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The Diamonds were the natural leaders of all gems, empresses born from the broken shells of planets to lead, conquer, and rule. Their nature was written in their gemstone, and they could no more put it aside then recut their gems. Before Pink, they’d all thought diamonds were unbreakable. Flawless. Invincible. Before Pink, they’d all thought a lot of things.
Pink Diamond was the sort of creature that demanded adoration. There was nothing gentle about the way that she inspired devotion among the gems that belonged to her, a resilience and a force that came from being, at the core, a Diamond. But it was unspeakable to call her forceful - that was Yellow, with her frayed temper, or Blue, with her chilly aloofness, or White, with her glittering edges.
The four leading Diamonds of Homeworld, the seat of the gem empire. White Diamond, the oldest and strongest of the Diamonds, the only naturally made of all of them, ancient and powerful, with judgements hanging from her proud shoulders, every facet of form cut to impress and subjugate and oppress. Blue Diamond, silent, implacable, mysterious, hooded and shrouded in her robes, unmoving on her palanquin, frozen so deeply into the ice that even the perfunctory cycles of court barely seemed to touch her. Yellow Diamond, reserved and logical, flat and hot, merciless like the blank glare of the desert sun. And Pink Diamond, youngest of them all.
They’d loved her too, the other Diamonds, how could they not? From the very moment she had taken physical form and exploded out of the darkened heart of a planet, she’d been born laughing. She’d been born perfect. Loud. Brash. Noisy. Even, most of the time, clumsy - though ever gentle of her great size and strength among her lesser gems.
Bruises and breakages were common when a lesser gem worked in close proximity to Diamonds, especially pearls, beautiful, breakable things that they were. White treated her pretty dancing pearls like glass (before that pearl, of course), Blue never touched her stiff little dolls, and Yellow expected her attendant pearls to be quick enough to move before they were stepped on - but Pink would make a basket for her pearl (odd-looking thing that it was, with that haystack hair and freckles like star maps, but it glowed like she did, and it laughed like she did, and it loved like she did) , and carry it, or let it roost in her hair, throwing dignity to the winds and dancing with jaspers, caught kissing her most favoured soldiers (had Pink’s murderer known what Pink’s lips felt like? Had Pink’s murderer known what it felt like to be held up under the force of that diamond-strong overspilling heart?) .
She’d always been odd, different in a way that had it been any other gem, they would have surely called defective. (There could never be anything less than perfect about Pink Diamond.) White believed so, and her word was law.
There had been no noise, no oddness, no laughter or love or last messages left in the shards after they’d shattered her. Nothing of her brilliant eyes, or of her softness, her ineffable, inescapable warmth. (She thought maybe that was what she missed the most.)
Afterwards, when the shards of her had been long since swept up, carefully disposed of, somewhere safe and deep and untouched, they kept pricking under Yellow’s fingers. She wondered sometimes if a bit of glittering dust had got caught under her nails, a needle-fragment of Pink to haunt them, remind them that without Pink’s bountiful nature there was only themselves, lesser than before. She had been the thread that bound them together, the bottom of the Diamond insignia, holding them up.
//
“You updated the sign,” Pink says. Her eyes are shining with sudden awe and wonder - so young, still, barely hours old. There is rock dust from the shattered planet she destroyed in her birth (the nature of Diamonds is to destroy and overwhelm, after all) in her hair, spread wide like the delicate petals of a flower. She keeps reaching out to touch everything with the ineffable curiosity of a new thing - fingering the edge of Blue’s stitched cloak, patting one of Yellow’s stern cheeks, playing with one of White’s long fingers.
White lets her. Yellow keeps waiting for the eldest Diamond to pull her hand away, for the glacial gates to snap shut in her disconcerting grey-pale eyes, for her to quash Pink’s fledgling curiosity before it can extend to her. But White lets her, indulgent.
“Of course,” says Yellow. “You’re a Diamond.”
Pink laughs with her whole body. The gemstone on her stomach gleams. Time seems to stop.
“Perfect,” says White, softly, and Yellow tries not to swallow visibly, jealousy flaring somewhere untouched. Pink had been born perfect.
//
It drove her into a temper most days. The memory of Pink wouldn’t leave her alone - and so Yellow wouldn’t leave it alone. She nettled and boiled and snapped at Blue until ice spread over Blue’s palanquin and froze it solid, but Blue never reacted. It was like Pink had taken half of Blue with her when she - went. (“Shattered” still sounded too permanent.)
