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Rose's back is turned when Pearl steals through the heavy-curtained door. The blush-pink curve of her neck reveals itself like a sliver of moon between locks of hair dotted with sumptuous white flowers. "Oh dear," she says, the suggestion of a delighted chuckle running under her words, "you're all fancy. Are we going out?"
She turns, glowing in the lamplight. "Don't you like them?" Pearl can just make out her mischievous smile, glinting forth from behind a curl.
Pearl can't keep her joking up for long. "They're beautiful," she says. Her pale eyes flash as Rose turns to face her. "You're beautiful."
"You're looking pretty...mmm...incandescent, yourself," she returns, and carefully unfolds Pearl's damp, trembling arm to kiss her hand--leaving her glowing seafoam and lilac, as if to prove a point. The back of her palm is chilled and clammy. "Now. What needs attention?"
"Oh, the usual," Pearl sighs. "Plus this business." She lifts the side of her shirt to reveal deep bruises collecting between the outlines of her projected body’s frameworks, watercolor bound by grid lines, inky teal crossed with shining white.
"Yikes. Did you fall?"
Pearl shakes her head. "Nope. She just pulled a punch too slow and grazed me. It's no big deal--I'm just happy she was giving it all she's got. I hate when they go easy."
Rose frowns. “Come here in the light and let me have a look. Try not to move your head too quickly. Oh darling, you certainly haven’t been holding back either, have you,” she murmurs, watching the energetic high of sparring begin to fade before her eyes and ashen fatigue take its place. She pulls up the hem of her dress and gathers it in her palm, using it to dab clear motes of sweat from Pearl’s hairline.
“It’s really nothing big, you don’t have to fuss about it, finish what you were do…oh, I want to sit down.”
Rose stands up and reaches out to support her strain-heavy shoulders, brushing her other hand across her cheekbone, easing her slowly to her favorite position for these purposes, on her side, curled up to half her size on the floor. The floor of the shelter is cushioned—clouds provided by gem magic covered with quilts provided by human hospitality, a setup designed for healings too delicate to carry out right on the battlefield. That the quilts are wrong way up—exposing the silky undersides whose intricate pillowed surfaces Pearl loves to run the backs of her palms over—is also by design, if less tactical in nature. “I’m thinking this could stand some tears,” she says, casually, trying not to let her worry show.
“O-only if you feel like it, it won’t be strictly necessary.”
Rose lies down beside her, propping herself up on an arm that disappears into her hair. “I could foresee myself getting a bit sentimental,” she says. Pearl’s smile is crooked and sleepy, her milky eyes reflecting Rose’s face back to her. She knows these words are formalities. They perform this routine almost every night. It’s a set of actions unique to their situation—their treasonous, unprecedented situation—yet it’s couched in ancient motions, unspoken-of things still seen in hip roofs and hieroglyphs, forbidden ceremonies of gems adoring gems for age after age after age.
None of the couples set in stone are a quartz and a pearl, of course. But yet Pearl reaches out her quivering arm and separates between her fingertips a single lock of her hair, soundlessly mouthing a phrase that might be, “the light…”
Rose catches her hand, curling its long fingers into her own. “The things you put this poor arm through. You can’t wait five minutes?”
“You’re teasing me.”
“You’re hurting, dear.”
“I’m always hurting.”
Rose curls over her knight’s small body to kiss, soft, still, long, between her shoulder blades. “Not tonight. Tonight we take it all away. I don’t want you just tolerating everything, going on through a bunch of aches and pains. I want you better. I want bliss, understand?”
She doesn’t realize how much this sounds like a battlefield pep talk until Pearl raises an unsteady fist in the air and sounds a crisp “Ma’am, yes ma’am!” The giggles that follow are absorbed into the billows, though Rose laughs loud enough for both of them.
“Sorry, I was just working on the manifesto. I might be kind of…in a mode.”
“I thought you were feeling sentimental.”
“The two things can get very conflated for me.”
“I guess I can see how they would, under the circumstances.”
