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There were two Pearls after Rose Quartz gave up her physical form to give birth to Onion.
There was the default Pearl, the personification of grace and precision honed to an edge on countless battlefields. You couldn’t take your eyes off of her because you didn’t dare. She was the often feared, often admired renegade legend of the war for Earth. As a friend and ally, she was a bottomless source of comfort. When threatened, she was ice on fire, and she was amazing.
Then there was the Pearl that showed up when Onion got one of his wild hairs. Everything about her—her appearance, her gait, even the timbre of her voice—went a little lopsided, like a gelatin dessert that came out of the mold too soon. During the last flare-up, she actually tripped over a chair for the first time since the English Civil War.
Apparently she was very entertaining in this state, but for obvious reasons she didn’t see the amusing aspect of it.
The crash of glass was doing it to her today. It had been nearly a month since Onion summoned his mother’s shield for the first time. Apparently he was a quick study, because this was the fifth time since daybreak that he’d broken a window with one.
On Garnet’s advice, the Gems had stockpiled panes of glass (although, as with many matters relating to Future Vision, they were just now finding out why) but they’d also come to the decision at some point in the morning that it didn’t make any sense to replace them before their young charge had gotten the impulse to play with his new toy out of his system. Nevertheless, shards of broken glass were shards of broken glass, so Pearl had elected herself as the one-Gem cleanup crew. The vacuum ran for the better part of the day because she kept finding suspicious glints on the floor, each requiring an extra five minutes of cleaning in case they might be painful slivers.
“Take a break, Pearl. Your eyes are starting to glaze over. Double-glazed, even.”
Pearl whipped around a little too quickly, having to steady herself against an empty window pane. She eventually found herself face to face with Amethyst, who had been sitting on the foot of Onion’s bed staring at a busted television while casually tasting a dab of glazing putty. It must’ve needed more salt, because she dropped the container on the floor without a second helping. “Blech. C’mon, P. It's a window joke.”
“Yes, I know what it’s a reference to, but you can just stop that ‘take a rest’ talk right now! I know my limitations."
“Sure you do. You’re about to poof where you’re standing.”
“I AM N...” She leaned in to point a finger at the junior Gem, only to topple forward onto the mattress. “Well, what if I am?” she finished into the foam core.
Amethyst dropped an arm around her exhausted friend. “I tell ya, P. You’re burnin’ all your energy thinking like Pearl, when what you gotta do is start thinking like a pearl onion.”
“But you never explain what that means...”
Before Amethyst had an opportunity to answer, another shattering sound came from downstairs, and she peeked over the lip of the loft for potential damage. Sure enough, she found a young boy standing next to a scattering of broken glass. He was a fair-complexioned child with a shock of pink hair on top of his head, but it was his other inheritance, the outline of a gem poking through the bottom of his shirt, that set off Pearl’s protective nature. A pink shield was sticking out of the remainder of the window, and Onion, realizing he was discovered, gave his guardians an exaggerated shrug.
Pearl tried to pull herself to a standing position, stopped by a gentle push from Amethyst’s pinky finger. “Nuh-uh. You’re not goin’ anywhere. I’m tagging in.” She slapped Pearl’s outstretched palm.
Raising a weary head towards the latest destruction, Pearl sighed. “Just promise me that you won’t eat any of that in front of him. It’s an imitatable act.”
“Roger Wilcox.” Amethyst offered a human-style salute and vaulted to the lower level, transforming into a bicycle cop on the way down. “All right, sir. Keep your hands where I can see them...”
While Onion took a time-out from the morning’s wreckage to recharge with a Guacola, the Crystal Gems convened an impromptu meeting at the kitchen bar. Amethyst had suggested sewing a safety net into the midriff of Onion’s shirts “to catch ‘em when they come”, but while Pearl was speculating about the feasibility of such a fashion disaster, Garnet shot the idea down.
“Focus, Gems. Damage control isn’t enough anymore. As Onion’s powers manifest, he has to learn how to control his impulses. It’s a harder course to take, but you all know the goal. With our guidance, Onion will grow into a unique and powerful leader, but left to his own devices...”
“...He becomes a force of elemental chaos,” Pearl and Amethyst answered in unison, as if it was a well-worn school lesson. Amethyst rolled her eyes. “Yeah, we know , and I’ll say it again. What you call elemental chaos, I call thinking outside the box.”
Pearl wheeled on Amethyst in exasperation, once again turning a little too far in the process. “Well, you can just clean up Onion’s box yourself next time!”
It was a split second between the comment and Amethyst connecting it to the domesticated cats that belonged to her friends in town. As she giggled, Pearl rubbed her temples. She would’ve never left herself wide open like that on a normal day.
Garnet lowered her shades. “You might want to rephrase that.”
Pearl smoothed her tunic and collected herself as best as she could. “Yes, thank you. My point is we all care deeply about our Onion, but as he grows older it’s becoming increasingly evident that my style of instruction...well, it just isn’t working anymore!”