Sometimes Yellow touched Blue and wondered if there was anything left but ice inside of her, and underneath the hood those flat, cold eyes would stare back, and Yellow would back away, because if there was nothing left in the heart of the gem she had once shared, before they split and became Yellow and Blue, Yellow wanted to never find out. They’d been formed conjoined, a monstrosity of gem, and Yellow still wondered if she had sucked up all the passion and life in Blue when White had split them apart.
//
“It is a common enough occurrence,” White tells them, distant and cold. They are on the ship surrounded by the debris of Yellow and Blue’s emergences, half-hours old at best, “Too much is injected into the ground for one gem alone, but not enough to form a perfect two. An additional… mistake is formed, leeching off the other like a parasite. Thankfully, my monitoring allowed me to interfere before you two became any more imperfect, and separate you to grow alone.”
“One of us is a mistake?” Yellow asks, already brimming over with fire. She is holding Blue’s hand. Blue, without her hood then, looks at White with withdrawn, mournful eyes. White’s power is seductive; it is all they have ever known, and White is the perfect Diamond, after all.
The disappointment is what Yellow comes to remember - the first time she sees disappointment in White Diamond’s eyes. Certainly not the last, but the first always has a sting of its own.
“Yes,” says White. “No one knew the right mixture for Diamonds. The next sister will be perfect.”
//
Once, they’d lived in each other, Blue’s water tempering Yellow’s fire as they’d chased each other’s colonies, sending confused peridots back and forth with coded messages, nearly jokes, secret things only the two of them knew. Yellow alone was allowed to lift away Blue’s hood, once - she hadn’t dared to try in many years ( worried, perhaps, that underneath that hood there’d be nothing left).
(Sometimes, she wondered if Blue ever wished that White had left them together. Sometimes, Yellow wondered if this longing is what fusion felt like, sometimes she wondered if wanting to soothe the ache made her defective. She didn’t wonder long. She knew the answers to all of those, and they were not the ones she wanted to hear.)
White had kept herself separate. Authoritative, their born leader, their creator, the oldest Diamond and the strongest. She remained entombed in Homeworld, her gauzy pearls flittering and singing, the stones throbbing with the strains of wild music, the eerie howl of wind blowing through deserted, mazelike hallways. It was impossible to reach the heart of White Diamond’s sanctum without a giggly, tripping little pearl to lead the way, beckoning with their slip-thin bodies and chasing weak-of-will quartzes into the labyrinth. White Diamond spoke in orders and there were gem shards in her eyes, her every step thudding with the weight of the gem empire’s power. When she touched her fellow Diamonds, it was little corrections (always finding disappointments, Yellow and Blue had never quite measured up to her expectations and she made no secret of it - born wrong) , smoothing hair or adjusting buttons, smoothly possessive, smoothly authoritative, quietly keeping her distance. (They’d never been enough to her.)
But never from Pink. It was impossible to stay away.
Pink had been rash and reckless, vivacious and alive. She brought roses, blushes, colour to White’s glittering, empty palaces and laughter, joy, explosions and messiness to Blue’s icebound court, and when she took Yellow’s hands and spun them together it felt like painting the sky with fireworks instead of caging volcanoes bubbling under the skin. Pink had slung an arm around White’s proud neck and hugged Blue with the other, as if it were normal for Diamonds to interlace like pearls, and without her, Yellow had forgotten how to touch, how to ask for touch.
(She remembered the shape of Pink’s kisses. They had always felt too hot, too soft, too wrong (still good, obviously, Pink made love look easy), but they served to rouse Blue - if Yellow hadn’t known better, she’d cite jealousy - and Pink knew it, glittering eyes all full of mischief, pushing them together while White watched, the same way White watched her pearls dance, utterly still, utterly captive, as if nothing else in the world mattered.
But White had always looked at Pink like that.)
//
“Dance with me!” Pink commands, already half-twirling on the wide space between their thrones, and Yellow stares at her flatly. This is supposed to be a meeting. As ever, irresponsible Pink has led them off topic, as she always does, childish and unfocused, but White doesn’t seem inclined to regain control - indeed, she watches, disconcertingly crystalline eyes intent over the rim of her water glass.
