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Thank the stars that Steven’s home survived the arrival of the injector.
If Bismuth hadn’t done such a masterful job at building it, Steven would have had no place to panic in relative peace.
The sky was relatively bright outside – too bright for the situation. All of the gems, plus the stranger that poofed them in the first place, were laying on the coffee table down in the living room, their familiar faces nowhere in sight.
It was 15:38. He knew because he’d been distantly checking his phone for the last ten minutes now. He wasn’t sure what to do – some part of him didn’t want to bring Greg into this and kept holding his finger in place whenever it hovered over his lockscreen. He was sixteen now, he didn’t need someone to fix these kinds of things for him anymore, he told himself.
The truth was, he didn’t know if he could move his fingers well enough to dial his father, let alone text him. There was a sharp, persistent pain in the joints all over his body, but his hands were a particularly dangerously painful place. The pain in his spine was almost enough to blacken his vision, too. He didn’t let it.
Getting back home had been fine – not good, definitely not good, but okay at least. His head was woozy and he could feel a stomach ache slowly making its way to him, but nothing hurt too bad. But the moment that he had set the gems down his knees gave out and he barely managed to flop himself down on the soft cushions of his couch without banging his head on the wall behind him.
So, he was just sitting on his sofa. There was a giant machine that didn’t look friendly at all, not even half a kilometer away from him, a gem of a person who tried to kill him and his family was lying right before him. He should definitely do something, at least move from his seat, if nothing else.
He just couldn’t find the strength to do anything.
However, somehow, a bit irritatingly, within seconds, his body brought out the energy it had hidden somewhere. He was moving before he could even register anything else – or, rather, before his nerves tell him that there was a pain blooming in his midsection that was almost strong enough to steal his breath away.
His spine bends, his muscles shift and he curls up around himself, as if he can protect himself from the pain. His body’s reflexes and efforts are useless, in the end, because the pain isn’t coming from outside him. It’s not the cries of a wound or anything of that sort. Strangely, it’s not even his muscles or guts that are torturing him so.
It’s his gem.
The cry of its agony is different than what he’s used to hearing from his human flesh – it burned far more, like a thousand suns, and while his human body’s pain swirled around and danced to a terrible sort of melody, his gem was a hard, determined thrum, piercing his nerves. Like his whole body was being bombarded with sea urchins.
It almost felt like it was burning his flesh, like it was a lightning bolt stuck between his skin and his guts, begging to be let out. Through all the pain, he scrambled and gripped at it, fingers sliding off of its smooth surface and settling where gem met skin. He didn’t think anything through, he just knew that if he didn’t rip it out of his body now he’d get burned alive.
After what felt like a torturous forever, the gem slipped out of his belly with what would’ve been a sickening ‘pop’ if he wasn’t in such agony. It clanged against the wooden floor, sliding all the way over to the counter.
He just stared at it. The severity of the situation clicked in his brain after a few moments. He felt his heart drop in his chest, probably all the way down to the place where his gem should have been.
He waited for the fatigue, braced himself for even more sickness, but it didn't come. The only thing that did is something near a panic attack, but Steven tends to bring those upon himself with little external help.
He didn’t slow down his breathing, even as the corners of his vision faded into black – it didn’t really matter, since he couldn’t see through the tears that welled up in his eyes, anyways.
He needs to get to his gem. He needs to be whole again. He can’t. He can’t move his fingers, he can’t move his legs, he can’t move. He can only listen to his breathing getting faster and faster and he can stare at a crucial part of his body, sewered and laying what seems like miles away from him.
He was panicking. The room was silent.
And the gem started to glow.
Steven gasped as it floated into the air, flickering here and there. It took the shape of Pink diamond – she was surprisingly tall, compared to everything in Steven’s home, he realized as her feet floated more than a meter above the ground – and he could feel a smile growing on his lips, just as he could feel tears of joy joining those of sadness and pain in his eyes.