Garnet winced, mainly because what Pearl said wasn’t entirely true, and once they’d worked their way free of this specific moment she would help her friend remember that. However, there’d be plenty of time to deal with that later. “I’ll talk with him. Take five, you two.”
Like a scout helping a grandmother cross the street, Amethyst led Pearl to the sofa, trying to be supportive as the renegade dejectedly mumbled a list of her perceived failures. “I can’t even watch him sleep anymore! He started watching me back!”
Garnet scooped up Onion under his arms and held the boy out in front of her, silently observing him. He stared back. She stared at him and he stared at her, neither making a sound. After a minute of this, Onion finally cracked a small smile and nodded. Garnet smiled back.
“There you go,” she said as she pulled him closer. He hugged her neck and then pushed off of her forearm, hitting the floor and rolling through the “Onion flap” that the Gems installed after he broke the screen on the door for the tenth time.
Pearl knew the human languages of many Earth territories, including long-dead ancient dialects, but whatever just happened—and it had happened several times before—baffled her. Mouth agape, she turned to Garnet. “How did you even do that?”
Garnet shrugged. “We have a rapport.”
Pearl hunched over the coffee table in defeat. “I’ll never know what Rose saw in that fisherman.”
While Pearl busied herself reassembling the house, Onion spent the next half-hour bouncing shields off the cliff wall just below Lighthouse Park. When that lost its novelty, he tried trapping crabs under one. He only had a 50-50 success rate, because although the shield gave him an impressive surface area to play with, it was still as large as he was, so it was awkward to actually handle it.
Onion’s phone vibrated. As he did at least once a day, his father Yellowtail was texting him from offshore, filling his son in about the catch of the day. But when Onion told his father how his day was going, the mood shifted. “We had an agreement about weapons in the house,” he said. “You and I are going to have a long talk about this when I make port. The Gems, too.”
All of it was part of the standard Yellowtail script for when Onion messed up. But his next message was something terrifyingly new.
“I’m starting to think all of this Gem stuff isn’t such a good idea anymore.”
Onion’s eyes went wide in panic. The shield he was sitting on popped, leaving him sprawled on the sand.
When Amethyst found him, he was curled up in a funk. “Heyyyy, Onion Ring. Ya doin’ okay?”
No response.
“Dude, they know you gotta learn these things. Just...y’know, not in the house.”
Onion shook his head without turning around. Amethyst plopped down next to him. “Okay, what’s the deal, Onion peel?”
In response, Onion held the phone over his head. Amethyst grabbed it and made a quick scan of the texts. “Aw, man.” She dropped the phone in the sand. “Dude, don’t even worry about that stuff. Yeah, you goofed. We goofed. But your dad’ll come around once we’re all together again. I mean, come on, Gem stuff is part of who you are. It’s like breathing , and nobody’s gonna ask you to stop doing that, right?”
“Muh muh muh,” Onion replied, rolling over.
“Yeah, you better guess not. Fishtail freaks out over a new thing just ‘cos it’s a new thing, and some people get like that. But he’ll sleep on it and chill out the way he always does. ‘Cos you’re still you, buddy.”
Onion squeezed the purple gem’s hand. “Muh muh.”
Amethyst pulled him in for a hug. “Yeah, love you too.”
When they broke apart, Amethyst faced him with a vaguely conspiratorial glint in her eyes. “So, um...not to make you give away any secrets if you don’t want to, but...how did you and Garnet do that thing?” Onion pantomimed holding something out and just staring at it. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
He leaned in and whispered the answer, and Amethyst cackled. “Whaddya mean you were just being polite?” Onion shrugged. “See? That’s what I’m talking about! You are amazing. Don’t let anybody tell you anything different. So, you wanna go to town?”
He gave her a tight nod.
“You wanna ride the alligator today?”
A thoughtful look into the distance, then he shook head.
“No? Oh, I know one they haven’t seen at Funland. How about...the Sasquatch?” She shapeshifted into a hairy, shambling, and yet somehow goofy and endearingly furry mess, complete with slobbery spit-growls. Onion laughed into his hand as she reached peak monster. “Okay, we got a winner! Just not too long, though. I didn’t do my stretches today.”
As Onion mounted Amethyst’s shoulders for another piggy-back ride guaranteed to terrorize certain parts of the countryside, out of the corner of her eye she caught Pearl and Garnet watching the scene from the deck. She gave the two a nod, and Garnet answered with a thumbs-up. As they turned the corner, Amethyst shouted to her passenger, “Ouch! Don’t pull! That’s still my hair, dude...”
When they were out of sight, Pearl hung her head in exhaustion. “She makes it look so easy.”
Garnet leaned against the railing. “She does have a gift for making it look simple, doesn’t she?” She laid a hand on Pearl’s back. “But she's right. You do need to start thinking like a pearl onion.”
The terrifying renegade collapsed with a groan.