"But the law of loving others could not be determined by reason, because it is unreasonable." – Leo Tolstoy

In which Pearl struggles to comprehend the value of a hot dog.

at first

"Testing, testing." Greg's voice bounced around faintly in the small recording booth. "Do you read me, ground control?"

Pearl sat on the other side of the glass in front of a panel of buttons and dials. She pushed several sliders up and then spoke into her own microphone. "Speak again, Greg. I think I have it this time."

Greg leaned over the mike. "I've got my eye on you, babe," he said, winking as he slung his electric guitar over his shoulder.

Pearl huffed in irritation, though she was pleased to find that Greg's voice came through crystal clear this time. Rose smothered a giggle behind her, leaning against Pearl's seat with a starry-eyed glow.

"Vocal levels seem optimal. Let's hear the instrument now."

"Hey, thanks for doing this, Pearl," Greg said, plugging in his guitar. "I've really never seen anybody learn the equipment this fast."

"She's quite the quick study, isn't she?" Rose said. "You should see her fix an engine." Pearl's face burned at the praise. She ducked her head and pretended to study the controls closely.

Greg shook his head. "She's incredible. It took me years to figure out this stuff."

"I owe it to your thorough explanation, of course," Pearl said modestly. It was true that Greg knew the equipment well. She didn't point out, however, that the small amount she had forgotten over the millennia was a far vaster collection of information than his human mind would ever hold.

"Alright, let's hear the guitar, please. I know you're paying quite a bit for the use of this facility, and I would not like to waste your time."

Greg nodded and strummed the guitar earnestly. A screeching wail rattled the recording booth, and Greg yelped, covering his ears. Pearl fumbled with the controls until she brought them down from an earth-shattering level.

"Are you okay?" Rose asked into Pearl's mike.

"What?" Greg yelled. "Oh yeah, I'm fine. Happens all the time."

Pearl's hands shook with embarrassment. "Please accept my apologies. I'll adjust the settings immediately."

"No worries, Pearl." Greg still spoke a little louder than usual. "You know what I always say… If every porkchop were perfect, we wouldn't have hot dogs."

"I… don't know what that means," Pearl said slowly. "But I've corrected my error."

"It means you don't always get it right the first time. Or the fiftieth. Heck, I blew out my own eardrum once," Greg said. "Right before a show. Marty thought dripping superglue in my ear canal was a good solution. Marty was a piece of trash, did I ever tell you that?"

"I'm sure we'd love to hear all about it later," Pearl said tightly. He couldn't afford another hour in this booth.

"Right." Greg cleared his throat. "Okay. This song goes out to the love of my life, the pink lady in the front with the rockin' curls. The first single of my latest album, I've Got My Eye on You, Babe."

Pearl double-checked that the recording light was on as Greg began his song. It was a wailing, crooning thing about seeing her face in the constellations, and other such outlandish overuses of the literary technique hyperbole. It was catchy enough, though, and Pearl absently tapped a finger along as she concentrated on monitoring feedback levels. The guitar solo toward the end of the song was enough to make her wince, teeth gritted, particularly when Greg struck the wrong chord, as loudly and passionately as all the right ones, and then continued with the screeching solo as if nothing had gone wrong. Pearl suppressed a groan. They'd have to record it again. She'd have to listen to it all over again.

Rose mouthed thank you, dear, and squeezed her shoulder. Pearl relaxed. Once more wasn't too much of a problem.

Greg strummed the final chord of the song, hanging his head dramatically. When the sound vibrated into silence, he waved Rose into the booth and wiped sweat from his face, his chest heaving. She clapped for him.

"Was it good?" he asked.

She nodded, her eyes sparking.

Greg lowered his guitar. "Was it really?" An odd vulnerability hung in his eyes.

Rose took his hands. "It was perfect." And she kissed him.

Pearl bristled, just a little. His performance had been far from perfect. Though she knew Rose didn't have a speck of malice in her gem, it seemed just bit cruel to encourage inferior creatures with such lies, regardless of the affection she may have felt toward them.

Even Greg heard his mistake when she played back the recording for him. He winced when the guitar solo ended. But just as she predicted, his funds for more recording time had run out.

"Oh well. What would we do without hot dogs, huh?"

Pearl didn't point out that hot dogs remained one of the least appetizing human foods.

"Thanks again for your help, Pearl. Oh, I did have one quick question. Is this supposed to be my name?"

Greg held out the demo copy of the CD she had burned. Pearl had rather creatively labeled the sleeve "D#dim re D#dim Universe."

"Ah, so you do know the difference between G and a diminished D sharp chord, then," Pearl said, smiling tightly.

Greg glanced at the CD again, chuckled, and shined it on his ratty T-shirt. "Always a pleasure, Pearl," he said.

He left with the demo tape in his baggy pocket and, inexplicably, his head held high.

Flawed, inadequate, substandard, defective…

Some days the words beat a rhythm in her mind until she could hear nothing else.

In another age, Rose had brushed her tears away with her thumb and whispered, "I wish you could see perfection the way I do."

And Pearl's heart ached because she tried, but she couldn't. She couldn't help thinking that it was a little cruel of Rose to encourage inferior creatures like her.

but then

The tarp over the unfinished ceiling flapped with each gust of wind. Pearl kept one eye on it, worried that it would tear away from the house and reveal the gray clouds building overhead. But Steven lay well within the shelter of the temple, the stone floor around him littered with loose paper and crayons worn down to stubs. He hummed to himself as he drew, his tongue poked out between his teeth from time to time in concentration.