His other half is almost here. He’ll come and save him.
The gem shifted its bright form into what he knew to be the outline of Rose quartz. He was just one form away from him. Any moment now…
But the light didn’t shift any further.
Rose’s feet floated down to the ground. Steven’s heart dropped the moment the gem started to dim.
The light faded away. He couldn’t breathe – he didn’t know if it’s because of his whole ‘separated’ situation, or because of the person standing in front of him.
Because there, just a few steps in front of him, blinking at the strangely familiarly unfamiliar world around her stood the one and only leader of the Crystal gems as well as the deceased dictator of a fourth of all of Homeworld.
“Steven?”
He was pretty sure that he'd lost his voice. He couldn’t find it. He didn’t know where it went. Maybe it ran away in fear.
“What happened,” Rose asked. Her eyes scanned the room briefly before she took a good look at her son. Steven could see her eyes widening but that’s the last thing he could manage to do before she started rushing over to him.
She kneeled down in front of him and took his free, achy hand in hers without asking. “Are you alright? Oh, darling, you look horrible–” she fretted.
She threw her arms around Steven.
Somehow, she smelled faintly of roses. She was soft, bright and even though he was sure that this would make everything better, Steven’s insides churned and stirred more and more with each moment that her pale skin was pressed against his huddled, shaking form. His hand opened from the shock and his phone landed with a light thud on the floor.
“Don’t– don’t touch me.”
The lightness left. Rose’s eyes shined with something torn between worry and hurt. “Steven… what… What’s wrong?”
He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. He looked at his phone briefly, just to check that it was still there. It was fine – the screen didn’t crack and it looked alright from where he was sitting. The only problem was that it lay all the way below the coffee table and he could barely move his jaw to speak, let alone–
Something warm touched his hand. He looked down, expecting danger, only to find that there were drops of water scattered on the back of his wrist. He watched silently as the water sunk into his skin and as flowers of pure light seemed to bloom beneath it.
He looked up again, at the gem still sitting in front of him. Her eyes glistened even brighter, the pink of her lips more opaque. From this close up, Steven could see the blurry outline of diamonds in Rose’s earthy brown eyes.
She looked up at him, too, and smiled a bit. The room was so quiet that you could probably hear a pin drop, the air thick with tension and anticipation and fear so raw that it could be cut with a knife.
Her smile faltered after a few seconds. “Why don’t you look better?”
“Why don’t I…” Steven started to laugh. He couldn’t stop himself, even as each bark and each wheeze of his lungs sent fireworks of pain shooting through his body. It was a broken sound, even to his ears, desperate and mad. “I ripped my own gem out of my body so you could exist, I saw my family die right in front of my eyes again, I can’t feel my feet over all of the pain, a whole half of me is gone and you want me to look better?”
“You– Steven –” Rose stuttered, looking far more terrified than he ever imagined her to be. The fear didn't look good on her. “I just don’t understand. My tears should heal you, no matter what injury you’ve undergone.”
Steven, still trying to calm himself down and not drown in the sea of pain that his burst of laughter had thrown onto him, wasn’t quite sure what to do. His instincts – his rather new ones, he might add – urged him to roll his eyes. But, as most of his brain tried to process Rose’s words so he could reply, he felt his fingers and tongue freeze up again.
Rose couldn’t heal him. There was no injury, not really.
There was just a massive gaping hole in his being. His literal other half was gone, maybe forever, because this hadn’t happened back while he was in White’s head, and he didn't know why it happened, but Steven – the other part of Steven – is just gone and–
“I can’t help you, can I?” Rose asked. Strangely, it sounded less like a question and more like a confession. Something far closer to sadness than the mix of fear and confusion that had been there up until now swelled up in her eyes.
Rose slid down onto the floor, her hair and dress sliding along with her, crumpling by the sofa’s feet. She looked like the evening sky, blown apart by a strong gust of wind. Clouds, pink from the setting sun, ruffled and ethereal.
