For any of those curious, the closing line is a pun on the word "fin" sans le lettre E.

A gigantic thank-you to those who have followed this dramatic soap-opera of a story for as far as they have. Your support was amazing, and never failed to make me smile. I originally wanted this chapter to end in a way that made it a good read for those who didn't want to read a sequel, but the more I read it, the more I realize how far I missed that target.

Unless anything unexpected happens, there will be a sequel to this story. (Either Aberration or Absolution. I'm having trouble picking between the two titles.) My guestimate for when would be sometime in March of 2016. I have a few more loose ends with other stories to tie up in the meantime, and I really want to start a different one as well.

But, so long for now.

Disclaimer: I don't own Steven Universe.

"Hey Amethyst!"

"Hey."

Amethyst gave Steven a slight nod, before returning to wiggling the sign for the Big Doughnut. He found it a little strange that she hadn't said more to him, but Steven supposed that she was just tired, or trying to focus on her work. Not that there was much for to really do. People generally seemed to lose interest in what she was doing after the first few weeks, and she had mainly been showing off the sign for the Big Doughnut and wearing the painfully bright costume. He didn't really mind too much though. Amethyst didn't have a lot of time to talk to him now that she had a job. Even if it did seem like a more recent development.

Grabbing a handful of cash, he placed it on the counter, and rung the bell. Sadie appeared from the back room, glaring at Lars. She brightened when she saw him, and gave a small wave. Lars stuck his tongue out at her, and leaned against the wall. After their first few meetings, he had learned that it was best to just let him be annoying, and not say anything back. He'd stop talking eventually.

"Hey Steven! What can I get for you today?"

"Two doughnuts please."

"Should you really be eating two doughnuts?" Lars asked.

"I'm not. One's for Amethyst."

Sadie counted the cash that he had placed on the counter and gave Steven his change. He took the remaining coins and put them in his shorts pocket. In the meantime, Lars grabbed two doughnuts and wrapped them in a paper bag. Steven grabbed some napkins on the way out, and waved to the teens with his free hand.

"Thanks!"

He opened the door with his side, and walked to Amethyst.

"Hey Amethyst! I got you a doughnut!"

Amethyst took a startled step back. Her peripheral vision was not very good when she was wearing the doughnut costume. Her eyes lingered on Steven's gem for a moment, but he didn't notice this. Amethyst shook her head.

"Uh, no thanks, I'm good."

"But you love doughnuts!" He said, frowning slightly.

"I'm not really hungry." She replied.

"Ok, suit yourself." He took a chocolate doughnut out of the bag and started to eat it. "So, how's the clean-up with the gems going?"

"Good."

"Any sign of Lapis?"

Pushing the hair out of her eyes, she shook her head.

"Nope."

"Oh. Well-"

Amethyst interrupted Steven by saying;

"I'm kinda' busy right now. Could we maybe talk later?"

"I uh, of course!" He said, weakly trying to laugh. "I'll just go now."

Slightly taken aback, he started to walk back in the direction of Vidalia's house. That had been a little weird. But he was sure it didn't have to do with anything. Still, he didn't feel so hungry anymore, and the doughnut in his mouth suddenly seemed too sweet. He spat it out and tried to rid himself of the unhappy feeling that was now bothering him. Amethyst had work to do, she couldn't always talk to him. It wasn't like she didn't want to talk to him... She was just trying to seem responsible... Even if that was something that Amethyst had never really cared for. That didn't matter though. Steven was certain that they would talk again soon. She'd be off sooner or later!

Since he now had an extra doughnut, and nothing to really do in Beach City, he walked back to Vidalia's. He'd put the doughnut somewhere in the house for Amethyst, and then maybe go to the park. Or he'd see if Connie could come over. He was sure that she would have left a message for him now. It had been a few days since they'd last talked, and Steven knew that at any minute, she would call back and they could hang out again.

Steven really wanted to have a friend to talk to. The adults were fine, but they were sort of... Old. He wanted to distract himself from what had went on at the beach, and on the ship. He found himself having trouble shaking the creepy feeling that now seemed to stalk him. He felt awful, not like himself anymore. And he couldn't stop thinking back to what... She had said about his friends, about what he had done on the ship. She had encouraged him to attack Jasper before it was too late. She had been the one who somehow knew that no one would hate him by the end of it all. She had said that it was her idea all along. It was hard to feel like he was still himself when he now knew for certain there was another gem inside of him.

Was he being controlled the entire time? What if she had been trying to kill him all along, so she could get out again? Could it be possible she knew he would be half-killed after the ship went down? What if the gem had future vision, like Garnet did? It made sense. How else would she know the things that she did? The entire jailbreak, pretending to work with the Home World, it all could have been one elaborate plot. A giant plan to make sure that she could live. That was why his hair had turned pink when he last reformed. That was why he had accidentally changed small parts of himself when he practiced, why it was so hard for him to reform each and every time: Because there was another gem fighting to take his place...