She draws her fingers once through the dampened thistledown of Pearl’s short hair—making her instantly shudder with pleasure—and gently repositions her, stretching out her troubled arm (the one she favors, just slightly, for holding her weapon) into her lap. Their fingers curl together again, and Rose slowly runs the smooth knuckles of her other hand down its length, testing how it bears touch. In her infinite manufactured delicacy, each little scale and fiber of illusory muscle hardens slightly with pain as the hand passes; in her infinite natural toughness, Pearl herself only winces when the healer’s hand skips over the hyperextended crook of her elbow. Rose feels a swell of something at this reaction. Of all the beings she has loved, Pearl holds the distinction of being the one she can cry for most easily.
“Don’t—”
“I know, I know, don’t heal your callouses. You’ve told me a hundred times.”
“Well, I need them.”
“I know.” She remembers the sight of slender white palms rubbed neon-blue raw, back on homeworld nearly a thousand years ago. That was partly her fault. When they met Pearl’s hands were servant’s hands, hard and rough with scrubbing—her tears had healed them soft, too soft to grip the hilt of a sword for hours and days on end. She had given her the hands of a lady—the hands of a knight, Pearl took for herself. Today’s tears come on the heels of that thought (and will be precisely applied to repair the soft and leave the scars that protect behind).
“Are you okay?”
Rose lifts her gaze, blowing a curl out of her face, eyebrows incredulously crinkled. “I gotta cry to do it, hon.”
“That’s not what I mean—”
“Pearl—Pearl—Pearl, don’t start talking yet. Just wait a second. Just wait one second.”
“Why?”
“Because you have to hold your arm still, and if you talk, you will not.”
“But—”
“No, either wait, or flip over and talk with your other arm.”
“I don’t talk with my arms, though, I talk with my face.”
Rose cocks her head to shoot her a look. “I—are you being cheeky right now or do you actually not know what I meant?”
Pearl sniffs, dragging the bits she does in actual fact use for speech across the quilt. “Sorry, let’s get it over with and then I’ll tell you.”
She nestles into the cushioned surface, tucking the arm less afflicted close to her chest, pressing the backs of her fingers to lips now chalky with exhaustion. Rose breathes deep and lets relief roll off her cheek. Even while Pearl is being distractingly cute, it’s impossible to hide the made-to-order suffering. It isn't that she can't hold her own in these practice sessions--she certainly can, and then some--it's just that she's--I know, I know, you're sick of hearing--not built for it. Her body is designed--even calculated--ostensibly to look graceful at the sides of her so-called betters; and, on a less detectable, more sinister level, to prevent resistance, to thwart escape. The arches of her feet start to give out if she tries to run too far. The half-dreamed muscles of her arms burn to the point of distraction if she lifts a heavy blade too high. She doesn't stop. She doesn't care. She has the indomitable optimism of someone with a knack for taking things apart and putting them back together better than they were before--her limitations are physical and therefore constitute an engineering problem, to be addressed with ingenuity, elbow grease, and trial and error. And, on these secret occasions, routine care, technically nonessential but too effective to go without.
The question Pearl had to delay was, “You used to look peaceful when you healed someone. You make a different face when you do it here. What is it? The difference? Is there something I can do to—”
“Oh, no. It’s just…” She struggles for words, words to convey the wonder, the frustration, the nobility, the beauty, and the tragedy. “You are a rebel, truly. You put so much of yourself in this. And they made you for this certain life, and did everything they could to keep you in it, and nobody knows what you go through…nobody writes ballads about what it’s like to be a pearl at war. I always have some tears of compassion for you, darling—those seem to heal best. But tears of outrage are quicker to get going.”
Pearl considers this with a nod, then addresses tangential concerns: “The lack of ballads is due to the fact that nobody’s experienced it except me. I have to write my own.” She flings her arm over her eyes and intones, “I can land my first hit while they’re laughing, turning down requests still hasn’t gotten old, you can put your own cloak away for heaven’s sake—someone set this to music—still better than just standing around…uh…my feet hurt all the time…” She ends off her not-quite-melody with a soaring high note on “Why are all these weapons so huuuuuuuuuuge!”
“Instant classic,” Rose laughs through her still-falling tears. “Here, take this arm up on a little test flight for me.” She tugs at the calloused fingers, and Pearl demonstrates for her that she can in fact now raise it over her head.
She feels along the lower edge of Pearl’s top, making her squirm in surprise but also smile. “Mind if I get this out of the way? It’ll be easier…”
“Oh, of course I don’t mind.” She shrugs the garment away as Rose pulls it off, and sits patiently, blushing in spite of herself, as familiar arms surround her and a steadying hand is laid below her ribs. “What’s the manifesto say so far?”
