Chapter Text
"That's - Amethyst, Amethyst, no, stay away from that!"
Amethyst's room.
What can really be said about it? It's truly an exotic place. It's an eclectic garden, an exotic menagerie, a shrine to humanity in all of its miscellaneousness. It brings to mind images of a vast, sprawling cityscape - that's just been hit by an atomic bomb.
It is above all else messy, and it is above-all-but-messy busy. Really busy. The main chamber - for reasons previously elaborated upon - busies the eye, while the the pristine waterfalls crashing down busy the ear. Beneath that, there's the subtle sound of trash falling from the top of the piles and skipping down to their base. Tinfoil, scrunched paper, the occasional kitchen sink. That sound is near constant. Much more rarely, a precarious stack of things will come tumbling down, punctuated by a great crash that echoes high above and drives Pearl up the wall.
All this without mentioning Amethyst herself, who makes more noise than all of the above on a good day.
And so it was so unusual that the room seemed... quiet. Pensive, almost. The falls lacked their usual luster, the junk seemed content where it was, and Amethyst sat with her knees raised to her chest. Silently.
There was a pillow in front of her, and on it, sat Pearl.
It was not a pillow from Amethyst's own personal stash; Garnet said those would be too dirty for something so precious, but Amethyst reckoned Garnet was being too precious herself. Pearl could use a bit of dirt on her from time to time - might help her wind down. None of these things did Amethyst dare to vocalize to Garnet, because she'd pushed her luck enough over the last few days, but she felt them.
Now don't call her cruel. Obviously, Pearl being destabilized* was serious business. To use a human comparison, it was like a gem being put under open heart surgery; they were completely safe, but balancing very precariously between life and death. It was dangerous! It was an irregular mortal threat to their otherwise very much immortal existences. Every few years or decades** they'd be involved in some accident and need to recover, and in the time it took for them to come back, they were truly vulnerable. Especially in a place as fast-paced as earth.
* That's the proper term, Amethyst just called it poofing and it was beginning to stick.
** Or months, for some of them, who will go unnamed.
All this made it sound dangerous, and to someone who saw all the dangers, all the time, maybe that'd be enough. But what Garnet missed was that it was routine. They got poofed every now and then, and they always came back no worse for wear, excepting Pearl's occasional poor fashion decisions.
"If Garnet's going to freak out so much about how everything could be soooo dangerous," Amethyst ranted to herself, "Might as well not ever go outside in case she got," she kicked a rock, "struck by lightning."
Garnet was especially bad with that new... human... thing. Steven. At the thought, a part of her turned, and she snarled as she realized it was almost agreeing with Garnet there. That human was all that was left of Rose.
Amethyst shook her head and focused her thoughts. She wasn't going to get derailed thinking about Rose this night - there'd be plenty of time for that. For now, she tried to focus on the question playing through her mind; why was Garnet really worried about it this time? Even more worried than she usually was with Steven? Amethyst didn't know. More than that, she suspected Garnet only kind of knew, and it was the fact that she didn't know for certain that made her unwilling to share. She wasn't desperate enough to have to rely on sharing with Amethyst, of course - oh no, no, never the troublemaker, never the runt of the lot.
Amethyst didn't know - but she had hunches.
They'd been searching through some old ruins when it happened. Those sorts of missions were the worst, but they were also the least dangerous, and that naturally meant Pearl and Amethyst got them the most while Garnet... had tea in the center of the Earth's core, or whatever it was she did on solo missions. There was never corrupted presence in those ruins, just like most of Earth now, but there was always the risk of a piece of tech innocuous to a Gem that would devastate anything else. Keeping Homeworld tech out of human hands was a bit like trying to take care of children allergic to clean air; they'd decided to be born on a planet full of the stuff, but there was less of it to worry about every generation.
Pearl was in Amethyst's ear about proper precautions, as she usually was, when Amethyst saw something wedged in a crevice. She'd taken it for some sort of scroll, but holding it in her hand, she could tell it was something more important. It had the weight of millennia to it. Old gem tech, far before her time and probably before Garnet's. On all her boring collection missions, she'd never seen something like it before, and that surely meant it was important. A button was nestled on its top.
