Final
And we're at the last chapter of the Breaking Down series, pretty much (not counting side stories). Sorry for the delay on this one, writer's block has been a pain lately.
…..
“I...I don't even know what else I can say to you,” White finished her tirade, hands held helplessly in the air. “Do you even understand why we're upset?”
“Of course I do,” Rose answered, breaking her long stony silence. “I'm not stupid.”
“I never said you were,” White groaned, massaging her gem setting. “This is a big step, and the public will go crazy with gossip, but I just don't know what else to do.”
Rose's eyes flickered towards the images on the holo-screen. It looked like a nice enough place; all green and blue, full of organic life, packed with nutrients and minerals to sustain a few hundred gems. A lovely little planet to send a Diamond into exile.
Of course, they weren't calling it exile.
And what else could they reasonably do? With two gems shattered, one suspected to be corrupted, and a fellow Diamond receiving extensive patching because her co-ruler had attacked her...they couldn't lock her in iso-pod, and a lesser gem could well be executed for Rose's deeds. She was getting off easy.
“If I could just see Blue...” Rose began tentatively. Her healing tears, she hadn't mentioned them, but it was worth...
“She doesn't want to see you,” White cut her off tersely. “Neither does Yellow. They're pretty disgusted.”
“I could say the same,” Rose shot back. “None of this would have happened if Blue hadn't been spying on me.”
“Spying? What are you talking about?”
“She sent gems to my apartment to scan my files,” Rose bit out. “She was talking to Emerald behind my back...she had my pearl taken into custody and tortured!”
White raised an eyebrow at the word 'tortured' and sighed deeply.
“That wasn't Blue,” she said quietly. “That was me.”
Rose was gobsmacked. White was the last gem she would have expected to have been behind all of this. Alabaster had always been laid-back, almost lazy, except when things were serious.
“Why?” she struggled to say.
“We were worried about you,” White told her. “You've been acting off for so long...we thought maybe you were worried you'd been infected or something. Emerald came to us and said you'd been asking a lot of questions about zoatoxes...and with the explosions you can see why we'd be worried. Emerald went to Blue to ask if you'd been feeling okay.”
Rose felt sick. Emerald had been a monster, that much wasn't up for debate, but she had been Rose's friend and on some level cared about her.
“I ordered your pearl to be taken into custody, just temporarily to see if it had any useful information,” White continued. “I gave orders that it wasn't to be damaged, I trusted the matter to Emerald, but you know what Amethysts are like when they get carried away....I am sorry they ruined it. I'll pay for a new one.”
“I don't want a new one,” Rose muttered, feeling the sting of the it as though she were Pearl.
“Fine,” White hissed. “Your shuttle is leaving in three cycles. You'll have to say your goodbyes fast.”
Rose nodded. There was only one goodbye that was even important.
But, as she was grimly making her way to Sodalite's hideout, she realized that she wouldn't be saying goodbye at all. Pearl was coming with her, consequences be damned.
…..
“Rose!”
Sodalite was so taken aback by her arrival she didn't even disguise her surprise.
“I thought you would have been gone by now,” she said a moment later, calm completely restored.
“I've got half a quadrant,” Rose told her. “Why didn't you message me to let me know you'd moved again?”
Rose already knew the answer. It had crept up on her as she spent the last three cycles going over and over what she knew. She had been so blinded in her mistrust of her fellow Diamonds, and so wrapped up in her love affair with Pearl that she had completely missed what was staring her right in the face.
It took looking over Emerald's records before she turned to realize that she had seen Emerald's newest pearl before. In Sodalite's lab. She had disguised it well, but Rose had unconsciously become familiar with a pearl's mannerisms thanks to her intimacy with Pearl. Each one was unique, in movement if not in look. And somewhere along the line Rose had picked up a little gesture-speak.
Sodalite put up an effortlessly cool front, though inside she was probably fuming.
“I didn't think you'd want to make it down here so soon before you left,” she said calmly. “I know you're busy...”
“I'm taking Pearl,” Rose cut her off, marching past her to the lab room.
“Sure, okay,” Sodalite said, hurrying after her. “But could you give me some time? She's prepped for surgery.”
“What surgery?” Rose snapped, throwing open the door.
Sure enough, Pearl was sitting on the operating table, waiting for Sodalite. When she saw Rose her whole form lit up from the inside out, and Rose felt euphoric at the sight of her, like she'd been in pieces before and suddenly pulled back together.
“I came into some new equipment, more accurate pliers,” Sodalite answered. “I was going to remove the broken stem from the spike in her gem. I've already injected her with the numbing agent, it won't take long.”
Pearl's face didn't change, and she barely moved, but the little movement she did make was as clear to Rose as though she had screamed the words at her.
She's lying!
Rose had read the pearl manual from page to page multiple times, going over everything she possibly could. The numbing agent was applied to keep pearls still while their subspace was artificially activated; Sodalite would just have to reduce her to gem form to take out the stem. But she would need the numbing agent to pack Pearl full of explosives.
“Where are all the other pearls?” Rose asked.
Sodalite's facade cracked, just a little. She scowled, and then smiled.
“I found new homes for them all, would you believe,” she answered.
“No, I don't believe.”
“I had a feeling you wouldn't,” Sodalite sighed. “What do you want?”
“I want Pearl, I'm taking her back,” Rose told her. “And I want to know why.”
“Why?” Sodalite laughed. “Why not? I mean, I never really planned it like this. I wanted one upper-class gem to lend me a pearl to experiment with, I just got lucky that it happened to be you. Everything else just sort of...happened.”
“It just happened?” Rose hissed. “Almost a hundred gems are dead! The entire population of Homeworld are living in fear!”