“Hold on. Concentrating.”
Pearl’s hand flies to her lips again. “Sorry!” She takes a deep breath as pain lifts like fog from her torso, letting her tiny weight settle fully into Rose’s embrace.
“Feel better?”
She nods and snuggles closer, letting her head fall to Rose’s chest. “What’s it say so far?”
“What?”
“The manifesto.”
“Very little. But it’s an important very little. Want me to rub your back now that you can lay facedown?”
“Mmm, please.” She stretches in her lap, pointing her toes out toward the curtains, wincing as her joints protest. Moving vaguely, missing the first few times, she edges her shoes from her heels with the opposite feet and kicks them off. Before she can move back to the floor, Rose lifts her, as lightly as a shield, and slowly lays her back down on the carpet of quilt undersides. Their liquid folds seem to touch each mote of radiance, each photon in her softly chromatic skin, separately, individually. She gasps in delight. Rose smiles. Healed of her pains, her iridescent bloom is returning, and in the low, direct lights of the lanterns every sound and move she makes shimmers just a little.
“Comfortable?”
“Mm-hm,” she responds. Her shoulders still tremble just slightly with uncoiling tension. “I’m probably still all sweaty. I tried to phase it all off but, ugh.”
“It’s alright,” Rose whispers, walking two cool coin-sized fingers up the high wire of her lover’s spine. Her voice fully manifests again, though softly, as she half-sings, “Close your eyes…” The touch melts into a feather-light brush, once up and down, a silent way of asking if she’s ready. Rose feels her relax completely—still a foreign sensation from Pearl, even after their millennia of bodily closeness—into the curves of her hands.
Rhythmically she kneads the tiny sinews, attending every punished inch, loving them well. The peaks of her shoulders—sacred blades indeed, Rose thinks—rise and fall as her hands press grateful sighs from her patient. After a period of this much longer than the insinuated five minutes, Pearl’s hands are splayed over the cushions, languid with the aftereffects of the massage. Rose twines her fingers into them and leans down close, curtaining her in her hair, laying her petal-soft mouth atom by atom on the curve of her shoulder. Slowly she draws both of their arms across the floor in an arc, sending it rippling around them, pulling from Pearl’s chest the deepest sigh of all.
Rose is opening her mouth to say something—not “I love when you’re like this,” that’s too much, somehow, and yet not enough, doesn’t adequately explain what a fragile treasure her trust (which, after everything, lets her relax in total vulnerability under the strength of Rose’s hands) is to a gentle soul in a body built to fight and conquer—when she curls and unfolds like a fern, letting her head fall back against her shoulders.
“I should finish stripping the rivets off those transports from yesterday,” she says, eyes still shut, voice sleepy. “We’ll probably have time to take the fuel cells and diagram the propulsion systems before somebody comes around looking for them, and we’re going to have to pack up and get out of here before they do...” She turns her head, catches an eyeful of Rose’s pout, and immediately blushes. “You’re making that face—I told you to stop doing that around me. I can’t take it, listen—”
“You don’t need to finish it right this second, do you? It’ll be days before anyone even notices they’re gone.”
“It’s just better to have a head start—”
“You can do it first thing in the morning. Please…stay here.” She makes the mistake of adding, “You’ve had a hard session. You could really use a bit more of a break.”
“Oh nonsense, I’m much better now. Fit as a fiddle, as they say locally.” She pauses, folding her hands, head tracing a downward arc in the air. “That’s another theoretical statement, actually—I don’t know what a fiddle is. Presumably, something fit.”
Rose catches her fluttering, gesturing hand again and pats it soothingly. “Now you know very well—”
“Rose—”
“You know very well, it’ll be less of a strain if you can get some rest.”
“I don’t know. Not for certain, first pearl in combat in known history and all.” Then she cracks a grin. “It’s just a theory some quartz medic came up with.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Pearl can feel Rose’s smile as it softly touches her forehead. “What would she know, right?”
She takes a tentative, wide-eyed look at her own hand clasped in her lover’s, her hard-worked fingers couched in so much cloud. She raises both their hands to kiss the back of Rose’s palm. “I suppose it can wait until morning. The—the light will be better, you know—”
Rose smirks. “Oh, the light will be better.”