Steven, despite the ocean of what must've been nearly all of the emotions he’s ever felt that churned in his guts, angered by the pain that just kept growing and growing, couldn’t tear his eyes away from her. Away from her pale skin, the soft curve of her shoulders – the kind that he recognized from his own reflection in the mirror.
They just sat there in the silence. The ocean’s soft humming reached them, along with the singsong melody of the summer breeze.
The sun was shining outside, bright and strong as ever, and yet Steven almost felt like he was floating in his bubble through space again. Lost. Doomed. Lonely.
There was an empty hole where half of his heart used to be, something that he’s had all his life, that grounded him in ways he never thought to miss before ripped away from him and lost. A sense, one just as important as sight or hearing, stolen from him. An entire language he’d known since childhood, gone.
He was alone. With no hope of surviving.
Except that he wasn’t. Not quite.
“I can’t help anyone, can I?”
There was something too real in his mother’s voice. Not raw – no, just real. The barrier of time and space that kept her separated from his world had shattered, the illusion of a ghost, haunting him on his every step, washed away. Now, a real, genuine person sat beside him. Now, his anger and love and hate and adoration and everything that he ever thought of Rose changed. He still wasn’t sure if for better or for worse, but it changed into something far more material
“I never could. That’s–”
“Why I’m here,” Steven finished for her. That was the one thing he came to find out during the past few years. That she was irresponsible and childish enough to leave him here just so he could deal with everything that she messed up for her.
“No.” Rose leveled him with a strong, almost harsh look. “That’s why I couldn’t bring you into a world where you could just be… happy.”
“You thought that I could ever be happy?” ‘As a half-human-half-gem with one very human father and three - well, sometimes four – hurting and traumatized gems for a family? When each gem that came down to Earth wanted to kill me for things I never even thought of doing? When the entirety of your legacy was a bloody war and a kingdom that you were too brash to rule?’
“I hoped so,” she admitted. “I knew that you might have to deal with… everything… But I also knew that the Earth’s time might’ve been running out. Although I didn’t know when Yellow expected the cluster to emerge, not exactly, at least, I knew that it would be soon. Too soon for my liking. And I wanted you to experience at least some of what the Earth had to offer…” she trailed off.
They fell into a deep silence again. Rose seemed conflicted. Steven had no idea what he wanted to say, now that Rose had taken care of her part of the conversation.
Not that there weren’t any words coming to his mind, but he couldn’t decide which ones he truly meant. Did he want to beg his mother – or, well, beg Rose. He wasn’t quite sure if the term mother aligned with the person he knew Rose to be even after learning so much about her – for something, yell at her for all the pain her decisions had brought him, ask her about… anything and everything, really?
He struggled to think, trying to find his way through the endless sentences and emotions and jolts of pain that coursed through his bones, but in the end, he settled for this: “What are you doing here?”
Rose’s mouth tensed. She opened it a few times, closed it when she couldn’t find her own words. “I’m not sure. All I can remember is - is Greg, all the way back before you, a bright light. And then the flashes – the gems, standing around you while you were eating something sweet and cold, a girl with dark hair and round glasses, sipping from a juice box, my – our – no, your Lion, a pink boy with a glowing skull imprinted on his chest… and then it was like I’d swum above the surface of something. I could finally see, hear, feel. I was here.”
She looked at the world around her once again, her gaze lingering on the warp pad and the door behind it. “I was home.”
Steven looked at her, too. Studied her like he used to study his hands in all those dreams – and nightmares – he had after learning about his true heritage. Back when he couldn’t quite tell if his hands were truly his own, or if they were his mother’s and if it made any difference. Searching and searching, glaring as if he could find out some crucial detail he overlooked, waiting for an epiphany to just spring into his mind.
“And what about Homeworld?” he tried. “Do you remember anything about the time I went to Homeworld?”
