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It's releasing a trapped bird in your stomach, to spew its contents and watching the feathers disperse from the stifling cage, while you are in pain. Hot, excruciating pain that makes you reach for the figure across the room. It — they — he — something stares back, and even though you see nothing but your own pink-hued reflection you feel its absence, crushing your heart, your soul, your everything.
Connie says something, then White says something, and you think even yourself are saying something. The silence echoes like heartbeats in your ears, and this horrendous strain of your molecules blots out the bright shock of viewing your mother's form, then her alter, and finally, you.
It's not time to ask why or how or anything. You need your mother's gem, and no amount of loathing towards its existence — how you've crumpled your shirt with the itch to take it out, to see what happens and to get some sort of answer as to why — is enough to assuage your desire to reach and want.
She's gone.
It's not your words, but it's your voice, and your mouth, that echoes throughout the blank room, thickening the atmosphere. The whisper carries and it lands and simmers into you, into your head and brain that's split into a gaping duo. It talks like it's known this all along; as it looks at you, nothing but you, like you're a universe and there's no one else that needs to hear this.
What did you say? Answer me!
She's GONE.
It hits like a gut punch.
The room quivers and for once, for once you listen to it.
Your mother really isn't here, then. All those moments where you'd wondered where Rose ended and you began... — all of this anger that you tucked away in guilt, guilt, unadultered guilt, because of your worst 'what if's — it releases. It echoes into White, into the Diamonds, into your friends, into the galaxy beyond.
How many times had someone tripped over your own name, had talked to you like she was in there and you were nothing but a messenger. How many blows did you endure for the sake of carrying her legacy, and in such you'd forgotten the possibility of your own? And here as well, when you confront her final parting gift to you — her multi-faced gem — and she is nowhere to be found. Absent. Dead. Gone.
Connie lifts you into her arms and you stumble towards it— her — them — him; you walk together in tremors, to this anonymous being that you can only define as you because it said Rose really and truly cannot exist and it twists in your chest like the realization of broader horizons before you. Because why would you lie to yourself?
White's attempts to seal you/him are futile, and this blinding light that makes you both temporarily stumble is a mere inconvenience for this untamed alter of yourself. Or maybe this is you, Pure Gem-you, and your pleas to stop hurting them are the only thing tying your true capabilities down. This weak human part of you that finds solace in peace rather than war. But, separate, you're imbalanced. You're unwhole. You just didn't realize that the answer would be...well, this.
You finally reach out, and you/he takes you in your/his arms and looks at you with raw, pure energy emited from your gem's power, and nothing - nobody - else underneath its surface.
Two souls, bound to parallel and never exist in the same room. Adrift, unanchored in space. In the absence of one, the other was indeterminate.
It holds you close for comfort, and you smile and laugh and wrap your arms around the shoulders that are yours alone and you fit perfectly.
The laughter burning in your chest and chorusing throughout the chamber is a song and your other half chips in, squeezing you tight.
And then —and then — you dance to a rhythm. Unrehearsed but so, so familiar.
You dance, like something's been removed from your shoulders, and this weariness has no place between you and yourself: this being that you ever dared to question. And now you know — you feel — that this love was descended upon you rather than forced, and you laugh as you twirl and catch one another and the dance isn't explosive like Smokey, or poise like Rainbow, or calculated yet swift like Sunstone, but it's you that trips on the right places, that holds yourself up on your toes and giggles
spinning, spinning and laughing and melting into yourself like starlight and
liquid gold,
and this inexplicable joy that warms your chest as you beam and shine
opalescent, physical love pouring into your veins
like a kiss from a loved one you never met
and when you finally twist into singular entity again your arms wrap around your midsection as a final serenade
because this pain and worry is gone, and there is no more ache in your stomach or your heart. Your mother is gone but she embodies this love you carry, like your father with his humor and songs and his own love that you've carried down, and you understand. That this was you, always you, and there is nothing left but you.
The dance is done and you're nothing new from when you'd started. There was nothing to reform.
Because you already are everything, and you are enough.