What The Gems Do
It’s been so long since the war that Garnet can’t tell which corrupted gems fought with the rebels anymore. The realization sinks in her gut like a heavy stone—separatists, unionists, they all look the same to her now. Corrupted. Dangerous. In need of containment. In truth, she thinks she’s stopped caring about who they used to be a long time ago, and that’s why she’s forgotten. After all, it’s not like the past identities of these gems are doing anything to save or redeem them now
All things considered, it’s really no surprise that Amethyst is the one to bring it up, standing at the edge of the burning room with Pearl and gazing up at the bubbled gems suspended above her head.
“How many more are out there?”
Pearl makes a small sound that is supposed to be disapproval, but in actuality betrays her own interest in the subject. Ever since the rebellion was won, they have been finding and collecting corrupted gems. It’s become their entire existence, up until recently.
Garnet, standing next to the lava pit, adjusts her visor and shifts her weight subtly. “Enough to keep us busy for a while.” In truth, she can only see corrupted gems as they become a problem for humans—it’s what she looks for when she scours the future. She doesn’t have any way of knowing how many are left for them to capture. They don’t even know what percentage of troops took to the corruption to begin with, or why. They don’t understand anything about it, other than the fact that it was Homeworld’s last desperate tactic, and by the end Homeworld hadn’t cared about preserving their own troops as much as crushing the rebel forces once and for all.
Amethyst doesn’t look at Garnet. Her eyes are still on the hovering spheres. There are a lot of them—one-hundred-and-sixty-one, to be precise. “Unless gem armies are smaller than I think, this doesn’t look like enough for us to be even close to done,” she says.
“Amethyst—” Pearl begins, chiding.
“You’re right,” says Garnet, glancing at the one-hundred-and-sixty-one spheres herself. “It’s not.”
Amethyst has been with them for so long that sometimes it’s easy to assume she was also there with them during the war. She wasn’t, though, and her experiences come into sharp contrast with their own when she says, “They’re all so messed up that we can’t tell the difference between who fought for our side or not anymore. Do you think they’ll remember, if we ever fix them?”
It’s a rare day when Amethyst sheds her devil-may-care demeanor enough to talk like this. Garnet has noticed that she’s more apt to ask these kinds of questions now, since her last regeneration. The threat of Homeworld coming back seems to affect her more than she is willing to admit in most moments.
“We’ve tried everything, Amethyst,” says Pearl with a sigh. “Rose tried everything. If Rose couldn’t even save these gems, I don’t think there is much hope for them. Maybe if we could break into Homeworld’s data bases we could find records of some kind of vaccination or cure for this corruption, but even then… Homeworld is so ruthless they might not have even made one.”
“Yeah, but didn’t Steven get farther than Rose ever could when he trained the centipeetle?” Amethyst gestures to the bubbled gem in question. The bag of Chaaaaps! is still floating next to it. “And that was before he had much control over his powers. What if he can do even better now?”
The brilliant thing about Amethyst is the youth of her perspective. She thinks of possibilities that Garnet and Pearl are too jaded for. The more she comes into her own and takes pride and ownership of herself, the more apparent that becomes.
With Steven, the possibilities are endless. He’s like nothing they’ve ever seen before, and likely the only gem-human hybrid that there ever will be.
“Steven’s half human,” says Pearl, gesticulating with splayed fingers. “There’s no way he can accomplish something that Rose failed to do.”
“We don’t know that,” Garnet says. “We can’t assume that being half human will make his powers weaker than they would have been otherwise. There is no precedence for that.”
“But humans are weaker. They aren’t as strong as gems, they get hurt so easily, they need to eat and sleep in order to live, their organic forms get sick and die—”
“P may have a point, G,” says Amethyst with a small grimace.
“We still don’t know that,” Garnet maintains. “Steven is very young. We see him improving daily, which means that he has yet to reach his full potential.”
Pearl begins to say something, but then stops. Finally, after two more false starts, she says, “What makes you so sure, Garnet?”
“I’m not. We simply don’t have enough evidence to conclude with certainty that Steven’s status as a gem-human hybrid makes him inherently weaker than a pure gem. We haven’t seen everything he is capable of, and we might not for a while yet.”
“But you can’t really think it’s possible for him to end up stronger than a pure gem, realistically.”
“He has surprised us before,” says Amethyst, glancing at the centipeedle’s bubble again. “And if Steven can fix all of these guys, we’d have a much bigger advantage against Peridot and Homeworld.”
Pearl rounds on her, hands on her lean hips. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“I’m not on anyone’s side, I’m just saying!”
“There are no sides,” Garnet says firmly. She adjusts her visor again. “We are all on the same team—we are all Crystal Gems—and we need to do our part to believe in Steven.”
This statement gives Pearl pause. “You think there’s something only he can do, don’t you?” she says, a hybrid of concern and skepticism rising in her voice. “Have you Seen something?”
“Nothing certain.” Garnet’s tone is resolute. She will not divulge any more than this.
Pearl knows her well enough to pick up on that, and she sighs. “Well, anyway. Amethyst, what has you so curious about how many corrupted gems are left to begin with?”
“I was just wondering.” Amethyst scuffs the bottom of her white boot against the ruddy stone floor.
“But why? It’s not like you to worry about something like this.”
Amethyst flashes Pearl a sharp look, prickling at what she obviously perceives as an insult (that hadn’t been Pearl’s intent, though, Garnet can tell). Nevertheless, she gestures expansively and says, “Finding and fighting and bubbling these things is, like, all we do. What happens when we run out of corrupted gems? Is that even possible?”
“Oh.” Pearl is stunned, as that thought has clearly never occurred to her. “Well, it would be realistic to assume that there is a finite amount of corrupted gems out there…” She looks to Garnet somewhat anxiously. “Is it possible for us to find them all?”
The Crystal Gems have been collecting and bubbling corrupted gems, as well as reversing their destructive phenomena, for millennia now. Until recently, that’s all they’ve done since winning the rebellion. It’s partially out of obligation—gems made this mess, and it follows that gems should be the ones cleaning it up—and also partially a way of working off the debt they owe the Earth for doing what they have to it (as if something like that could ever truly be repaid). All the same, the process has come to define them, and that’s just as well. After all, what else are three quasi-immortal gems trapped on a single planet going to do with their time?
But who are the Crystal Gems if there are no more corrupted gems to find and fight? What could they possibly do with themselves?
Would finally finishing the five-thousand-year long cleanup project mean that their debt to the Earth has been repaid?
Honestly, Garnet doesn’t know. She can’t decide how to feel about any of it, either.
“Statistically, yes,” Garnet replies.
“Statistically, anything is possible.”
“I don’t like thinking about it,” Amethyst says. “Is that wrong?”
“No,” Garnet says. “You have a right to feel the way you feel, Amethyst.”
“Well, you said we’d still be busy for a while, right Garnet?” Pearl’s voice has gotten tight, like it does whenever she is trying her darndest not to freak out over something. She keeps clasping her fingers together, searching for some kind of comfort. “We haven’t run out of corrupted gems yet, and we probably won’t any time soon. That’s good, right? We still have plenty to do!”
“In the foreseeable future, yes,” Garnet says—and it’s true, as far as that goes, but she can’t shake the unsettled feeling in the pit of her stomach. Amethyst’s musings have shaken them all, even if they won’t all explicitly say so.
“Yeah,” says Amethyst, but her voice is dull and her gaze is on the bubbled gems again. If her expression is anything to go by, then she doesn’t know how to feel. “Great.”