“It's a result,” Sodalite shrugged, infuriatingly calm. “It's interesting how quickly it all falls apart, isn't it? So much for the impenetrable gem wall.”
“You killed all those pearls to satisfy some sick curiosity?”
“Oh no,” Sodalite laughed softly. “That would make me a monster. Those pearls wanted to die. There was no way they could live with themselves once their spikes were out, they were too far gone...”
“That's not for you to say,” Rose snarled. “You didn't even try to help them, did you?”
“Believe me, Rose, there was no helping them. They wanted to die, and they wanted to take out as many gems as they could on the way out. They were pushing each other out of the way to get the Emerald mission.”
It was too much to take in. Rose's shield formed itself with a bare effort from her, poised and ready. But Sodalite just laughed.
“You can't kill me, Rose,” she sighed. “They'd know it was you. Your shield imprints on your victims, you know that.”
She was right. All gems left weapon traces; it was how they knew she had killed Emerald's corrupted form. She couldn't even claim self-defence, Sodalite had made no move to summon her own weapon.
“Exile's a pretty good deal,” Sodalite told her in an infuriatingly friendly tone. “One more good explosion, and I'll stop. You can leave with a clear conscience.”
“NO!”Rose bellowed, slamming her shield down threateningly. “You're not taking her!”
“Rose, come on,” Sodalite sighed. “How are you going to stop me without shattering me? And in any case, why do you think she'd want to go with you? You know what those Amethysts did to her, and it was your fault they got her in the first place...”
Sickening, but it was true. Sodalite may have been causing merry havoc, but Rose had left Pearl vulnerable. Why would she even want anything to do with Rose? Rose's knees buckled, and her shield lowered. Sodalite allowed herself a smug little grin...
...it stayed on her face, glued fast, as her gem cracked in the middle, splintered, and the sharp end of something long and metal burst through the very core of her being. She gasped once, reached for her throat to clutch at the foreign object that was skewering her, before her mass dissolved and the broken shards of her gem fell to the floor like rain.
The numbing agent was still very much affecting Pearl; the strafing pole seemed to be welded to her hands. Somehow, while Sodalite and Rose had been trading words, she had gotten down from the table, found the pole and used it to decisively shatter Sodalite's gem. She stood rooted to the spot, clutching her improvised weapon, staring up at Rose.
Rose's shield fell away, she hardly noticed it clatter to the floor, and she gathered up Pearl in her arms, stiff and rigid as she was. She rained kisses and words down on her, apologies, gratitude, words of love...
...and a promise never to leave her behind again.
…..
“We've found a suitable spot, your grace,” the Kunzite in charge of the project told her after just twelve cycles on the planet. “It's a canyon on the upper hemisphere...conditions are great for Amethyst planting.”
“Go right ahead then,” Rose told her sweetly. “I'll leave it in your capable hands.”
Time moved so differently on the blue planet. A cycle was a full rotation and the light and dark came so quickly it left them breathless. It was beautiful, so varied and teeming with life, bright and dim and warm and frigid and wet and dry all at once.
It was so beautiful, it seemed a shame to let anyone miss it. It would be gone soon enough, when the nutrients had been sucked from the soil. Three cycles since they had landed, and Pearl hadn't seen any of it.
In fact, Pearl had seen nothing since leaving Homeworld. Rose had smuggled her onto the ship and put her down in her own rest pod, and Pearl had been there ever since, not moving, not speaking, not doing anything other than staring at her hands.
Rose knew she was shaken by all that had gone on, it was impossible not to be. She had expected Pearl to cry or scream for her murdered brethren (Rose refused to believe the other pearls had chosen their deaths of their own volition) and she understood when Pearl cringed away from her touch. But the silence and the stillness was concerning.
She knew enough gesture-speak to recognize that the movements of Pearl's hands were repeating the word dead over and over again.
Rose approached her from the front (approaching her from behind would cause her to jump violently and shake until sundown) and signalled that she wanted to talk.
“I want to show you something,” she said, as pleasantly as she could. “Will you come with me?”
For a moment it looked like Pearl would refuse, as she had done all the other times Rose had asked, but to Rose's surprise she nodded. Delighted, Rose escorted her out of the ship and onto the soil for the first time.
They had landed near the ocean, and it was a short walk from the ship to the coast. Rose had left her feet bare to sink into the sand pleasantly. The brilliant blue of the water reached up to the sky, or so it seemed. Homeworld had not had large bodies of water in millennia, it was incredible to see. The waves shimmered in the evening sun, the sky daubed in glorious streaks of red and orange and purple.
“Isn't it beautiful here?” Rose sighed, sitting down on a sandbank. “It's been such a short time, but I already feel like I could stay here forever...”
She glanced over at Pearl, but Pearl wasn't even looking at the water. Her hands were digging into the sand, and for the first time since they'd left Sodalite's remains she looked....tranquil? She gathered up a handful of sand and watched it trickle gently into her palm. Rose was reminded of her attachment to the barrels of lead granules back home. Anything that took her out of her own head was good.
She was the only pearl on the ship. The terraforming crew was mostly made up of a mishmash of troublemakers and rabble rousers, a few rogue Jaspers, some Kunzites that had been caught experimenting out of bounds, a whole stockade of Rubies, and none of them warranted a pearl of their own, even a smuggled one.
An awful dread trickled over Rose from time to time, when she found herself thinking too hard about what had gone on.
I've ruined her life.
But she had been given a second chance to make a life with Pearl, on this planet. If she could make it up to her, she would never stop trying. She would make her happy again, someday. Even if it took the rest of her life.