“I’m not a pearl,” she says, crossly, to hide embarrassment. Yellow is not a pearl, she is a Diamond, and she doesn’t stir herself to dance at court, or any other time - such public acts are dangerously defective, dangerously discourteous.
“I’m not asking you to dance like that, ” Pink giggles. She blushes a darker shade of red. “Unless you want to, of course, then I wouldn’t stop you.”
“Spare us, please, Yellow is as stiff as a marionette,” murmurs Blue, and White chuckles. Yellow glares at the floor and clenches the arms of her throne.
Pink’s hand covers her own, and she tugs, imploring. “Please, Yellow? Ignore them, dance with me!”
Yellow huffs, and rises to her feet. Pink has to arrange Yellow’s hands, one on her shoulder, one clasping Pink’s other hand. It’s almost easy to move with her, back and forth, following Pink’s steps into a gentle, repetitive waltz. Pink is beaming, and her smiles are infectious, and Yellow does love her, after all, and if White is happy to let the meeting go to waste, then Yellow may as well be too. She cracks an awkward looking smile back.
“Amateur,” White interjects, and Pink glances over her shoulder to stick her tongue out. Yellow feels her cheeks burn, knowing the comment is for her, and the smile slips away.
“I’d like to see you do better,” Pink challenges, and White smirks, rises from her throne.
“It would be my pleasure, Pink,” says White, and extends a hand.
//
Yellow had never seen White blush before Pink. It was a faintly darker shade of grey, almost impossible to glimpse unless a gem stared hard. But it had been there, and her ever-present headaches (always centred around the gemstone in her forehead) had seemed to soften when Pink was around, and Yellow still remembered the hushed awe in Blue’s voice when she quietly leaned up to press her lips soft and close to Yellow’s ear (closer than they’d been in months, then, Yellow wondered if she was the only one who yearned for that closeness - useless wondering, Blue never desired anything) and whispered secret things about how easily Pink would reach up to massage the ache around White’s forehead, where the headache hurt the most, and how White’s palm seemed all too familiar spreading protectively over Pink’s stomach, and if sometimes maybe footsteps of a creature too huge to be any gem naturally created sounded in the night in White’s empty, airy palaces.
Yellow had laughed loud and sharp at Blue, but suspicion festered. Touching another gem’s gemstone was an intimacy reserved for the most vapid of gems - it was something a pearl would do. At the very least, it demanded a level of connection and love far beyond anything that White had ever shown for Yellow and Blue. And, well, if White and Pink could touch the very essence of what the other was without any problem, even casually, maybe they could even fuse - become one gem from two, an amalgam of all of themselves.
Fusion was a hideous thing reserved for battles and dire situations, only, she’d reminded Blue. Just a cheap tactic to make weak gems stronger, White had told her once, and Yellow had repeated the words whenever fusion came up. It was what made the Crystal Gems, the rebellion, quite so formidable; their willingness to fuse with gems not of their kind created hybrid abominations.
There was certainly no reason for Diamonds to fuse.
Yellow was sharp demands and glaring instants, she couldn’t keep secrets, and Pink had noticed - of course she had, had wrapped her arms around Yellow and tumbled them together on the floor of the control room and well, Yellow had just asked -
(What does fusion feel like, Pink? (What does it feel like, to have White love you more than she loves us? To never have to scrabble for her favour? To know she doesn’t look at you and think “defective”?))
Pink had laughed, soft and rosy, blooming over like springtime. She’d pushed back her hair, made a fuss of her hands, but her eyes had shone and her gem had gleamed, and now the secret was gone into shattered fragments. Fusion? She’d laughed. You’re silly, Yellow, Diamonds don’t fuse. Though if anything could make us, it’s White’s voice!
Yellow had never been permitted to hear White sing. She didn’t tell Pink that - not when Pink lit up so to describe it. Gems had no word for the concept of heaven, a perfect afterlife. The closest was finding your purpose. But Pink had whispered, serving your purpose and breaking free all at once.
White had loved Pink just as much as the rest of them had.
Yellow stabbed at the soft cuticle under her nails, glared and paced and boiled and fumed, and the pink diamond in their insignia, all four Diamonds united together, stared down at her in disappointment from every wall. She ordered a shroud put over Pink’s mural. But everywhere, the insignia blazed, jabbing those gem shards, so small, so weak, so insignificant, back into her. It was impossible to escape.
//
“I saw it,” says the little ruby. She is shaking. “I saw Rose Quartz shatter Pink Diamond.”