“Yes—”
“The light.”
“The light.”
They look at each other very seriously for a few more seconds, and then both of them snort, eyes waning to crescents, and burst into laughter.
Rose turns aside, giggles still reverberating through in her voice. “Anyways, do you still want to hear it so far?”
“The manifesto?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Absolutely.”
She stands up—hair brushing the low draped-cloth ceiling—and returns to the stack of concrete blocks (taken, like the vehicles Pearl has been disassembling, from a building site they’ve sabotaged) that she’s been using as a writing table. Pearl stands on her tiptoes, reading over her shoulder. “We intend to fight for all life on the planet earth…well, I would imagine they’ve gathered that much by this point, wouldn’t you?”
“True, but it’s something to have it written down. For posterity, you know.”
“Of course…oh, how silly I didn’t think of it—this is a historical document! The declaration of earth’s rebellion.” For a moment her actual words get lost in pure excited shrilling before she finally takes a deep breath, drapes her arms around Rose’s neck, and concludes, “Oh Rose…we’re really doing this.”
Her warm, low chuckle sounds through under Pearl’s body. “We certainly are. Would you like to hear the rest?”
Seeming to remember again, all at once, the actual fact of the manifesto being read over the excitement of its eventual importance, she slides off of her shoulder and stands straight. “Yes! Yes.” She clears her throat and places her hands behind her back. “Continue.”
“Defend all human beings—” She’s barely begun when Pearl, in a transparent charade of absentmindedness at her side, begins to separate curls again, slowly, carefully, always taking a moment to adore each strand between the bases of her fingers. “—even those—ohh, stop it.”
“Okay!” she replies quietly, pulling her hands back into nervous fists.
“No, actually, don’t stop it. I just said that because you were throwing me off reading.”
“What was the last bit?”
“Defend all human beings, even the ones you don’t understand.”
Pearl looks long-sufferingly upward, but her smile holds fast and real. “That’s all of them, in my case.”
“I was thinking of you when I put it in. Although to be fair, I’m not much better.”
“As long as you’re spelling out our intentions like that I think it’s the thought that counts. We’ve got time to figure things out with the humans. They’re chatty.”
Rose looks over her shoulder to stamp another kiss on Pearl’s jaw. “So are you,” she says, her words bright with her hidden grin.
“It’s brilliant,” Pearl informs her, picking up the page—paper is an earth thing they’ve recently discovered, and they’re both a bit enchanted with its lightness and portability—and twirling off toward the other sides of the shelter with it. “Succinct, straightforward, entirely sensible. Any gem who sees the beauty in this planet will understand, and earthlings won’t have to have any doubt that we’re here for them. Your genius will be a beacon to them all!” Her voice drops a decibel as she squints at the paper. “Although you should really put a comma before ‘even.’ It is a separate clause, after all.”
“Thank you, dear.” Rose gently takes the page from between Pearl’s fingertips, still sparkling with her laughter. “I don’t really want it to end there. I feel like it’s missing something.”
“Like what? That seems to be just about everything.”
“Like…” She leans on the table again, chin in her hand. “I don’t know. Something to ignite it all. A core feeling. It’s just, where’s the passion?”
“The passion?” Pearl repeats her phrase with the flat affect she uses to question concepts that make her nervous.
“I mean, what will inspire them? What will drive them to the lengths to which we need to go. What’s…well, what is it for you, Pearl?”
“For me?”
“Yeah.” Rose turns to fully face her, spreads her arms through her cascade of hair to lean on the cinderblocks, crosses her cool, florid legs slowly, as if pouring water from one glass into another. Pearl suddenly feels a little weak in the knees again. “Where do you get your passion?”
Not entirely certain if she’s being flirted with or entreated for political insight (or both?) she stammers the first thing that comes to mind, which, she regrets as soon as she says it, is not insightful, or flirtatious, or even particularly in line with her own conscious thoughts. “Only you would ask that of a gem literally made for propriety, Rose Quartz,” she says, and folds her arms, but softly, feebly, wanting her defenses here challenged.
“What’s the matter with putting in passion?”
“What do you mean? I didn’t say anything was the matter with it.”
“You only call me ‘Rose Quartz’ when you’re addressing me as an ideological entity. Does it make you uncomfortable? It’s…” She stops a moment, longing to draw her close again, sensing that this isn’t the time. “It’s one of the things I admire most about you.”
