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“There you are.”
Steven looked up. Against the dark canvas of the night, the figure glowed brighter than any star. Her water wings caught the fading sunlight, refracting it like a prism, each sparkle sharp and vivid as a precious gem.
“Lapis.” He surprised himself with the warmth in his voice, the corners of his mouth lifting into a smile. “Good to see you.”
“Steven. Good to see you too… though you didn’t make it easy.” A small smile tugged at her lips. Slowly, Lapis descended, and when her feet touched the dusty ground, her water wings dissolved back into her gem. “Do you have room for one more?”
“Uff, maybe if I can scooch over a little.” They both shared a quick smile, he didn’t move, only rested his head on his folded arms, letting his hair sway gently with every subtle shift of his body.
Lapis sat by his side, completely disregarding all the dust dirtying her dress. They enjoyed the silence that followed, both of them staring at the same colossal thing in the sky.
“I’m not an expert on humans,” she said after a while. “So… Steven, don’t you need air to breathe?”
“Apparently not. How are we even talking?”
“Beats me. It seems neither of us have much idea how our species works.” She let the words hang for a bit.
Truth to be told, Lapis hated small talk, well, it would be more accurate to say that she hated talking in general, the list of people she didn’t mind doing it started with Peridot and ended in Steven.
But she dreaded the conversation that was coming.
This was supposed to be Steven’s job, and she was far, far from the ideal one to do it. She looked at Steven’s face, at first glance aloof and relaxed, but there was a hardness there shouldn’t be.
“Why here Steven?”
“I think you’d know better than anyone.” She had walked straight into that one. And she did know. But part of her hoped her friend wasn’t reliving everything she had endured, or worse of all, that she had given him the idea. “I…didn’t think you would step on this place again Lapis.”
“Well.” Her voice softened. “I did.”
The moon.
They both kept looking at Earth, a giant ball of colors painting the dark space surrounding it. Even if they both knew how to fly there was a certain vertigo seeing this colossal thing in the sky, thousands of miles away yet it appeared to suck you in.
“...how are they?” Finally Steven could let it out.
“Looking for you still. They are trying to keep appearances, you know, still going to Little Homeworld everyday and all that, if any of the gems there or worse, the diamonds, found out you had disappeared they would put the entire Earth upside down.” She left out that she only knew because Peridot told her, it stung a little that they thought she would go crazy if Steven disappeared…however true it would be. “They respect you a lot.” And she did too.
He closed his eyes, letting Lapis’ words hit like blows to his already fragile morale.
“Peridot told me that it has been six days since the human girl…” She paused a little to fish the name out of her mind. “..the Connie girl, came crying.” Another stab to Steven’s heart. “And then you disappeared.” She suppressed a laugh. “You had to see Peridot, she keeps saying how she should have put that chip in you..” And it died as quickly as it came. “She is really worried.”
Slowly Steven reached into a pocket of his jacket and handed his phone to lapis, she looked at the small piece of plastic drifting slowly to her hands.
“Are these things…”
“Supposed to be broken in pieces? Nope.”
“So…you are single now?”
“Seems so.”
Another silence. Longer. Colder.
Lapis took a breath she didn’t need.
“Help me out, Steven,” she said with a mock playfulness she wasn’t feeling. “Let’s say you had a friend—a very, very good friend—who helped you through a lot. Someone you owe a debt you could never repay.”
“I’d say friends don’t owe things to each other,” he answered softly.
“And I’d say I’m not finished.”
She inched closer. He radiated warmth—familiar, grounding—something she had longed for more than she was ready to admit, even here on this desolate rock.
“That friend… he’s going through a hard time. He just broke off with his childhood friend turned girlfriend for no reason, started acting weird and distant with everyone, and one day went completely off the grid… and is now hiding on the moon. The most boring place orbiting Earth.”
She waited a little but Steven sat silently. She didn’t want to look at his face right now. “And you really want to help him, but you are a mess yourself, and you know that every single word you will say to him will be the most hypocritical thing ever. But you still want to find whatever is happening to him.”