Rose stopped to think. “I remember my Homeworld. The halls, the spires, the thrones. The tower. Blue, Yellow, White. The hollowness. I remember the last time I was on Homeworld, my last appearance as a Diamond. But…” she paused, looked up at Steven again with her deep doe eyes. Something a bit akin to surprise flashed through their dark, rich magenta when she saw the way Steven clung to whatever words might leave her rosy lips next, like his life depended on them. Like she wasn’t quite expecting someone to expect much from whatever thoughts she had to offer that weren’t just below the surface of her mind.
“All I remember about your Homeworld is the fear and then the snap.” She spoke slowly, her voice trudging through the memories carefully, as if she could only see the memories through a thick fog. “The sharpness, the danger. The cold,” she said, pointedly looking at the dark beneath Steven’s eyes, the shaky rise and fall of his chest, “ and finally the joy.”
“I remember the laughter and the love. I remember that you – both of you – were so unbelievably at peace with yourself.”
So she knew – one of the only two people other than White to know and she wasn’t even properly there. She knew about the separation and about his re-fusing. Even despite the terror that having half of his being forcibly removed from him brought, it was still one of his fonder memories – in a strange, tad twisted way. He didn’t exactly love the sight of his family acting like soulless puppets, or the knowledge of impending doom as White drew her awfully pointy terrible nail towards his revealed gem.
But the thing that came afterwards…
He loved the reunion. There was something so brilliant about finally seeing who he was, finally getting to know who he was, about being able to look himself – or, at least a big part of himself – in the eyes and just know that this was who he was always meant to be. Who he always was. There was a sort of unimaginable magic in becoming whole again – in learning how to feel, watching color and love and emotion bleed into the world with a single touch of the hand, as well as in learning how to not hurt, finding the logic in the chaos that his emotions would be on their own.
The magic of being Steven Universe.
And, yeah, the whole thing hurt like hell. And it was pretty traumatizing, he supposed. And he did have nightmares about it for – well, he’d been having them up until then (the latest one interrupted his sleep just a week ago.), but they were never about the end. They were about the pain, the loneliness. And, more often than not, about watching his gem float in the air and reform as the person who had somehow haunted him all his life.
But it gave him something to cling to. Later, when he was travelling from galaxy to galaxy with his distant family, checking in with all the ex-colonies and spreading peace, freedom and love all throughout the universe, when he was rarely called anything else than ‘Pink diamond’ by most gems he met, the knowledge that he was himself helped him stay sane and safe. Without it, he wasn’t sure if he wouldn’t get lost in his own thoughts. If he could still separate himself from his mother.
In a way, he was glad.
His mother had given him so much to deal with and took away so many opportunities. But she couldn’t steal this from him.
She couldn’t force him to be her when he knew he was himself.
“And then?” he said, hopeful, though he didn’t quite know what he was hoping for.
“Then I was here,” Rose admitted. Her voice was plagued with something like shame, guilt, sadness, or frustration – he wasn’t sure. Her emotions were somehow all too familiar, and yet he couldn’t figure out the right way to read them.
He almost got to the point where he’d feel guilty himself. She just reformed and so many places where her memories should be were empty. She must’ve been alone for a while now and Steven actively wanted her to be even more lost? She was his own mother, for someone’s sake! On his particularly bad nights, he wanted her to see everything he did so she could be proud of him –
A mighty, painful cough pierced through his lungs and clawed out his throat. He could feel his body shake, the terrible turmoils setting his nerves on fire. He was sure that he was burning, there was no other way to possibly explain why he was so unbearably hot.
And, the thing is, he felt the same way back in White’s head. To the human part of Steven, loneliness was a heat that rivaled the sun’s surface. Loneliness was a long afternoon at home at the beginning of august, hot showers after a day without the gems or his dad, microwaved meals that burnt his tongue upon the first bite. Loneliness was pain.
Rose, who leaned back towards him, didn't do much to ease the burning. Her hair swayed as she moved and the air swum with her, following her every move, but Steven still felt like he was drowning in lava.