Pearl takes a step towards her. Her arm—strengthened, healed, repaired—rises from her side, draped in the air like a garland, intricate mechanism custom-made for grace, never more beautiful than when it reaches, here, actively forward, through the space between them to swathe rose’s arm with her slender fingers. “I wish it didn’t make me uncomfortable. I don’t think it should. It still scares me a little, what I’ve done—what I’m doing—what I know I would do. I want to stop them, I want to fight—but that’s not enough, that was never enough. You know what I’m risking.”
Rose nods. She knows. She is burningly aware every day, and never more than during these sunset healings. “Then what is it? What made the difference?”
Pearl leans in, inquisitively—despite her declarations a second earlier, every demure inch of her still subconsciously begs your permission, ma’am—and Rose, taking the hint, pulls her back into her arms. She drags her fingers through Rose’s hair yet again, back from her cheeks and down to the nape of her neck, sending a shimmer of serene pleasure over her. “You must understand,” Pearl says, never wavering from her usual formality, “of course. You must understand that I am in love.”
Rose’s eyes fill with light; behind her reflection Pearl could swear she sees the pale moon, stormy Venus, brilliant Mars, rise to zenith in their darkness. This gem—her leader, her lover—is a shred of the cosmos that finally gave her freedom. After the terror of being on her own, the sink-or-swim panic of getting what she so desperately wanted—what absolute bliss to be held safe in the arms of the concept of liberty given form: the leader of the rebellion. Her face is soft and sweet and fierce. She understands, she accepts; she puts her hand on her cheek and murmurs “My Pearl…” for the thousandth time. That is enough; Pearl needs nothing more in return. But there is a rush and a breath and a movement, and suddenly she is clutched to Rose’s shoulder with a tender, mighty hand covering her head, and she can hear her voice say, “I know. So am I.” In that moment she flashes, electrifies, bites her lip to keep from whimpering in sheer overwhelm. A sword is forged in the white heat of her soul.
Their hands attract like opposites, trace together, press into each other. “Well, you wanted to know,” Pearl whispers, her lips tracing each vowel against Rose’s neck, tightening into a satisfied smile as she shivers and draws in her breath. “There’s your passion.” Her words dissolve into squeaks and giggles as Rose gathers her up to perch in her arms and carries her back to soft floor.
She bends low to lay her down, kneeling over her, pressing their false bodies together. They have begun to breathe, to blink in unison, to fall into sync, the oscillating vibrational prelude to the scandal of inter-class fusion. Even some of their allies would raise their eyebrows, as it is, with Pearl involved of her own free choice. Like their dreams of freedom, their love is something their race finds dangerous, a threat to the order of things; a rebellion, really, of its own. “Are you alright if we end up—” Rose begins.
“We’ve already committed treason,” Pearl replies, the words seeming to tumble from her, and flings her arms around Rose’s neck.
Rose shifts her hands to cradle her and sighs “Darling…” into her hair before murmuring off into words much older, sussurating and swift, the language of a long-ago age they both just barely remember. Rose dreamed through so much of it, a soldier transported bodiless on flights that lasted decades, only to form on a rich new world and be sent immediately to the front lines of its battlefields. But the places she viewed through a rose-colored shield stayed with her forever, and when she’d paid her dues in the fray of conquest they eventually let her helm that exploration fleet. She wanted to give her life to the beautiful unknown. Meanwhile Pearl, made at the tail end of the age of the great voyages, squirrelled away news bulletins about the ships that crossed the dark between the shores of the galaxies, hoping no one would ask.
There are things you call a gem to whom you give your love and loyalty—traditionally, ritually, poetically. Or there used to be, before the empire spread so wide; before the Diamonds began draining worlds dry with horrific efficiency. Rose isn’t particularly drawn to them, or wasn’t, before she touched gems with a true lover of antiquity. She loves to watch Pearl’s eyes light up when she quotes the sacred ballads, loves to hear her talk about them, find their story in the stories of the past. The trouble of course is that none fit quite perfectly—none of the ancient war poets were writing to the pearls, she’s afraid, or if they were, they weren’t writing nobly—so Rose has to adapt them. Lady of resplendent facet—oh, no, that won’t work. Inclusion of my being, twin of my crystal—that’s no good either. Listen, I’ll figure one out. Beloved forged in salt brine, her brave light a sun on the galactic sea… (Rose is proud of that one. The change from ‘magma’ to ‘salt brine’ connects the old song to earth’s sea as well). Pearl laughs and cuddles and hums along, and everything old is new again.