Steven didn’t move. The dust beneath him shifted in tiny puffs as he breathed—slow, steady, but hollow, like someone pretending they still needed rhythm just to feel anchored.
But finally he opened his mouth.
“I’d say… that he is probably very happy that she is with him…that she could have just told everyone where her friend was and let them care of it, but she didn’t, she gave it a try herself because she knew her friend wanted to be alone yet she couldn’t let him be.”
Steven grabbed her hand for a moment. “Thank you Lapis.”
And she tightened the grip. “...ready to tell me why you are sulking on the moon now?”
Steven sighed, resigned to his fate, and searched in his pocket. “Promise not to freak out.”
“Steven, I’ve seen Peridot’s search history. Nothing you do could possibly shock me—”
But the rest of the sentence never made it out. Her eyes widened, pupils shrinking, the lunar chill deepening around them.
“Here. Want to hold it?” He passed it toward her with even less care than he’d shown his broken phone earlier. That, paired with her shock, made the bubble slip right through her fingers—
but a water-formed arm shot out from her gem, catching it mid-drift.
Lapis didn’t have a heart, not anatomically.
But something inside her clenched all the same
Lapis chose to imagine the tiny click of a tongue didn’t come from Steven.
Steven looked almost amused. In truth, he was relieved it was Lapis up here with him. Anyone else—Pearl especially—would have been shrieking by now.
Lapis brought the bubble close, turning it slowly, carefully, not believing what she was holding. The sunlight—sharp, raw, unfiltered by atmosphere—washed over the gem inside.
Pink Diamond’s gem.
It glowed in soft rose radiance, scattering petal-colored reflections across the pale dust below.
“Steven…” she whispered. “This is your gem...” She said it aloud more for herself than for Steven.
It hit him then—how for a gem, what she was holding was basically his beating heart, and she was seeing Steven walking fine without it.
“It fell off,” he said.
Lapis stared at him with an expression that could only be described as: Absolutely not.
“Gems don’t just—” She stopped herself. “It fell off?”
“I woke up, it was on the floor.”
“And you bubbled it?”
“Instantly.”
Okay now she looked kinda pissed at his non chalant so he kept going. “I…think that whatever it was doing in my body is done now. Or at least something else changed because I doubt I would have survived here before. So it just…dropped. ”
That calmed down Lapis.
A little.
She inhaled sharply. For a long, taut moment, she just stood there, breathing the non existing oxygen like she actually needed it. Even someone like Lapis wasn’t immune to the reverent attitude every gem had hardwired to the Diamonds.
Eventually she exhaled and—with an extreme carefulness much unlike her—passed the bubble back to him. Steven accepted it with an equal amount of reluctance and tucked it under his jacket again. Taking it away from his sight.
Still she could now see the small pink glow coming from it.
Her hands were sacking. “It felt…”
“Alive.” Steven finished for her. “You could feel it too right Lapis?” And she did, it was the first time she sensed something like that on a gem. Diamonds were truly built differently. “I'm not guessing. I know. When I let that gem out of the bubble… it’s going to reform. Mom—” His throat snapped shut. “Pink Diamond. It’s going to reform again.”
There wasn’t a single doubt in his voice.
“Isn’t it great, Lapis?” he said suddenly, his tone twisting into something bright and brittle. “My mother’s going to come back. Just like that. We’ll finally get the happily-ever-after I used to dream about as a kid, right?.”
His smile snapped at the edges.
“And I hate it.”
The words landed like meteor impacts on the moon’s dead soil.
He dragged a hand down his face. “Because I know . I know what happens if I go back to Earth. I’ll show them the gem. I’ll release her. And after the screaming and the panic and the chaos dies down… I’ll start to understand her. I always do.”
His breath hitched. He didn’t stop, like he finally had the chance to spill his thoughts after days of shouting inside his own head.
“Maybe we’ll fight, maybe I’ll be pissed at her for a week, or a month or a year, but at the end, I’ll listen. I’ll empathize. I’ll start making excuses for her actions. And eventually—”
His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper.
“I’ll forgive her.”