“Is there really nothing I can do?” she asked, a whisper of pain hidden in her voice. “What’s wrong? Please, Steven, tell me what needs to be fixed,” she pleaded, taking hold of his hand again, even despite his previous protests.
The touch was mild. Not cold, not quite the reprieve Steven’s gem half’s near-frost was, but it still offered a bit of peace to the blood that boiled in his arm’s veins. It was almost like the slight chill crept upwards from where she held him, its thorny stems carefully wrapping around his skin.
Steven didn’t let his anger burn the calm away. Whatever his mother messed up, he couldn’t worry about it now. He had to stay alive, get rid of the massive injector above his roof, get back the gems and fix everything else – getting lost in the mess that his feelings were was not on his agenda. He couldn’t figure out a schedule that he could shove it into and still manage everything else if he tried.
“I think…” he started, not really surprised at the way his voice stayed a whisper even when he urged it not to be. “I need my gem back. Not– not you, I need–’’ he struggled to find his name. “I need pink Steven.” He really hoped that she would know what he’s talking about.
Rose looked down at her – their? – gem. Its glossy pink surface shimmered a bit in the light that streamed through the large windows of the room.
“You mean you need me to become you?” she tried, clearly a tad confused. “And there is no other way to help you? Maybe we need something stronger than my healing tears to–”
“No,” Steven hushed her. “I’m not hurt. My body just can’t function when half of it is missing. You’d have to keep crying on me for forever so my heart won’t stop beating or my lungs are going to collapse or- or something,” he said, a bit of guilt somehow snaking its way into his voice. What exactly he felt bad for now, he wasn’t sure. Maybe it was because Rose was just trying her best to help and he kept shutting her down.
He wasn’t sure why he was being so easy to sway along with some emotion that he wasn’t really even supposed to be feeling. All he knew was that he had to ask Connie if this is how she felt the week before her period starts and also that he needed to be Steven again.
“How do I do that?” she asked, looking up at his face again. “I’m sorry, I… I don’t know how.”
Steven tried thinking. “Maybe you could try shapeshifting? I mean, you could hold the form you have now almost permanently, maybe–”
“I don’t believe that that would work,” she cut him off for a change. He could tell that she wanted to say something more, but to his surprise, her body started glowing.
He watched as her gem floated to the ground (he didn’t really realize that she was this tall before, even just as Rose) and as her hand, bright and cold, shrunk on his own trembling one until it was the same size.
When the light finally settled down, he sat face to face with a far pinker version of himself. He could feel his heart skip a beat – in the good way, too! He was here! Oh, now all they needed to do was fuse, an easy-peasy task, and then they can be Steven again! They both grew so much since they last saw each other, but that didn’t matter, they were still themselves–
Pink Steven opened his eyes.
– except that they weren’t.
“This is how he’s supposed to look, right?” Rose asked. Her diamond eyes burned into his soul. Her voice, coming out of the mouth that was meant to be his, terrifying him beyond what is translatable to words.
It was like the time Amethyst shapeshifted to look like Rose, back on that one New year’s eve. Except different.
Maybe a bit worse.
He hadn’t seen his mother in his nightmares often back then. Becoming her and still being her – he’s had more dreadful dreams about that than even peridot could ever count.
“This isn’t working, is it?” Rose asked. Before he could do anything about it, her hand started glowing again.
“No, no– don’t!” he shrieked as she turned back into her own form. His chance at being whole was gone. Rose reemerged in his vision as a blur of pink and white, hidden behind his tears.
“Please, please just turn back!” he tried begging. “I– We can try fusing like that! I know that it’ll work!”
“No, Steven, it won’t,” she leveled with him, her big hand moving up his arm, easing the heat as it moved, before it settled on his shoulder. Just an insignificant and tiny – compared to the entirety of the universe, the distance that he’s travelled in his life – smidge away from his weak heart. “It can’t work.”