Really - when presented with a mysterious, important button on a mysterious, important object, what is an Amethyst to do but press it?
There was a light humming and the feeling of increased weight in her hand. There was the sound of Pearl's voice growing closer, chiding her for reckless handling. There was the sound of the air being split by a rush of pure energy. There was a burst of light. There was a brief, terrifying flash of recognition in Pearl's eyes, and then...
"Stay away from that!"
It was a pink scythe. It was an unusual color - this is the kind of thing the mind picks up on in times of crisis, when time is so slow you could trace a water droplet as it falls through the air. Pink was the closest thing to a color the rebellion had. A pink scythe...
Amethyst couldn't remember if she'd ever been tackled by Pearl before. She was half convinced a gem monster had somehow been there all along and only now decided to make its presence known; more likely than Pearl getting physical. But no. Rolling over, she saw Pearl straddling her hips, the weapon shattered into pieces, but not before its blade could pierce her stomach.
She’d been saved. And for what?
Leaning forward, Amethyst dared to reach out. Slowly, she inched forward towards Pearl's gem. You know, maybe Garnet was right - the whole room was a bit dirty for her. It'd been a few days, and who knew when she'd reform? Last thing either of them needed was for Pearl to wake up in an awful mood in Amethyst's own room. But, her waking up today in the first place would be... well. It wouldn't be so bad. But she ought to wake up outside the temple or something.
Amethyst opened her hand and went to touch Pearl's gem.
A quiet, high humming rang out, like the sound of a gently parted waterfall. A light blue glow so pale as to be nearly white stretched over the pillow, retracting slowly as Pearl's gem floated away.
"Pshh," Amethyst shrugged, "Guess you're coming back here anyway. Your choice Pearl - you can't blame me," Her head fell back, looking to the ground, and adding, quietly, "... You're gonna anyway though."
"Please identify yourself."
Amethyst's head snapped up, looking to Pearl's gem. Some three feet above her, its blue light hardened into a round gibbous shape. Thin lines formed in the construct, crossing over it in stripes that gave the illusion of depth. Rapidly edges were trimmed, curves were slimmed, and details formed until it finally made the unmistakable shape of a clam shell. Amethyst stumbled to her feet, blinking into the light.
"Please identify yourself," came Pearl's voice from the gem, softened and heightened to lack her usual, breathy flair.
"... Pearl?"
The clam shell hovered above her for a moment. In so far as an object could, it seemed to be thinking.
"... Are you certain that's correct?"
"You seriously doing this?" Amethyst laughed awkwardly, "Glad to see a lighter side, 'P, but I don't really get it-"
"If," It clarified with politeness that did not invite further questions, "you are a Pearl calibrating this unit in place of your owner, please identify her in your place."
Amethyst leaned back and looking to the side. There was a sinking feeling inside of her as the perpetual glaze of sarcasm that wrapped around her fell away, and for a moment, curiosity came out. Imagine being with a friend in pitch darkness, letting go of their hand, and the silence going on for a moment too long. The primal, animal instinct that urges you to call out 'are you there?' - that is the same instinct Amethyst felt in that moment. Of course, in the end, your friend's hand always finds yours again, and perhaps they elbow you and ask if you got scared, and of course, you say no, and you both smile.
This is not what happened here. No face emerged from the darkness, no hand gripped hers, and she was alone in there. That sort of thing makes instincts take over.
"Please identify-"
"Amethyst. It's... Amethyst."
On the topic of instincts; Amethyst felt one activate deep inside of her that was much less esoteric or social than before. This was the 'I've just walked off a cliff' instinct. It told her she'd done something she couldn't undo, that would also end up making a mess on a jungle floor somewhere.
"Greetings, Amethyst. Please state preferred customization options."
"Uh, man," she scratched her hair, "Uh. Normal? Normal as 'P can be?"
"Default settings selected. Please stand by."