The pile of shards is haphazard, scattered everywhere. The crack must have zigzagged directly across the front of the Pink’s diamond. No gem has touched them yet. Lost, her little pearl stands next to the shards, staring at them as if waiting for Pink to glue herself back together and give her a command.
White strides to the gem shards and throws Pink’s pearl away with such force that she is reduced to her gem, falling to the ground with a sad little clink. She stumbles when she approaches the shards, then her knees buckle and she falls, accidentally planting a hand in the shards. Her physical form is cut immediately, blue blood oozing out in thin, razor lines, but White does not seem to care.
Blue gets out of her palanquin, and wavers, legs unused to walking. She wobbles like a newborn fawn to White’s side, and kneels. Yellow joins her, and together they press against White’s shoulders, linking hands across her back, as if with their presence they can hold each other together. It is too little, too late. Pink is already gone.
//
There hadn’t been an ounce of Pink left in those gem shards. How pathetic they’d looked, razor-sharp and scattered over the floor of Pink’s first colony. Yellow remembered the meeting when they’d apportioned Earth to be Pink’s first colony. The excitement in Pink’s face - her joy, the quiet, reserved way White watched her - possessive, once Pink got her own colony she wouldn’t have to live on Homeworld any longer, wouldn’t be White’s alone, but Pink was a Diamond and not a pearl, and Diamonds were built to rule and dominate and conquer, and Pink couldn’t escape her nature any more than a peace-loving quartz could refrain from starting a war. She’d been more than ready for it.
(Shattered just as she left the nest. The perfect Diamond. Would White have preferred to never see her grow into her gem?)
Yellow spat at the insignia and closed her eyes so she didn’t have to see the shards anymore.
It had to go. Make the four Diamonds three.
Logically, she told Blue Diamond, logically, it was the only way to preserve their reputation after the rebellion. Let Pink Diamond be swept away by history. Let the Crystal Gems be forgotten.
Unmoving, Blue looked at her from her palanquin. Her drapes and hoods covered her completely, only her soft lips were visible, the deep blue gem on her chest. Over her heart, the same place as Yellow’s. Yellow’s own diamond began to ache - the way it always did when Blue ignored her like this.
“White Diamond will not agree.” Each word came out as soft as the gurgle of a half-trapped brook, but Yellow heard them as if they had been shouted. A heat burned up from her gem, and she clenched her fists, overrode it with anger, crushed it down with fire and fury until the heat let itself be tamed into logic. Constantly outrunning the emotion within herself.
(“Too irrational,” White had tutted once when Yellow had exploded, fire and lightning and hate, bitter and confused, after Blue turned away, unmoved, withdrawn, drowned, “You could at least pretend that you have the strength to stand alone.”)
Yellow worked on logic, made it her sword and her shield, forged it into her gem. Made herself “the most perfect, the most reasonable, rational, efficient decider ever to exist in the universe”. Blue liked to push, to undo all of that. It was so easy for her. Blue never struggled with things like composure. Their flaws fit together like puzzle pieces.
(Sometimes Yellow wondered if fusion would Blue would feel like being complete.)
Yellow had her own ways to needle, though. “It’s the proper thing to do,” she said. “To help the empire heal.”
Blue had no comeback - she did not know things like healing and change. Fire purified and destroyed, ice sustained. “White Diamond will not agree,” she repeated.
“White Diamond has hardly acted in a manner befitting a Diamond when it comes to our lost sister,” stated Yellow, and looked at where Blue’s eyes would be under the hood, and thought fusion.
Silently, Blue Diamond agreed. It was better to leave the shame behind. To leave Pink Diamond behind, and put her out of the minds of the new generation of gems that would follow this war. Earth would be struck off their charts. And in time, Yellow would destroy it.
Blue was right - of course. Blue was always right. White’s palace gleamed like the heart of a star in the lazy dimness of Homeworld’s night cycle. The original Homeworld, birthplace of the empire. Crystalline fractals spun and shimmered out of sight, and small piles of macabre shards had been implanted directly into the walls from the great force with which they had been thrown - the shards of the pearls that had once sung and danced here, all shattered when one of their own turned renegade. White had taken great pleasure in shattering them, personally. Wind whipped their clothes, tore at their hair like the shrieking fingers of widows. The halls were empty, dead, filmy with dust. It was a self-indulgent display. White couldn’t afford to lock herself away, there was an empire to be run.