Lapis froze. Steven’s entire body trembled like he was fighting gravity itself.
“ I’m thinking of destroying the gem before she can reform.”
He met her gaze—raw, unshielded, frightening in its honesty.
“Lapis. I’m thinking of killing my mother.”
The tension between them tightened.
He took out the bubble, looking at the diamond inside like he could see his mother’s face in each and every facet.
Lapis couldn’t speak, from the shock, from Steven’s declaration, from the pink glow he was begging to dye his skin in.
“You said before that you were being a hypocrite?” Steven let out a laugh—an actual, unguarded laugh, the kind that cracked through the cold between them. “Lapis, literally everyone I care about has tried to kill me at some point. Peridot. Jasper. The Diamonds.”
He paused. She recognized the unspoken name in that list. Her own.“ And I forgave them, and I would do it again. But this time I just can’t Lapis, I really want to kill her, just because I don’t want to live in an universe where she gets to run around, after every single thing she has done, after..:”
His voice broke, the word hanging in the air like something too heavy to fall.
“I can’t face them,” he whispered. “ All my life I’ve preached compassion, redemption, second chances—and now all I want is to not give that .” His whole world was collapsing on him. “ How do I look at Pearl in the eyes after all this? How do I get to joke around with Connie? I’m seriously thinking about killing my own mother right here and now, where she is the most vulnerable, where she can’t defend herself, just because I don’t want her to exist in my world.”
He looked at her then—really looked. His eyes were wide, too bright, a star collapsing inward. A certain kind of madness behind them. “Lapis… if Jasper stood in front of you right now. If you could kill her, without any consequences or anyone knowing—would you?”
“No.” Her answer landed instantly, without hesitation, without drama. “And it’s thanks to you.”
And it broke something inside him.
The fury, the frantic resolve, the righteous anger, the pink glow—gone.
Like a balloon deflated, what remained was a hollow, raw ache, an implosion he didn’t even try to hide. His shoulders sagged, his breath hitched, the light in his eyes flickered. A figure that looked like it belonged to this dead land.
“I thought you would understand.”
He wasn’t accusing her.
He was begging.
Begging not to be alone in the darkness he’d carved out for himself.
And for the first time since she’d arrived, maybe since she met him, Lapis truly saw him—not the savior, not the half-gem miracle, not the beacon everyone trusted to fix everything.
Just a kid.
A kid with red-rimmed eyes, clothes tattered from days spent wandering, his skin and hair greyed with moon dust. A kid crushed between two impossible futures—both of which he despised, both of which terrified him.
A coward, her mind whispered. Who couldn’t choose between forgiveness and vengeance. And ran to the moon to delay that decision.
Just like her.
And for the first time too, she felt a flicker of relief that it was her who found him and not Pearl, not Connie, not Garnet. Because Steven didn’t need someone perfect right now—he needed someone cracked in all the same places.
Water flowed from her gem, gentle and powerful, rising around them in a shimmering sheet. It wrapped them in a blue cocoon, hiding the accusing gleam of Earth, hiding the death barren grey of the moon.
A world within a world.
Just the two of them.
No destiny.
No responsibility.
No mother.
No past.
Lapis reached out, steady and cool in the dim cerulean glow , but with someone finally willing to stand beside him in the darkness.
“Run.”
At first, Steven thought he had imagined it. Days alone on the moon had blurred the line between the voices in his head and the ones outside it.
But Lapis continued, steady and real.
“In the Moon Base. There’s a warp pad.”
The water cocoon shifted, and tiny filaments of blue brushed against him—washing away dust in soft, reflexive strokes before retreating like shy fish.
“I saw it before, one of the old ones from before the war. Diamond-grade.”
He could survive the vacuum of space without blinking, yet her cold water made him flinch. Lapis found it very cute.
“Those types have no coordinate locks,” she smiled. Peridot’s nerd rants were finally useful. “No Homeworld pings. No breadcrumb trail for anyone to sniff out.”
The blue glow deepened, warm in color despite its chill.