The gem - or, rather, the clam - turned flush with the ground and zoomed away. Briefly, Amethyst imagined herself having to chase it through the forest that was her room. Fortunately, the light flew only a few feet into the air before swinging past her and onto the flattest ground it could manage. Its hard light top opened, and the familiar shape of Pearl rose out. Pearl always took her time with regenerations - far too much time, in Amethyst's opinion - but this had been a quick one, and it... showed?
The pure white silhouette of Pearl's slender body immediately bulged around its shoulders. Soft, pillowy shapes hung gravity defying in the air and then suddenly sagged, giving the impression of puffy softness. The bowl shape of her miniskirt extended out like a telescope in three quick bursts of growth, smoothing into layers of a knee-length skirt. The same slight bevelling stretched up across her waist and allowed itself to split about her back. And then the colors came. A lot of them. Maybe all of them.
Patterns of whites, blues, creams, occasionally forming in big blotches of color around the thickest parts of her clothes. That was all familiar. What wasn't was the stripes around her torso; golds, oranges, pinks, a whole opposing end of the color wheel she rarely dipped into, and never in such pastel shades. She'd allow herself a daring dash of bright yellow around her collar and hot pink near her feet, sure, but always striking streaks of it. She'd never go for such an even, homely palette. While Amethyst would never dare call Pearl punk, she could at least respect her for being bold, and was ready to tease her for regressing.
You know. Once she'd waited for the weirdness of it all to go away.
Pearl spoke, and it became obvious Amethyst would be waiting a long, long time.
"Pleasure to meet you, my Amethyst," Pearl practically sang, bringing to mind images of expensive hotels and too-wide smiles, "This Pearl is honored you've chosen her; I am forever at your service."
Pearl's mind can only be compared to a meticulously crafted labyrinth. Not a pearl's mind - a typical pearl's mind is as far from labyrinthine as possible. Although indeed it is a gigantic archive of all sorts of information from the highly sensitive to the extremely unimportant, it is nothing if not well-organized. Getting lost in a typical pearl's mind is only possible if you ignore any and all signposting, which is hard, because the signposting has signposting. A typical pearl thinks alphabetically and has a train of thought lost and found.
But Pearl is no typical pearl. Pearl is someone who has carefully crafted her mind to resist every feeling she was taught to feel, to think thoughts it was not meant to think, and to facilitate this all, she had to bend those neatly organized halls into knots. Though the most shallow levels of her mind are, indeed, very plain and neat - with a perpetually work-in-progress categorization system and, yes, a lost and found - there's levels beneath that. More than levels, there's pathways. While yes, you can simply go down to find the deepest thoughts, you can also stop halfway through the cerebral stairwell to the place where she keeps her long-disused spy persona. You can take a left at a long hallway and find a dedicated room to store the Killing Data. You can head through a long forgotten door by the library - you might need to pick the lock - and find...
Well. You get the idea.
In a way, Pearl's mind is no different than the proverbial 'typical pearl' - it's just a hundred of them, cleverly fit into a place contorted to accommodate them. It's in one of these many minds, through a particularly twisted hall at an awful forty degree angle, we find Pearl. Our Pearl.
She dashes across the hallway, arms waiving frantically at her side as she leaps a bulge in the ground and nearly tumbles onto her back. Narrowly folding into a roll, she stumbles to her feet and towards the exit. She doesn't dare to turn around, but feels a swish in the air as something goes for her neck. She breaks into a hysterical sprint, putting just a few more strides of distance between her and the things, and crosses the threshold, slamming the door behind her and bringing a bar down over it.
She presses her back against it and stretches her arms wide across. She hears a thumping, a thumping, a banging against the door, and then, it passses. There's scrapes on her knees, up her thighs, around her wrists, some from the many falls she's taken in her time here, some from... other things. Her chest heaves and her hair frays at its edges.
She's worn, beaten, battered, and - as she scans the pitch darkness of the room and sees the glint of something shining and moving - not alone. She doesn't know the way out - she doesn't know if there is a way out, and by all accounts, it seems impossible. But she's been doing impossible things for a few thousand years. What's one more?
She steels herself and breaks into another sprint, away from the light of the door and into the darkness of her mind.