“Why not?” he asked, doing his best to stop himself from snapping at her. Oh, stars, he was being so moody, what’s gotten into him?!
“Because I won’t be you,” she admitted.
“But– but you can be both Pink diamond and Rose quartz! How is this any different?”
“Steven, I could take on the form of Rose, could appear like her and not crack under the pressure of the change because I was her. The first few times I appeared as her, I admit, I wasn’t really Rose yet. I wasn’t myself yet– I had to become that person so I could be that person,” she explained calmly. Then she thought about the stuff she said. Then she frowned a bit. “Does that make sense?’’
Steven couldn’t say that it did. But, then again, neither would it make sense to Rose if he explained his own gem-related situation.
A bright, searing pain erupted in his side – this time, it really was his own human body. Something inside him was already disagreeing with the lack of energy that his gem brought him and, though he wasn’t an expert, he was, like, 20% sure that one of his organs was failing to function.
He wanted to yell – scream at the top of his lungs in hopes of getting rid of the pain, at least for a few seconds. He, oddly enough, wanted to laugh, too.
For the first time in… ever, he was actually right beside his mother – unless this was a really vivid fever dream. He hoped it wasn’t. If only because that meant that he wasn’t wasting time sleeping right now and could do stuff – and after sixteen years of wishing to speak with her for at least a minute, he spent the past ten minutes moping about and whining about the pain he was in.
He had a chance to tell his mother everything that he wanted, could maybe even give her a hug. Even if he did tell her not to touch him just a few moments ago. He had the perfect chance – and yet…
Here he was, almost sure that he was dying, begging her to be someone she wasn’t.
Even if she did, in a way, take that someone away from him.
“I–”
“We could try fusing anyway,” Rose cut him off. “Maybe I won’t be the perfect replacement, but I think that if we were together that way, I could at least give you some energy. Maybe we could even keep you up and about until the other gems come back. Then we can figure out some better solution.” She held his hand close to her chest. “Together.”
Steven found himself nodding, albeit a bit reluctantly.
It’ll be better this way.
She placed a soft kiss on the crown of his head, and whispered a final few words into his soft curls: “I love you.”
Then there was light.
And then Steven found his body with a few less aches than before. He didn’t feel perfect, but it was hardly worse than if he woke up after a rough summer night of tossing and turning in bed for who knows how long, unable to fall asleep. Nothing he couldn’t handle.
He still didn’t feel fine. His whole being felt off, like a part of him was replaced with something similar, but not what he was used to, and there was a different type of power coursing through his veins, both human and light-made. Something paler than what he was meant to feel like.
He took a deep breath in and reached for the phone below the coffee table in front of him. He noticed that, in the few moments that she was here, Rose must’ve accidentally knocked into the table. Ruby and Sapphire’s gems were lying further apart than they did before, Ruby’s laying right next to the keys from his Dondai.
He unlocked his phone and found his dad’s contact info. He took one more breath to steady himself and pressed the green dial button.
As his phone rang, he tried to think of what he would say. He definitely needed to ask his dad for help, but maybe he should leave explaining the situation and the way the gems got poofed for later? It might be too complicated to explain over the phone like that.
And Rose. That whole debacle is definitely too lengthy and confusing to explain right at that moment. Plus, he didn’t even really know what happened – he shouldn’t worry Greg with that now. He’ll have plenty of time to tell his family later, when there wasn’t a giant (possibly) doomsday device right above his head.
(Just like he ‘told’ them all about what happened in White’s head.)
“Hey schtu-ball! What’s up?” Greg asked from the other side of the line.
All that mattered now was getting the gems back, figuring out what to do about that other gem and saving the day. Hopefully, nothing won’t go wrong and he won’t have to think about what Rose’s appearance meant until after all this.
“Hey dad,” Steven said in a voice what was his and yet still sounded eerily different.
When Greg came over, a few minutes later, he was too distraught to even notice the new, pale, embroidered rose on the back of Steven’s favorite jacket.