“Hey dudes, whatcha doin'?” Amethyst called suddenly, breaking me out of my shock as I watched her approach. She was holding a little plastic cup with a piece of something that looked like a burrito inside. Amethyst threw the cup, plastic and all, in her mouth and chewed. “What’s with the look on your… faces…” Amethyst’s sentence broke off as she took in the spots on Mo’s arms. Taking a great effort to swallow, Amethyst cleared her throat and looked away. “Sorry.”

Mo shrugged, folding her jacket into an even square. “It’s fine. I’m the one that hides the marks. I know that they aren’t something I should try to hide, but they’re… hard to look at… sometimes. I tried to reform so that they wouldn’t show, but…” Mo’s form glowed and shifted. When it cleared, she was wearing a coat that matched her skin color, right down to the yellow spots on the sleeves. “It’s just not possible.” She shapeshifted back into her normal appearance. “That’s pretty much the only reason I buy clothes at all.”

Amethyst reached for Mo’s jacket and, when Mo didn’t stop her, picked it up and examined it without much effort, sticking her fingers through the hole in the shoulder “So you Corrupted along with the others Gems?”

Mo nodded. “Pretty much. Except, my case was a little different.”

“Different how?” I asked.

Mo took a moment to think, eyes darting up to the ceiling before returning to us. “You guys know how my powers work by now, or you at least have a general idea, right?”

I thought back to the times I’d seen Mo use her abilities. I remembered how she showed me my memories of Opal and of her own back in the Kindergarten. “You can show memories?”

“Hm, yes. That’s one thing I can do per se. I can show my own memories, or I can show another Gem's memories. I’m kinda like a thumb drive. By touching another Gem’s gemstone, I can store their memories and show them as my own or have them relieve the memory.”

“Wait,” Amethyst cut in. “You said you ‘store’ memories? What does that mean?”

“It means that when I touch someone else’s gemstone,” She pointed to Amethyst’s chest and my naval for emphasis, “I basically download them. Your memories become my own; a separate bank of recollection that I can access. Kinda creepy, right?”

“Very,” we said in unison.

“Yeah, not the first time I heard that. Anyway, I was actually talking about a different power. Here’s a hint.” She lifted a hand to her shoulder, her gemstone standing out against the splotches of yellow. It glowed briefly and my shield appeared over her hand.

I lunged forward, pushing the shield down, whipping my head around to see if anyone had noticed. “You can’t just pull out a weapon in public! People get freaked out!”

She let the shield disperse before gesturing to the air around us. It was then that I noticed the wisps of smoke swirling around us, a small sphere separating us from the rest of the shoppers. “Don’t worry. It’s the same thing I did back in the Kindergarten. All they should see is the three of us talking, no weapons or anything. Now then, do you see what I’m talking about.”

“How you copy our weapons and make our forms go all junky,” Amethyst said, poking at the strain of smoke floating by her.

“Bingo,” Mo snapped her fingers. “I disrupt the abilities of other Gems. That be anything from their weapons to their powers to their forms. Sorry about that, Amethyst.”

“S’all good.”

Disrupting other Gems’ powers? That must have been what she did when Amethyst’s form glitched during our fight. And…

“When you resisted Yellow’s aura!” I realized, the pieces finally clicking into place. “That’s why you didn’t poof! You countered her aura!”

“Exactly. And that’s what I did when they tried the three Diamonds attacked the planet.”

The air grew colder. A distant cry cut through the store as a melodic note swallowed it. I tried to find the source until I remembered the smoke. The smoke is linked to her memories, so that must have been a glimpse into her past. Knowing that didn’t shake the shiver that runs up my spine.

“You fought the Corruption?” Amethyst’s eyes were wide. Whether the assumption surprised or she was still shaken from the brief memory, I couldn’t tell.

“And failed.” Mo’s chuckled, but her face drooped as another sensation rippled through the smoke. I felt something scrambled, a mixture of emotions and thoughts that broke apart and mashed together so aggressively that I couldn’t make heads or tails of what they meant. “I never fully broke free. At first, I was lost in a blur and my thoughts wouldn’t process. Eventually, I had a moment of clarity and I was able to fight back. I had my form back, but I could still feel that Corruption, struggling against my control and trying to drag me back into its sickness. Sometimes, it would win.

“I would switch back and forth between my Corrupted form and my real form. Sometimes it was for long stretches of times, or I would switch back after a few moments. It never had any pattern. As long as I kept fighting, I would get my body back. I found other Corrupted Gems in both forms, but I didn’t have the heart to poof and bubble them. After all, what kind of hypocrite would that make me? When I was lucid, I spent my time around humans, learning everything I could about them and living amongst them. I think that’s what helped me the most.” Warmth washed over me. I could make out the distant chatter of voices, so far and quiet that I couldn’t make out what they were saying. There were so many. Each voice was somehow clear in my ears even though there must be hundreds, if not thousands speaking out. And with each indistinguishable word they spoke, nostalgic ease that wasn’t mine settled in my chest.

“You were all so different from each other, and they were always changing. Each place had different cultures, different ideas, different traditions. Nothing stayed the same for very long. Seeing all that change, how things on Earth were never the same as they were the day before, helped me cope while I struggled. I could change too, be whoever I wanted to be at that moment and someone else the next. Still, I never stopped looking. I tried to find other Gems, hoping that some of them had escaped Corruption. After thousands of years of searching with nothing to show, I gave up. When my Corruption came for me next, I didn’t fight. I sank and became plagued, letting myself become lost in the nonsense. I thought it was better to live without sense then to keep on hoping.”

