#centithyst

Sighing, Centi clenched and unclenched her fists a few times, not turning around. “What?” she said shortly.

From the corner of her eye, she could see Amethyst cross her arms. “What what?! You’re the one that needs to explain yourself!”

“You didn’t have to do this, you know.”

“Do what?!”

“Follow me.”

“Screw that!” Amethyst was almost shouting, but not quite -- as if even in the height of her anger, she was still being mindful of Centi’s sensory issues. “Will you just tell me what you meant, when you said...?!”

Centi was used to struggling with words when she was frightened or upset, and apparently the same principle applied when she was angry, because she had to hesitate for a long time. “You know what I meant,” she said, finally, flatly. “Let’s both just forget about -- everything that happened before. That’s all.”

Even knowing that she’d probably badly misinterpreted Amethyst’s emotional cues from the start, that her mangled communication skills were what had brought them to this point, she still couldn’t help feeling led on. Which was why she refused to look at the other gem, and why she had started twisting her hands through her hair.

“Just forget about it?” echoed Amethyst incredulously. “You expect me to just forget about the dance, and the portrait sittings, and everything else...?!”

“It shouldn’t be that hard for you. Because you ‘like-like’ Peridot.”

Amethyst took a step closer, her feet crunching in the leaf litter. “You really believe that.”

“Because it’s true.”

It started out as just a training session. Centi didn’t like training, as a rule, but this was different – not one of Pearl’s measured lessons at the ruined arena, but an impromptu spar with Amethyst at home in the jungle-swallowed ship. With Amethyst, Centi had no time to worry or, indeed, think at all – battle practice became a game of improvisation.

They’d been doing an agility test of sorts, where Amethyst cracked double whips and Centi ran back and forth to avoid them. She was especially proud of her dodging skills today, but Amethyst quickly became bored. “Let’s do something else,” she proclaimed. “Let’s fight with weapons!”

Centi frowned, placing her hands on her knees for a moment as she caught her breath. “But I can’t draw my weapon, Amethyst. You know that.”

“When was the last time you even tried?” insisted Amethyst. “C’mon, you can’t put it off forever! I don’t even know what your weapon is!”

“It’s a grappling hook. Nothing very exci – ”

“Don’t tell me, show me!” Amethyst snatched a fresh whip from her gem, stretching it in her hands tauntingly. “C’mon. I’m gonna getcha if you don’t!”

Centi shifted uncomfortably. “Amethyst…”

Amethyst snapped her whip forward, the crystals on the ends just barely stopping up short of Centi’s toes. “Come onnnnn!”

“Amethyst, I really don’t know if I should – ”

“Don’t be such a wet blanket!” snorted Amethyst. “C’mon, you’re braver than this! Show me what you got!”

Without warning, her whip lunged forward, probably in an attempt to startle Centi into instinctively drawing her weapon. But Centi’s instincts were different now, and she recoiled, her legs trying to flee the scene without bothering to coordinate with the rest of her body. Moments later, she felt the whip constrict around her ankle, and she went tumbling head over heels with nothing more than a skillful flick of Amethyst’s wrist.

Centi yelped helplessly; grit made her palms feel like they’d been sprayed by fireworks, and a ring of fiery pain encircled her ankle where she’d been wrapped. Behind her, Amethyst merely chortled. “You can do better than that! Let me see your weapon! Come onnnnn!”

Centi closed her eye for a second, feeling fear and shame mingle desultorily within her. Maybe Amethyst was right – maybe she was being cowardly. But he last time she’d drawn her weapon, things had gone so very badly…

…but no, she couldn’t let that stop her. What would Amethyst think of her if she lived her entire life afraid to do something as simple as summon her grappling hook?

So she took a deep breath and reached up towards her eye-gem, and almost instantly, everything went wrong.

For a split second, her mind was going through the motions, trying to build the solid form of her weapon out of the light that comprised her; then it was like her brain had exploded into shards. Her senses shattered into an indecipherable mixture of too-bright lights and too-loud sounds; her injuries began screaming with an entirely new kind of pain; and her body abruptly forgot how to maintain its proper form. Her physical form began to buzz and crackle, and she howled as the sensation agitated her already oversensitive nerves.

Somewhere, probably a million miles away, Amethyst was saying something that Centi couldn’t decipher. One last semi-coherent thought fluttered through her head – don’t look at me don’t look at me don’t look – before shriveling up like a butterfly struck by a bullet.

Her ears were ringing. She flopped down on the coarse ground and lay there until the infernal vibrations had finally faded away from her body.

“…Centi! Centi! Are you okay?!”

She blinked sluggishly. Words…for some reason she was having a hard time wrapping her mind around words. But she recognized her name, anyway. She pushed herself up with trembling arms, then noticed with mild surprise that she still had arms to push herself up with, and not insect legs.

She’d reverted, but not all the way. Her head was green chitin and dominated by a large set of mandibles; no thorax this time, but her legs seemed to be stuck halfway between their normal and insect forms, as they were too thin and brittle and the knees jolted out at odd angles. The damage done to her mind was worse, though. The afternoon sun seared into her eye, and she winced, covering her face with both arms before falling back again.

