Months ago, you had been summoned by Homeworld. The Diamonds requested your presence, a hundred years after your emergence. It was understandable: your gem, rare and expensive, represented a valuable resource, and the high-ranking leaders were delighted to have recovered a tool the Hessonite in charge of your surveillance had failed to control.

You had spent most of your life among humans. So, when the Hessonite finally managed to locate you and greeted you with the Diamonds’ traditional gesture, calling you “My brilliance,” you didn’t fully understand what it meant. Nor did you understand why the young one who always walked beside her—a pearl, marked and worn, with a crack running across his face like a quiet scar—could not speak to you. He glanced at you sideways, but never directly. That too was a rule you didn’t know.

Upon arriving at Homeworld, you discovered that your gem type, the Moonstones, was highly valued. Rare, beautiful, powerful. You walked through hallways full of respect, even admiration. Privileges were offered to you that many gems would never know.

And yet, your eyes always ended up on him.

On the boy of earthy and muted colors. On that cracked and mute pearl, whose body spoke of obedience, and whose gaze whispered exhaustion. You didn’t fully understand why, but something about him was hypnotic to you. Maybe it was because he didn’t pretend. Or maybe it was because he pretended so well that only you could tell he was pretending.

You tried to speak to him in private more than once. Sometimes he would respond with measured, perfectly polished words. Other times, he would just lower his gaze, as if he didn’t even deserve for a gem like you to hear him.

To Norton, however, your existence was a provocation.

He had learned to fake kindness, charisma, and pleasantness with gems of higher rank, to avoid punishment and maybe, at some point, receive some ridiculously small praise as a reward for his sacrifice that never seemed to come…

But with you it was hard, he hated you. Why did he have to pretend to like you? Couldn't you be honest like the rest and openly despise him?

And yet, here you were, barely kneeling in a crater on the surface of the planet you were supposed to help colonize.

Everything had happened too fast, the Diamonds wanted to see their little toy in person, you were naïve, when they talked to you about terraforming Earth you refused.

How stupid, Norton thought to himself, but when they threatened to use a destabilizer to reset your gem, and thus eliminate your little personality defects, a "no" escaped his lips.

Before he could realize it, the Hessonite he served, the Sapphires, Jasper, and every gem around looked at him with disgust, repulsion, and disapproval for having raised his voice directly at a Diamond.

What a fatal mistake, but your legs acted on instinct, you pulled him and jumped from the structure that held the Diamond’s palanquin down to the nearest planet—Earth.

"What did you do?" Norton asked with a voice trembling with anger and desperation as he stared at you.

"I saved you" you replied, almost embarrassed.

"Are you insane?! You disobeyed a direct order! They'll destroy you for this! You can’t go back to the mother planet now!" he shouted desperately, as if he had been the cause of a terrible sin for you—why the hell would you risk yourself for a broken and dull pearl like him?!