“But what about the people you met?” I asked softly. The veil of emotions was becoming heavy. Short scenes popped in and out of my visions, sights that held no meaning and no significance. I could feel the din of Corruption that must have tried to overwhelm her, a chaotic swirl of half-formed thoughts and broken sensations that would have seemed so simply if they could have been understood. “You said being around people helped you. What went wrong?”

The chorus of voices returned, but instead of happiness, I felt my chest break. One after another, the voices fell silent. Some would scream, others would fade, and many simply vanished. In the end, there wasn’t a single voice left. Mo’s hand trailed through the smoke as the finale voices became silent. “The only bad thing about life on this planet is that it’s so short. Time doesn’t mean a lot to me since I don’t age. But humans do. And they’re frail. I would spend a lifetime with someone only to watch them pass on. While they went from a tiny child to a withered elder, I didn’t change. I couldn’t. Not like that. I lost so many friends, people I loved, just because they ran out of time. And there were others that lost time, from mortal wounds to illness or to themselves. Hundreds of lifetimes of people I cared about, and they all came to an end eventually. If I could find the Gems that escaped, I could finally be with my family again. I could have my timeless friends again. As you know, that didn’t work out so well.

“One day, after I’d succumbed to Corruption, I stumbled onto these ruins left from Homeworld Gems. A device started playing all of a sudden. It cut through the blur and managed to coax me out of my stupor. And that’s when I first saw you.”

“My message to the universe.” It was the video the Diamonds and I had broadcast to celebrate the dismantling of the Empire. I remember how White had insisted on using a storybook after I told her how humans told stories back on Earth. It was the same message that brought Spinel to Earth with her Injector. “You saw it?”

Mo nodded. In the background, I could hear the gargle of my voice as I recited my speech to the listening Gems. “It was the first sign I had of there being other Gems out there. For the first time in so many years, I fought to regain control. It was so much harder this time. I struggled for months before I found myself at Rose’s Fountain. Every time I’d gone there before, it was dried up and bristling with thorns. Now, it was pink and overflowing. I threw myself in and I couldn’t believe the relief that came as the Corruption was washed away.”

I remembered that. In that dream I had, I remember my mom’s fountain and the joy that came after I crawled into the fountain. “I’m glad that you were able to come back.” And I really meant it.”

“Ditto,” Amethyst added. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you before. I had no idea what was going on. Turns out, you’re pretty cool.”

“Thanks, guys. That means a lot.” Mo turned her head away as the smoke cleared. The noise of shoppers and carts rattling on the floor came crashing back. I’d forgotten we were still in PricePal. Her illusion down, Mo took her jacket from Amethyst and buried her face in the material. “Now stop being sweet. I can’t keep crying every time we talk.”

Her embarrassment made me laugh, which in turn made Amethyst laugh. Eventually, even Mo was cackling as disrupted shoppers threw us odd looks. We didn’t care. We were together and it was easy. Whatever happened in the past and whatever problems are waiting for us at home don’t matter. Right now, it’s the three of us in the middle of a store. It’s simple and clean. And now that Mo’s had another weight lifted off her shoulders, we could keep going.

We spent another hour or so drifting through different aisles, mostly those with food. Mo insisted that we get whatever we wanted and she would do the same. Eventually, we were carrying so many items that Mo had to run back out and grab a cart. On the way out, we snagged some more snacks from the food stand. We walked up to a cashier and waited as he scanned each item. Mo paid after swiping her membership card and we left, checking our receipt with a lady standing by the exit. With bags dangling from our arms, we made our way back to the train and watched the sunset from the train car, dipping into our supply of snacks as the sky dimmed. For the time, everything was easy, and I kept my mind here. It was nice and I’m glad we spent the day together.

“So… what’s the plan?” Mo spoke to us in-between bites of a snickerdoodle. “Do you guys want to go back to the Kindergarten?”

Just from the look that crossed Amethyst’s face, I could tell neither of us did. The thought of going back to the desolate gloom again was enough to turn our opinions.

“We could go to the barn,” Amethyst suggested. She was sitting beside me and Mo was on my right as we sat on the edge of the open train car, so she had to lean over to speak to both of us. “Garnet and Pearl won’t go there, and Bismuth might… ya know… be cool with it?”

I felt Mo tense beside me, the snickerdoodle crumpling in her hand. “If you don’t feel comfortable with it, we can think of something else,” I said trying to reassure her. Mo was being so open with us that I didn’t want to do something that would make her uncomfortable.

Mo set the broken cookie aside as she rubbed the sugar between her fingers. “It’s not that I don’t want to. I just… I don’t want to make anything worse by showing up.”

Amethyst reached across us and shoved Mo semi-roughly. “Well, nothing’s gonna get better if you avoid it. Even if we… have been doing the same thing. Ugh, I’m just tired of running around this!”

“Mo,” I placed a hand on her shoulder, feeling her gemstone beneath my palm. I had a quick flashback to the scene in New Homeworld and marveled at how the situation had changed. “I think it’s time we faced whatever this is and try to sort it out. If you’re not ready, then we’ll wait. But just know that we’ll be here for you, and we’ll help you. You can count on us. I promise.”

Mo stared at my hand on her shoulder. With a start, I realized that she hadn’t put her jacket back on. The article was beside the bags of snacks behind us. The train rattled on, the sound of its engine chugging away and wheels against the tracks holding any silence at bay. Mo placed her hand over mine and squeezed. “Alright. I think I’m ready.”

I smiled, and she returned with her own. Amethyst whooped and ripped open a bag of licorice. Everything was looking up, until…

“I just need to poof before we get there.”

“...What…”