"You're hard at work there, aren't you?"

Steven kicked his feet absently. He didn't reply. Greg claimed that Steven never stopped talking at home, but he was shy whenever he visited the Gems, murmuring only one or two words at a time and often silently staring at Pearl with wide-set curious eyes. But if the old expression was true that a picture spoke a thousand words, then today, Steven had spoken volumes more than ever before. He had been coloring feverishly since the morning, almost as if to combat the monochrome of the stormy sky and temple walls. He had her eye for beauty, perhaps. They'd have to make sure to decorate the house brightly for him upon its completion.

The fridge stood behind him in the temple as it had since his mother's first craving, still thrumming with magic. Now it was decorated with magnets of various barnyard animals, each of which held one of Steven's drawings. Pearl could pick out the square shapes of Greg's van and Garnet's hair, Amethyst's purple tabby form, and plenty of scribbled ocean waves, but some of them were unrecognizable in their brightly colored nonsense. Perhaps Pearl had made a premature assumption about his artistic eye. She tried not to assume anything anymore.

"Can I see what you're drawing, Steven?" Pearl asked, sitting down beside him.

"Shhh!" Steven commanded seriously. He padded across the floor in bare feet and climbed into her lap, facing her with his eyebrows drawn in deep concentration. He grabbed her cheeks in both hands and stretched them out, then squished them together in chubby folds. Then he nodded to himself and scurried back to his nest of papers.

"Steven, are you drawing me?" Pearl asked, suddenly embarrassed.

He ignored the question. Pearl edged up beside him, but he shrieked and threw himself over the drawing. "Not yet!" he cried.

"Okay, okay." Pearl held up her hands in surrender and paced back onto the unfinished floor of the house. She summoned a level out of her gem and checked the slant of the floor, not for the first time. She had to see to it that Steven's journey to the breakfast table wouldn't be an uphill climb every morning.

The minutes crawled by until Steven finally dropped his crayon, rolled onto his back, and inspected his work carefully. Nodding again, he kicked his feet clumsily until he righted himself and then ran over to Pearl again, the paper tucked behind his back.

A gust of wind whipped through the open walls, tugging at his drawing impishly. Steven yelped and tightened his grip on the paper, holding it protectively against his chest. Pearl led him back to the shelter of the temple, and he handed the drawing to her, eyes wide and solemn.

It was her. At least, that seemed to be his intention, though this Gem's proportions were quite askew. Her stick-skinny arms stretched out below her feet, which pointed painfully in opposite directions. Her sash seemed to tie just below her neck, and her skirt flared out somewhere around her armpits. Bright orange hair flamed out from around a face that wasn't much less chaotic. Eyes of two different sizes were separated by a nose longer and sharper than a stalactite. The shaky, lopsided line of her mouth was turned up in an unmistakable smile.

"Wait!" Steven cried in horror, suddenly snatching the paper back to make a last-minute correction. He grabbed a crayon and carefully spelled out the letters he had spent the past few months learning.

P-E-R-L.

Almost.

Pearl studied the drawing for a moment. She opened her mouth and then closed it again, then slowly lowered it to see Steven staring at her, unblinking, hanging on every twitch of her face. She held the picture up to the light for extra close inspection. He bounced against her knee impatiently.

"Steven, this is…" Pearl paused, considering carefully. "This is a masterpiece."

It wasn't. Of course it wasn't. She had seen the truly remarkable works of art that humans kept protected in their garish museums, and this was not of a similar quality. But Pearl felt no guilt in her lie, only an odd warmth in her chest, the irrational thought that this was the only word worthy of the care he had put into his work. And yet she had to come up with another word, because Steven was chewing the end of a crayon, perplexed.

"Whazzat mean?" he asked, around a mouthful of Cerulean.

"That means it's absolutely lovely." Pearl pulled the crayon out of his mouth.

Steven paused to consider that. "Yes," he agreed, with a thoughtful tilt of his head.

"I think it belongs on the fridge with the others, don't you?"

He clapped, cheeks dotted with pink. "Yes!"

But when Pearl picked up the paper, Steven whined, "I wanna do it! Let me!"

She handed him the cow magnet off the fridge and pointed to an empty space near the floor. "It'll fit nicely there, won't it?"

"Nooooo." Steven thrust out his arms. "Up!"

Pearl set him up on her shoulders and watched as he positioned her portrait front and center, hanging it crookedly over several others. She didn't straighten it.

She opened the freezer and handed Steven one of those frozen cat treats. His eyes lit up as Pearl helped him tear the wrapper. "Yes yes yes yes yes yes!" Cookie crumbs rained down on her head.

She swung the freezer door shut and found herself at eye level with her distorted likeness once again. P-E-R-L. She paused, still holding onto the fridge handle.

"Lovely," Steven said, clapping sticky ice-cream hands against her cheeks. Warmth spread through her core, though his fingers were freezing.

"Lovely," Pearl repeated, softly.

And after a long moment, she smiled.

AND NOW

The story's over.

I'm sure that Rose chose to have Steven for a number of reasons, many of which we aren't privy to yet, but I will bet anything in the world that she wants to show Pearl that not only are humans capable of so much than she thinks and worthy of so much more love, but Pearl herself is, too. Gaaahhhhh.

Thank you all SO MUCH for the reviews, follows, and favorites! I am as proud of this mess of a story as Steven is of his artwork. :) I love this fandom, and I'm sure I'll have to write more for it soon, especially now that the show is returning to its regular schedule. Tomorrow! Hooray!