A hand landed on her shoulder. “Centi?! Holy crap…is this why you always say you can’t draw your weapon…?!”

Right. Amethyst. With difficulty, Centi managed to wrap her mind around the words. Amethyst hadn’t been around when Centi last tried to summon her grappling hook – which, uncoincidentally, had been the time of her last complete reversion – so she hadn’t realized what the consequences of her goading might be. A screeching gurgle that sounded vaguely affirmative left Centi’s mouth.

“Crap. Crap.” Amethyst paced a few steps back and forth, a washed-out blob in the sunlight. “You should have said something! No – I shouldn’t have kept pushing you! What was I thinking?! UGH!” She slammed her hands against her face.

Centi shifted one crooked leg, then hissed as her ankle reminded her angrily of its incapacitation. The sound immediately grabbed Amethyst’s attention. “Are you hurt?! Did…did I hurt you?!”

…it was almost unbearable to upset her any further…but it was the truth. Centi nodded, her gaze frozen on the ground.

Amethyst swore, whirling around and kicking at a rock that happened to be nearby.

Centi didn’t bother trying to move again. Such an abrupt reversion had left her mind feeling tender and raw, but she’d get used to it eventually, and then she’d be able to hobble her way back into the ship. Meanwhile, Amethyst would storm off, and they wouldn’t see each other for a few days, but as soon as they did Centi would apologize for letting this all go so wrong, and…

A pair of stout arms slid underneath her.

Centi squawked in surprise as Amethyst hoisted her up. The purple gem’s face was grim, but she showed no signs of deserting. “Okay,” she grunted softly, shifting Centi in her arms. “Come on. Let’s go back to the temple, Steven can heal your leg, and then you can chill for a while until you feel ready to head back home. Okay?”

When Centi was reasonably sure that she knew what Amethyst was saying, she nodded.

“Good. Okay. Let’s get moving.” Amethyst turned for the Warp Pad, barely betraying any effort as she carried Centi along with her. She didn’t look down at the corrupted gem, but she did say one more thing…

The plants had almost been completely concealed by papers: large, small, torn, whole, basically any scrap that was large enough for Centi to draw on. In everything from pencil to marker to paint, the entirety of Centi’s world had been depicted here. There were landscapes of the forest that had nearly absorbed her ship; sketched renderings of all the events that had happened to her since Steven first healed her; portraits of everyone she knew, carefully drawn from memory, since no one ever came here to sit for a portrait.

Centi shrugged, suddenly self-conscious about both the quantity and the quality of her art. “It’s just what I always do,” she explained lamely. “It’s…my way of understanding this strange place.”

Amethyst nodded like that made perfect sense; Centi was sure she was being humored. “It’s cool,” commented Amethyst. “I like it better than Peri and Lapis’s meep morps, if you wanna know the truth, but don’t tell them I said that! I guess I just don’t get all that abstract, this-represents-that stuff. Your pictures at least show real things.”

“Oh. Um…I’m glad you like it.” In all honesty, Centi loved the metaphorical artwork that Peridot and Lapis produced, but she just didn’t have the head to do something similar. She had a hard time thinking in abstractions.

Amethyst suddenly whirled around, spreading her arms wide to indicate the entire room. “So, do you like it?”

Centi blinked. “Why would I have drawn all these things if I didn’t like doing it?”

“Not that!” responded Amethyst dismissively. “I mean, do you like living here?”

Centi tilted her head. None of the Crystal Gems had really asked her that before; they all seemed perfectly content to assume that she was happy with her current living situation.

Amethyst continued in a conspiratorial tone: “Look, nobody else has mentioned it, but if you really wanted to, I bet we could get a room for you and your crew pals at the temple. Pearl and Garnet know how to program the place, and what with you being pretty much an official Crystal Gem now, you’d be welcome there. Only if you want to, of course…”

“Oh!” A small smile inched across Centi’s face, and she shook her head. “Thank you for the offer, but I truly am very happy here. This is my ship – I’ve always belonged here. I couldn’t bear to leave it.”

Amethyst folded her arms. “But don’t you ever feel…I don’t know, lonely? You’re out in the middle of nowhere here!”

“I have Neph and Phrita,” Centi pointed out. “And the Warp Pad, even if I cannot use it, lets me know that my friends are close by. And if I need a reminder, I can just…draw them. It’s enough to know that they exist. That they care about me.”

After a moment, Amethyst returned the smile and nodded. “Huh. I guess your art does mean something else after all.”

Before Centi could respond, Amethyst had returned to examining the menagerie of artwork, apparently having found something that caught her eye. “Woah, hey! When did you draw this picture of me?!”

Centi blushed profusely, suddenly recalling the hours she had dedicated to that particular portrait, drawing and re-drawing the precise curves that encompassed Amethyst’s distinctive form, wanting to create as accurate a representation as possible. She’d always found that Amethyst had a certain visual appeal that she didn’t notice as much in the other Crystal Gems – speaking from a strictly artistic perspective, of course.