Why did it have to be so hard to not think about terrible, awful things like that? He didn't want to believe it was true, but the more he thought about it, the more realistic it seemed. He kicked a pebble that was resting on the sidewalk. It skittered ahead a few feet, and then came to a rest. Steven started to focus his attention on the rock rather than the thoughts that seemed to haunt him. He kicked it down the sidewalk until he had gotten back to the house. From there, he gave it one final send off down the road. It landed in the sewer with a small splash.

No one was in the house when he entered. Steven figured that Vidalia was off running errands, while Sour Cream and Onion went off to do their own things. He never really saw them around that often. They were both busy with their own lives, and didn't seem very interested in talking to him. Yellow Tail didn't talk much either. It seemed like Onion got that from him. That didn't really bother him too much. He wouldn't know what to say even if they were there.

Entering the kitchen, he opened the fridge, and tried to find some room for his extra doughnut. There were a lot of jars filled with old paint in the middle area. More than once he had mistaken a container of white paint for the milk. It didn't help that the white paint was sometimes kept in a milk jug. He pushed aside a few vegetables that were laying on the second shelf, and managed to fit the bag into the cramped space. Now that he had properly stored the food for Amethyst, he could see if Connie had called him at all.

Steven pushed the chair up against the wall so that he could reach the house phone. He had grown accustomed to pressing the play button, and waiting for any potential messages that might have been left for him while he was out. The phone beeped, but nothing played. His hopeful smile sank when he realized that Connie still had not called him. But, she was probably just as busy as Amethyst. After all, she had to practice the violin and play tennis, that took up a lot of her time. There was nothing wrong with that.

He was sure that his friends would respond sooner or later. It was just a matter of time.

Everything would be fine...

Yellow Diamond had been unaware of just how many alarms were in her office. At least until all but one went off simultaneously. She dropped the tablet she was holding, and almost jumped out of her seat. Even she could be caught off guard by the blaring noise that suddenly began. Each separate alarm had it's own sound. There was a shrill, high-pitched buzzing for minor dangers, like natural disasters, that had simply occurred on the other side of the planet, or perhaps, some other world they were currently controlling. The most fitting sound was the klaxon, which sounded when a new war was declared or ended. She was most familiar with that one. Attacks on their planet, while rare, had alarm bells. In a direct threat to herself (This merited a lockdown.) there happened to be a siren. There was also the standard test drill, which was a plain buzzer. She never had to practice evacuating the building however, as she was deemed "competent enough" to know whether or not there was a real threat in the building that require evacuation. The test alarm was the only one that had not gone off.

Mixed within the din of constant alarms, there was one that she did not recognize as any that had sounded over her time in power. It was much more ominous than the wailing siren that warned herself that someone was after her. The noise was similar in fact, a much louder, more screechy version of what her own was like. She briefly wondered what idiot had installed a new alarm without telling her.

When she didn't run, hide, or take any action that she was supposed to do, the illusion on the window faded. Before it had looked like the Capitol's city horizon, only, with clean, cloudless skies. It vanished, revealing the sad, purple-brown haze that normally clouded the area. But only for a moment, as flashy, scarlet text ran past her eyes, much faster than the gem could ever hope to possibly read. It blurred before her eyes, becoming a single, crimson streak of indistinguishable characters. Then, she started to make sense of all the warnings that were trying to catch her attention.

WAR HAS BEEN DECLARED

DESTRUCTION OF HOME WORLD PROPERTY

POTENTIAL DIRECT THREAT TO YOUR SAFETY

POTENTIAL DIRECT THREAT TO OFF AND ON-PLANET CIVILIANS

QUARTZ RESURRECTION PROJECT HAS FAILED

It was the last warning that finally told her what was going on. For the first time in many years, she felt much more than simple anger at bad news. There was fear, and worry. Something had happened to Steven, and the project had been deemed a failure because of that. It didn't take a genius to string things together and understand what was going on. Property attacked, that could easily mean the warship the detainment crew had been given, or Steven. More likely, it was both. Both were war-worthy events. In the case of Steven, it meant that war was automatically declared, no matter whom it was against. Her safety was a given, but Steven... The project had failed. Property had been destroyed.

The memory that she should have been doing something by this point finally reached her head. The gem flung the doors open, and sprinted out of the room. She ran down the hall, paying no mind to the shocked and frightened gems around her. Their reactions didn't matter, and they were all sworn to secrecy anyways. At the end of the hall, there was a warp pad specifically keyed to herself. No other gem could even touch it without destabilizing. The current that ran through it was strong enough to leave permanent scars even on gems that had reformed multiple times. But one of the many benefits to being herself was that the warp pad could take her directly to a series of different locations that few gems even knew existed.

One of those places happened to be the labs, specifically, the ones that were used for covert weapons research, and were widely unheard of, if not speculated upon. She arrived in a small atrium, where a lone escort awaited her. The gem was trembling from head to toe, and seemed utterly speechless. The tiny thing hardly seemed to acknowledge her presence before running down a sterile, sickly-lit hall. She didn't bother with the escort, there was no time for that. It was laughably easy to run ahead of the gem, and straight to the labs where a certain team of scientists would be. They had an entire wing to themselves. It was largely unused, as many similar experiments had succeeded thousands of years ago. There was only one active room at the moment, and it was where the team of workers that monitored their project resided.

