A/N: First of all, I 'd like to thank you all for your support of my oneshot "The Fourth Time's the Charm", and I'm sorry to keep you waiting for so long! I've been eager to start this, but I wanted to wait for the end of Season 3, and now I'm glad I did. (As of this writing, the last aired episode was "Bubbled.") You can consider this as an AU that takes place after Season 3 - an alternate Season 4, if you will.

This takes place after "The Fourth Time's the Charm", but everything from that oneshot will be explained here, so it's not exactly required reading.

It had been four weeks, two days, and eighteen hours since Centi's last complete reversion.

She knew because she'd made up a chart for herself on a sheet of paper from the ream that Steven had brought her. At first it had been difficult to keep track of her transformations, since she only had useable hands about half the time, but it became increasingly easy as the days passed. And for the last month or so, it had been a cakewalk. Still, the chart remained, hanging up among the dozens of other pictures she'd plastered across the walls of her ship's anteroom – as if her ability to keep herself together was another artistic achievement worthy of admiration.

To celebrate, she was making a self-portrait.

The door was open, and she knelt in the pool of vegetation-suffused sunlight that it provided, hunched over her current work-in-progress. A few visits ago, Steven had given her a new material to draw on, which he called 'poster board'; it was bigger than ordinary paper, and thicker, with a softly corrugated texture that was almost like fabric. Since receiving it, she'd been fervently contemplating what she'd use it for, certain that a special material like this deserved a special purpose. Well, now she was taking a chance, hoping that her hands would remain sure and steady and that she wouldn't end up with a wonky, unpresentable drawing like she had so many times before.

Her eye was just about finished now. With a pencil (which, she'd learned, was like a crayon, except that it gave you the ability to delete your work and try again, a very useful feature) she scratched in a snub nose near the center of her face, adding a curve beneath it to represent her smiling mouth. Everything looked good so far. Soon she'd be done with the lines, and then she could start trying to paint it, which was the fun part because paints could cover whole entire areas of the page instead of just –

A succession of screeches snapped her attention to the world outside the ship.

"Coming, I'm coming!" called Centi, hurriedly grabbing the corners of her poster board. After ensuring that it was careful stashed against the wall with her other unfinished work, she scurried outside, the daylight flashing against her eye. Anybody else would find Neph and Phrita's noises to be incomprehensible, but even in her current state, she found that she still understood them perfectly. And she always dropped whatever she was doing when they announced that there were visitors, because she always knew exactly who it was going to be.

Foresight didn't stop her hands from coming up and flapping a few times with excitement. "Hello, Steven!" she called, thrusting an arm into the air to wave to him.

Steven smiled and waved back. He was making his way through the small stretch of jungle leading up to the ship, greeting Neph and Phrita first, who'd been outside already and so had seen him arrive. Right now, Neph had three malformed arms on one side of her body and an insectile thorax, while Phrita's head had taken on the buggy form that Centi had grown very familiar with, but he still talked to them as if both were equally capable of answering before running to meet Centi.

"Hey there!" he exclaimed. "Wow, you look good today!"

Centi beamed, holding out her arms as if to showcase herself. "It has been a good day," she agreed. When she went to sleep last night, she'd had four arms and a reverted leg, but those had vanished overnight…and her head had been the same for a good three days now. "Steven, I am doing an artwork with the poster board you gave me! Will you come and see?"

"Yeah, sure I will, Centi!" he replied, then glanced over his shoulder. "But…um…"

She followed his gaze curiously, and was taken aback to note that he hadn't come alone today. One of his friends, the tallest one with the gauntlets, was here too. And she was stepping through the undergrowth like her body was a knife that sliced through all obstacles.

"Centi, you remember Garnet, right?" asked Steven hopefully. "You've met her a few times."

Centi nodded wordlessly, her eye fixed on the statuesque gem. She'd had a few encounters with Garnet since the beginning of her recovery, but Garnet never said much, and Centi had always been rather intimidated by her.

From behind her visor, Garnet must have noticed Centi's shoulders hunching up, her feet shuffling in miniscule intervals, because she smiled serenely. "Hello there. You're Nephrite, correct?"

"Correct." Centi bobbed her head subserviently. "But everyone now calls me 'Centi.'"

"Centi," repeated Garnet. "I'll remember that." She looked Centi up and down, scrutinizing a body that was weakened and battle-beaten, but revealed no traces of corruption – not at the moment, anyway. Then she dipped her chin at Steven in a gesture of approval.

Steven cleared his throat and straightened up. "So!" he started, with a fake brightness that didn't befit his genuinely cheerful personality. "Um, I didn't…I didn't come here for a normal visit today. Not that I don't love seeing you, 'cause I do! But…me and Garnet wanted to talk to you about something."

"Like what?" said Centi warily. My corruption? Did you find out something else about my condition? Is this going to be bad news…?!

Garnet shook her head briskly, a silent denial of Centi's concerns before she had even voiced them. "Steven tells me that you've been doing better lately," she stated.

"Yes," answered Centi. "I haven't even fully reverted since…four weeks, two days, and eighteen hours ago."

"That's good." Garnet bent down slightly, so that her face was more on the level with Centi's, though Centi still had the unavoidable sensation of being looked down upon. "You've reverted less and less since Steven healed you a few months ago." It wasn't a question.

Centi didn't answer. What could she say when Garnet seemed to know everything already? Maintaining eye contact terrified her, but somehow, it seemed like she couldn't even blink.