“You could step on it and vanish into worlds even the Diamonds forgot existed. If you don’t want to face the others after this, if you don’t want to live in a world where she gets to exist…just be selfish for once and make a dumb choice. Run away. If you have survived four days in this trash rock, you can survive on any planet you want.”
Steven blinked slowly.
“That’s… a terrible advice. You know that.”
She did. And she didn’t pretend otherwise.
“Of course it is.”
Lapis folded her arms, the slightest hunch to her shoulders. “I’m not you, Steven. I can’t give speeches about forgiveness or healing or whatever you’re supposed to say in moments like this. I…can’t help you like you helped me. I suck at this. So I’m not going to pretend.”
Her gaze flicked toward the faint glow under Steven’s jacket.
“You run from this place, and I’ll take your mother’s gem back to Earth,” she said, calm as an ocean before a storm. “I’ll explain everything. Pop the bubble. And then…” Her jaw tightened. “Let Pink Diamond deal with the fallout of your choices for once.”
A flicker of bitterness passed through her voice.
She didn’t know Pink Diamond the way the others did.
But she was already sick of her influence on her friend.
“I’ll even throw her into the ocean every now and then just to piss her off.” She said as an added bonus.
Steven let out a breath that was almost a laugh, almost a sob. For a second entertainment that impossible future.
“If you show up on Earth with that diamond on hand and without me, do you know how bad that’ll look? Pearl will kill you.”
Lapis lifted her hand.
Water surged out from her gem, spiraling upward, shaping itself into a massive arm of condensed blue power, water muscles rippling like a living tide.
“Let her try,” she said, flexing it with mock pride.
Then, with a small, sheepish shrug.
“Though maybe I’ll tell her closer to the beach…”
The giant water-arm dissolved into gentle droplets.
Then Lapis extended her real hand toward him—waiting.
She didn’t speak.
She didn’t need to.
The silence inside the cocoon spoke for her.
Choose.
His breath hitched.
A selfish choice. A cowardly choice. Something a hero would never choose.
But in this moment, inside this water world, he was just a kid.
Steven hesitated. Then he placed the bubble in her hand. This time, she didn’t look at it, her eyes fixed entirely on him.
The water around them pulsed as if alive, echoing the enormity of his decision.
For a fraction of a second, Lapis froze.
Then, suddenly, she pulled him into her arms. Without a single trace of grace or elegance, a desperate hug filled with quiet sobs, water, and trembling fingers curling into his jacket.
Steven let out a quiet, cracked sound against her shoulder. His arms lifted slowly, hesitantly, as though even a hug could shatter the fragile moment.
“Steven…” Her voice wavered, low, almost drowned in the silence. “I’m not good at saying things the right way.” A brittle laugh escaped her, fragile and more human than Steven had ever heard her. “Or at feeling things without breaking something.”
He stayed still. Letting her find her words.
Her grip softened, without letting go, but just enough to lean back and look at him. Her eyes glowed with centuries of unspoken history, of emotions Steven couldn't put into words. He saw his reflection of them.
“So I’ll just say this,” she whispered. “Come back. Not because anyone needs you. Not because you should. Come back because you want to. And if you want to beat up your mother you can count on me.”
Warmth gathered behind his eyes, and the face of the blue gem became blurry behind human tears, but they were quickly sweep away together with all the water around them, merging and slowly transforming into giant wings.
She leaned forward, pressing her forehead against his. The contrast of cold and warm anchoring both to this moment. Moonlight, Earthlight, and the faint blue glow of her gem mingled in the space between them.
When she pulled away, her wings erupted outward in a quiet roar, for a moment dawrfing the Earth and stars behind her. They draped the gray dust in shifting ocean colors, a reminder of the power and presence she carried.
“I’ll see you again,” she said. Quiet, but certain.
Steven nodded. Not a promise. Not a refusal. But enough.
With a single sweeping motion, she lifted off. Water spiraled behind her, freezing into drifting crystals that sparkled like shattered halos.
She didn’t look back.
Her silhouette shrank against the horizon, the blue glow merging with Earth itself, leaving Steven alone on a silent moon.