The door was already part-way open. The frantic sound of typing and hurried commandments were escaping through it. Like all of the other worried gems, none of them seemed to acknowledge her presence. The room was cramped, and the walls lined with wires and tubes, that were hastily stuck to the wall. There were worn patterns on the tiled floor, created from years of treading along the same path and repeating the same tasks every day. It was in a sad state for a place that housed all the information on one of the most important projects they had developed to date. One gem was sitting at a computer, rapidly typing lines of code into it, another was monitoring the spreadsheets that were constantly printing. The third was barking orders at the other two, clearly as distressed as they were. None of them even bothered to look up as she asked;

"What's going on?"

"The monitor in him is dead! That should only happen if-"

"Maybe it's just momentary interference!" The gem reading the papers said. "His heart beat's only been gone for a few minutes now! Something could have gotten in the way!"

"I'm trying to find any problems in the system that could have lead to this shameful-"

"Enough!"

Again, none of the gems listened to her. They were all babbling on, as if it would comfort any of them. The trio just seemed worried that they were going to lose a little more than their jobs for this failure. They were doing everything in their power to right the wrongs that probably were not even in their control. None of them could stop another from finally destroying the gem once and for all. Of course, if the project truly was over, than that meant that there would be no reason for them to live anyways. It was something that they would take with them to their rather early graves. Unless they could somehow make a second Steven without anyone questioning just a little how that was even possible. Besides, it would take much too long, and they needed the weapon back now.

"I'm sure it's just a momentary bug!"

"-no need to panic, everything will be fine once the signal clears up-"

"-I-" The gem with the spreadsheets sucked in a deep breath. "THE SIGNAL'S BACK!"

The other two abandoned their posts and ran to look at the long scroll of paper that was still printing out for her. She ran to the gem's side, and craned her neck to see what they were all staring at. There were several lines sketched out along the page, all in different colours. Most of them were flat, but they were starting to spike up and down in somewhat irregular patterns. This was what they were so fascinated by, the return of the signal.

"What does this mean?" She asked.

"He's back!"

"But..."

"Spit it out." She snarled.

"This signal's unfamiliar to us."

"Almost dead, but not quite."

"It looks more like a gem's readings than a human's now."

Growling, the gem rubbed her temples.

"Stop sniveling and tell me what that means!"

The trio of scientists looked between each other with wide, frightened eyes. The smallest one hugged the rolls of paper to her chest, trying to keep herself together. Scared reactions were nothing new to her, and she was waiting for what they had to say. She had been so used to always having an answer, always knowing what was going on. Simply asking another gem gave her all the information that she needed within seconds of asking. Every meticulous detail about anything she wished to hear about was her own.

"We don't know."

Never before had she received such an ominous reply. But the worrying all seemed to end after a moment, as a bout of static overtook one of the monitors. A scientist scurried over to the computer and accepted the distant call. It's location could have only come from one place, and one place only. Everyone in the room believed they knew exactly who would be calling them. Still, the signal was too faint to make out any visuals on the screen, or perhaps, there was no screen from the place where the gem was calling from. However, they were all sorely disappointed when they realized it was not Steven who was calling them, but rather, Peridot.

"This is Peridot transmitting on all frequencies from abandoned crystal system colony planet Earth, to Yellow Diamond. My mission has been compromised, my escort and informant are gone and I am now stranded! Please send help!"

"Peridot! Can you hear us?" One of the scientists asked.

Her response was quiet through the stifling static.

"Yes, I read you."

"What has happened to Steven and the ship?"

"I wasn't aboard the ship at the time of it's power failure. But no doubt Jasper and the Steven were involved in it somehow. They've been nothing but trouble this entire trip back!"

"Why weren't you on the ship?"

"To check on the cluster of course. Speaking of which-"

She groaned when the gem started to relay data to them. Oh the stupid, worthless thing! How was this supposed to help them in the slightest! She wanted to leave that moronic gem on that miserable ball of mud to rot for a while. Her information was helping them get nowhere. The cluster project was nowhere near as important as the other ones happened to be. And not only that, why was she referring to Steven as the Steven? Had her mind truly been that messed up once she learned the details of the project? It was hard to tell whether the pathetic thing was simply clueless to begin with, or just plain dumb.

"-hatch within a short amount of time. Now, when can I expect a lift off this gem-forsaken planet?"

"In about-"

She pushed the gem away from the computer, and grabbed the microphone from her hands.

"As soon as you have found Steven, we shall send a crew to pick you up."

"I, what? The Steven? How am I supposed to do that?!"

"I'm sure you'll find a way. Happy hunting!"

"No, wait! The clus-"

With a triumphant grin, she pressed a button, effectively ending the transmission.

"Well, that solves one of our problems."

Everything would be fine.

End Part One