As Rose speaks into the trembling outline of her form, Pearl caresses her head where it lights on her chest, drawing up curl after curl, every moment feeling the unique vibration of her lover’s gem close to her and growing closer, filling her with their forbidden duet. Rose bends her neck to kiss her still-bare middle, and the sensation—radial sweep of silky curls, cool touch of petal lips on tight-coiled muscles—makes her own soft mouth fly open; a tiny “oh”, a sudden wish, out of the veils of resistance to touch that usually surround her, to feel and feel and feel and feel, forever, the sound of Rose’s voice, the gossamer brush of Rose’s skin.
For all her talk of them being already as outcast as they can be, Pearl worries—she has always worried—that she is a liability to their cause. That she undermines the respectability of a visionary who needs all the clout she can get. That others will follow Rose—but not the two of them, and not the two of them—like this—together. They keep things quiet, but she has always assured her that she contributes more than she detracts. Pearl wishes she could be so sure. So secure. As smitten as she is without a smidgen of guilt. She lies and listens and thinks, and she begs some abstract authority for yet another inch of freedom.
As if on cue Rose raises her eyes. The celestial spheres turn again.
That dangerous, revolutionary phrase, the phrase that could one day tear the order of things apart: “Tell me what you want, Pearl.”
The force that they are, the upheaval they are undertaking, is a whirlwind around her spine. She lifts her head. Like the last day of her servitude, like the end of every battle, like, someday, the end of the empire, she rises up.
On her tiptoes, floating in the vapor on the floor with Rose’s face turned up towards her, she takes her will in both hands and whispers, “Kiss me.”
When their lips meet, they both could swear they feel palace columns shake ten million light years away. They forget themselves—what they were, what they are, what they’re supposed to be. The entire world fills with song, crest after crest of sound and motion, the fluid synthesis of fighting together transposed into the key of tenderness.
Pearl pulls away at last, breath taken, cheeks electric blue. Rose’s hands circle her wrists. Her eyes are wide, her chest flutters with feeling. “Pearl,” she gasps. “This. You.”
“What about—”
“The passion.”
“The passion?” This repetition, she is nodding.
“The light—” Before Pearl can question it Rose is kissing her again, and she doesn’t mind that one bit to say they least, so she lets herself fall back in, and she can feel the hum of inspiration in her throat, can taste her eloquence, feel the electricity of the never-before-seen dancing over her tongue. “Who do you belong to?”
“What?”
“Who do you belong to?!”
“Nobody!”
“What do you fight for?”
“For earth, for us all, for you—”
“And why?!”
Rose’s voice is big and brassy now, her battlefield belt, and Pearl is hanging in her arms like a windless banner, smiling bewilderedly down at her. “Where are you going with this?”
“Why do you fight? For any of it? For me?”
“B-because I’m free, and I’m in love—love they can’t control!”
The smile on her face grows ecstatic. “Love they can’t control. Love that’s out of anyone’s control!”
“That’s what they can believe in,” she says, eyes far-seeing, voice small, dreams big, painting life together after the war, painting a free planet in the glittering solar system of her mind. Rose cups her face between warm, sinuous hands, and ever so softly kisses her gem. The warmth, the wildness, the potential of her, of Rose Quartz—gem, legend, escape route—falls from her lips to Pearl’s entire being. Tingling rushes of sensation fall over her like smoke rings, and when she opens her eyes, her queen of clouds is glowing through a nimbus of pink against her, leaning conspiratorially over her shoulder.
“Believe in what,” she whispers. The old calls and responses. The songs of home, the home that hated her, rebuilt and reimagined and retaken by force.
“Believe in love that’s out of anyone’s control!”
“And risk—everything—for it!” The words go through her like a torpedo. Rose’s fingers clutch again between hers, the way they did back at the battlefield, when they decided, together, to stay.
They are young, they are brave, they are filled with the hunger of lions. They lie there, volcanic, engulfed in a love that burns bright enough to break diamond.