A fleeting pearl lead them further down into the mazelike system of halls. It was not one of White’s pretty pale things, this was a ruddy-pink creature, freckles like a star map and hair flyaway as a haystack, but her eyes were dark and dull and serious, and she lacked the grace of a typical pearl. “White Diamond is waiting for you,” said Pink’s pearl softly, saluted both of them, and then slipped out.
White Diamond. Not “My Diamond”. Still loyal, after all this time. Yellow didn’t bother to feel surprised. Such devotion was a pearl’s nature.
White Diamond sat at the end of a hallway of mirrors, the paleness of her near blurring into the chair she sat in. The sharpness of her lines seemed to have decreased, blurred out, faded and washed and wan. Like Blue did, she sat rigidly stiff, but unlike Blue, her eyes were sharp and hard and present, and she carried the weight of her head upon a stiff neck like her gemstone was a crown of its own.
“Blue Diamond. Yellow Diamond.” Her acknowledgement was challenge and remonstrant both, but it had lost its power, and Yellow felt the silent order - leave - pass through her, unaffected. At White’s feet, their insignia stared at them.
Yellow didn’t waste time. Such a thing was an illogical idea, suggesting a sparing of feelings White wasn’t even supposed to have. “There are three of us now,” she said through a mouthful of Pink’s gem shards, catching and clawing at her throat. “Murals must be updated, the insignia must be updated. The petty matter of Earth will be scratched from our records.”
A long, low wind howled around the swaying crystal chandeliers, threatening to snap the gossamer thin threads holding them up. Ten thousand daggers, they swayed overhead, easily able to destroy any gem beneath them if they should fall. But Yellow and Blue were Diamonds, and they were unbreakable.
“A Diamond is not a gem to be forgotten,” White Diamond stated.
“A Diamond that failed is.” Blue Diamond contradicted.
The accusation fell like blows, and White Diamond stiffened in ancient, overwhelming rage. “Pink Diamond-”
“-Fell to a Quartz,” Yellow Diamond interrupted. “A Diamond that may be unseated by a Quartz and her degenerate pearl is not one that our image may associate with. Let her go.”
White Diamond stood, rage flashing in her eyes. Let her go? Yellow had veered too close, and White intended to remind her of her place. Lesser. Subordinate. But the swelling of power that would have once made Yellow quail and kneel to White failed, thrown off by the secret hardening in her heart.
White Diamond has hardly acted in a manner befitting of a Diamond.
(“Fusion is just a cheap tactic to make weak gems stronger. But Diamonds are the strongest of all gems. White has been lying to us, Blue. We are stronger.” Yellow wondered if Blue would hear her, through the fine as sand splinters of yellow in her gem, of blue in Yellow’s own. Born conjoined. Not a full Diamond, without each other.)
“I refuse,” said White Diamond, as if that was the end of that.
Blue Diamond slowly stood, and stepped off her palanquin. It was a declaration of war, and Yellow felt a stab of satisfaction when White’s eyes widened at Blue’s disobedience. She hurriedly stepped up next to Blue, and they stood together, looking up at White on her raised dais.
“Pink Diamond will be struck off the insignia,” Blue Diamond said slowly, softly, but with every hint of quietly contained power that White had ever wielded.
“You are being irrational,” Yellow Diamond murmured, and White Diamond twitched.
“How dare you?” she hissed. “My word is law! You… You are defective!”
“Fusing is defective.” Blue Diamond’s words made White physically flinch. At once, Yellow’s suspicions were confirmed.
White had faded in colour, like a ghost washed out after Pink, her eyes wide, unseated from her throne, and she knew it. Slowly, she sat down, and then rested her head in her hands, rubbing at her gem. Suddenly, White looked nothing but tired, nothing but a lover in mourning, and for the first time Yellow felt equal to her. “You know about that.”
“Yes,” said Yellow, not without sympathy.
“I would shatter you both in an instant to spend one more hour with her,” said White Diamond. It was not said coldly, but a statement of fact, nothing more. Pink had been the perfect Diamond from birth. Blue and Yellow had never had that luxury.
“Yes,” said Blue. Silently, she reached for Yellow’s hand.
Before Pink, they’d all thought there was no such thing as defective Diamonds, if defective meant caring, and being illogical, and disobeying all the rules of their station. Well, now they knew three.