Garnet was silent as well, making Centi feel as if she was being stared through rather than at. But finally Garnet stood tall again, placing her hands on her hips. "You're almost stable," she proclaimed. "And I think you're stable enough to join us."

"Join…you?" echoed Centi.

For the first time, she managed to drag her gaze away, and it landed instinctively on Neph and Phrita. Her two crewmembers were standing at attention, in a stance that she recognized from the days when Homeworld superiors would come and speak to her, hanging on every word without making a single verbal contribution of their own. Phrita wasn't even chattering or clicking. Centi saw her concern echoed back at her in their altered faces; was Garnet talking about taking her somewhere else, away from her ship and her crew? But they were happy here…!

"Yeah, join us on a mission!" Steven piped up quickly, grabbing her arm without warning. "We're starting this big…thing…today, and we want you to help us!"

"Help you?" she repeated. Her brow arched, hovering above her eye.

The corner of Garnet's mouth twitched. "What is it? You don't want to?"

"No, no!" said Centi quickly. Wait, that sounded like she was definitely refusing…! "I mean, no, it's not that…! I just don't see at all how I could help you when I'm corrupted!"

The effects of corruption stretched beyond inconvenient physical transformations, after all. Through various experiments over the past several months, Centi had figured out that she was weaker than she used to be, quicker to tire, and unable to even draw her weapon without major repercussions. Not only that, but her mind had shifted, seemingly drawing in an unprecedented amount of information from her senses…but instead of making her intuitive, she was rendered hypersensitive to sounds and smells, as well as constantly questioning apparently contradictory stimuli. As a captain, she'd been designed to make fast judgments on matters that would make or break her ship and crew; now there were too many times where she felt like her brain had been rubbed raw, overwhelmed by the simple variations of day-to-day existence.

Her eye dropped to the ground instinctively. "There's nothing I can do that…that one of you can't do better," she added, lacking the words to describe her thought processes any further.

"I don't believe that," said Garnet.

Centi blinked. Steven immediately contributed as well, exclaiming, "I don't believe that either! You're not the only one of my friends who's thought something like that, Centi, and it's never true!"

"Besides," continued Garnet, "the subject of our mission is gem corruption."

Centi perked slightly. She was, while not exactly making eye contact, no longer eyeballing her feet. Gem corruption…even as a corrupted gem, she had so little insight into the details of her condition. What had the Diamonds done to her? Why did the changes so obstinately refuse to retreat, clinging to her mind like a layer of black sludge, ready to engulf her whenever she let her guard down? Why wasn't Steven able to fully heal her, or any other corrupted gem, for that matter? Could corruption even be reversed at all?

The Crystal Gems had admitted their equal ignorance in the matter. During her entire recovery process, all of them had been feeling their way along in the dark, always afraid that one day Centi would wake up as a centipeedle and never show any further signs of her true form. It had been long enough now that such a grim possibility now seemed much less plausible, but she still wasn't completely better, not by a long shot. Some answers would certainly be nice.

"What about gem corruption, exactly?" she ventured to ask.

Steven opened his mouth to reply, but Garnet halted him by resting a hand on his hair. "We're about to hold a meeting with the other Crystal Gems to talk about it," she responded. "We came to see if you would like to attend. It will be better to explain everything all at once."

"You should come!" said Steven with an encouraging smile. "Besides, you'll get to meet everybody, and I haven't gotten to introduce you yet!"

That meant that there would be other gems at the meeting besides Garnet, Amethyst and Pearl, who were the only ones that Centi had seen so far. What were these strangers going to think of her? How could she possibly present herself to them in a way that wouldn't leave them disgusted, or horrified? How –

"You don't have to come if you don't want to," Garnet assured her. "If you don't feel like you're ready, that's fine. But don't worry about whether or not you're good enough, because you are. And I can see that no matter what happens, you would be a big help to us."

Centi looked at Steven. He mouthed the words future vision, his eyes sparkling.

"I…" Centi hesitated, then finally conceded, "I guess it wouldn't hurt…to go to the meeting, at least."

"All right!" cheered Steven. Suddenly he had wound both hands around her arm and was dragging her forward, forcing her to stumble along after him. "This is gonna be awesome! And everyone is gonna love you!"

Sensing that the serious part of the conversation was over, Neph and Phrita suddenly began gurgling for attention. Phrita clicked and gestured emphatically, while Neph, her language abilities still not quite recovered from corruption, asked repeatedly in her garbled voice, "Us, too? What of us…?"

"Sorry, you two," said Garnet, quieting them with nothing more than her words and a soothing smile. "I don't think you're quite ready to join this mission yet. Maybe soon, but for now, just wait here at the ship. We'll bring your captain back soon."

"We will wait," agreed Neph. She stuck out her hand to bid goodbye to Centi, and Phrita copied her. "Goodbye, Captain!"

"See you soon!" called Centi, still being whisked away towards the warp pad by Steven.

She hoped that was true, anyway. She wasn't sure how long she could bear to be away from everything she knew, everything that had become her life now. For the first time in thousands of years, she had a home; she had compatriots; she even had her ship back, although it was far from airworthy, and she was happy to share it all with part of her crew. But she supposed that she'd always known that it was a tenuous situation. Everything was so transitional right now, including her own body and mind. The only thing constant was change.

So she went with Steven, hoping he would understand that as a corrupted gem, she wasn't yet ready for anything too drastic.