eyes. She could just choose not to have tear ducts to avoid this embarrassing display altogether but it takes concentration she does not have at this moment.
“You aren’t cursed, Pearl.”
That forces a laugh out of her. Really? Isn’t she?
“Rose was doing just fine before I asked those emotions of her. She didn’t need me.”
“Nobody truly needs anyone Pearl. But you talk like you forced her to love you.”
“Didn’t I?”
(It had to be pity. Who could love a–)
“She would be insulted that you would even imply she didn’t love you.”
That hurts more than anything. That she would besmirch Rose’s name in her mission of self hatred. She pulls back from Garnet, apologizing a million times over until the hand that came to catch her tears comes to lay upon her head.
“I’m not Rose. Don’t apologize to me. You know she would forgive you anyway. She’d just be so sad that you see yourself like this.”
Pearl whispers “I know” over and over to the woman above her. It’s her mantra. She knows she should stop, it’s just so, SO hard, she can’t break an old habit just like that, she wants to stop for Rose, for Steven so he doesn’t see her like this, for Garnet so maybe she can understand what’s happening between them– is anything happening? Is she just hoping against hope?
Garnet gently tilts her head back so she may look at her head on. The visors are gone.
“We will try this again sometime. Until then I think you may need to consider why I would kiss you at all while you somehow still think you’re such a terrible person, Pearl.”
The quiet implication that she isn’t terrible makes her want to flail and scream, being terrible is all she knows. She must be terrible and small and insignificant, she is a pearl.
But Garnet is on the outside looking in and she sees something else entirely.
By any sort of logic Pearl must consider her point of view, hard as that is to do.
Pearl may not be the smartest.
But she likes to think that she’s capable of learning.