Days 14-15: Little White Lies

- - -Day 14(2)- - -

I stared Steven down. He averted his eyes.

"I didn't want to make you worry," Steven said.

"Worry about what!?"

"I didn't want you to lose hope."

"Steven, come on. What are you talking about!?"

He didn't run away. He didn't lash out at me. He was silent.

"How long have you been hiding this from me?" No response. "Since you picked the notebook off the floor?"

He lowered his head further, obscuring his face. "I didn't want you to be mad at me."

"Steven. What did you do?"

Back to silence.

"You know that you can tell me."

Nothing.

"You're my best friend.

Nothing.

"Please, Steven. We're trapped here together. We don't need to fight."

A third batch of nothing.

I scowled. "Fine." I stormed away.

For a second, I wondered if I could force the room to show me his memories. But not only would that be unethical, it would be impossible without Steven there to ask the room in the first place.

I sighed and collapsed against my bed. Why did everything always have to be so difficult? We were supposed to be focused on escaping, weren't we? So why were we keeping secrets from one another, instead?

I considered telling that to Steven but brushed the thought aside. He hadn't listened to anything else I said.

"I just want us to work together," I muttered to myself. "Why is that so hard for him to understand?"

I kicked at the floor and the clouds lightly swirled at my feet.

A rush came over me, one I hadn't felt in a while. Homesickness. I missed a time when we didn't find it normal to lie to each other. I remembered a time when we promised to be open. But as this place drifted us closer, suddenly it seemed to drift us so far apart. We'd been here two weeks, now. I didn't know which was scarier: that, or the fact it was starting to feel normal.

I sighed and flipped open my DS. Maybe that could distract me…

All day, I waited for Steven to fess up. To tell me the truth. But it never happened. He stayed in his side of the room, never looking back at me.

A few hours after the initial incident, I tried to talk to him again, but when he saw me coming, he walked away without a word. I didn't bother walking after him.

As I walked back to my bed, my foot brushed against a strange object sitting on the floor. It seemed to be little more than a simple box. I examined it for a few seconds. It didn't seem to have any hinges or anything, it was just a solid box. I certainly hadn't drawn it.

"Hey, Steven?" I said. "You forgot to erase…" My voice trailed off. Right, he wasn't speaking with me.

I set it on my desk so it wouldn't grow a gem.

If he still wasn't speaking with me, I supposed I had no choice but to open my DS and fail to keep mind off Steven.

15 minutes later, I heard muted footprints approach on the cloudy floor.

"…Hey," Steven said.

I glanced upwards. "Hi."

"You, um, wanted me to erase something?"

I averted my eyes. "Never mind."

He averted his own eyes. He shifted his weight to one foot, prepared to walk away. But he stopped himself. He took a deep breath and met my eyes again. "I'm sorry, okay!?" he said. "I did what I thought was right and now we're both feeling awful. I don't know what to think anymore. Yesterday, everything was fine, and now because I screwed up, it did more harm than if I just told the truth. So I'm sorry."

I saw his eyes, filled with sympathy. "I…" I didn't know what to say. "Please. What did you do?"

He took a deep breath, then 2 more. He turned away. Even now, he wouldn't tell me.

I cleared my throat. "You, uh, wanna play a few rounds of Mario Kart?" I said. "I still have a few characters to try out."

He nodded silently. I tossed him a DS.

We played for a few hours. Never did we come close to reaching a glow. We hardly talked in between matches. Instead, I doodled in my notebook about tracks we could race on next.

Every match we played, I got more and more frustrated. This was for for a few reasons, chief among them: I won every single race we played. It was like he wasn't even trying.

I wanted to be angry at him. I wanted to be furious. But all I could muster was an ever-increasing frustration.

I threw my DS to the side. It broke, but it would only take a few words in the book to fix it.

"Connie!?" Steven said, alarmed. I simply sighed and picked up our console. I couldn't keep up the façade that was our current relationship if Steven was unwilling to do the same.

I was only slightly surprised when, after a single round, Steven drew a controller and sat beside me. It was kind of funny; he isolated himself from me but when I tried to give him his wish and ignored him, he refused to leave.

I clicked "Competitive" in the main menu and selected myself. Steven did the same.

The visual detail was striking. Or maybe it wasn't at all: perfect visuals wouldn't be that difficult for a being with near-limitless power.

"Steven, you could end this," I said.

He pressed the start button on his controller.

Text lined the screen:

- - -Match Start- - -

The two fighters spawned amid a massive ruinous set piece. Plenty of places for stealth and strategy. However, neither of us took those opportunities. Our avatars slowly walked to the center of the temple and met, eye to eye.

We added a feature yesterday. Whenever one of us spoke, the person we were controlling would mimic our lip movements as if they said it themselves. Technically, when placed in an actual video game console, it would be incredibly difficult to program, if not impossible without a Kinect camera or something. Even more so to do it well. But so what? Technological improbability bended when there was magic involved. While it added an extra dimension to Co-op, now, as the characters sparred, it seemed as if they fought for something more than their notebook-based programming dictated.

The two of us slowly circled one another. No stealth, no underhanded tactics. Just a straight-up fight. We stood in the midst of a ruinous temple. I didn't know where it was, maybe an ancient gem structure. It didn't seem to matter much in the moment.

Steven made the first move. He threw a shield at me, imbedded with spikes. As I dodged to the side, he closed the difference in distance between us. He brought up his spike-filled bubble and planned to sqash me flat. Fortunately, I had the reflexes to jump over it, using my sword to vault off of the top of the bubble, popping it in the process. I landed a few feet away from him.

I levelled my sword at him. "I don't want to fight you," I said.

"It's too late for me to tell you the truth."

"No, it's not!" I said. "Was it too late after Jasper first attacked? I sure remember you telling me the truth. Have I been living dream or something all this time?"

"That was to protect you!" Steven said. "And I already know I was wrong back then."

I paused. "So this isn't to protect me? Then what-"?

I didn't get a chance to finish my sentence. He lunged at me again. I kicked at his feet to knock him off balance. Unfortunately, he still had a trick up his sleeve. When his legs gave way, he didn't fall. He activated his floating powers and carried the momentum of his whole body to hit me hard with his shield. I flew across the room and impacted a wall. Battered, I rose.

I ran forwards and swung my sword. Steven raised his shield to defend against it. "Then why can't you tell me?"

He froze. I supposed it was a question he didn't expect me to ask.

I used that chance to strike. I broke from his shield, rolled around him, and slashed him in the back. I didn't go for the kill, of course, but I made sure to do damage. Steven fell to the ground.

"So, what then? You can't say what you're hiding, and you can't even tell me why?"

A lesser opponent would goad him, call him a coward for his unwillingness to give the simplest of answers. I was no such opponent. My sword seeked nothing but the truth.

"Prove to me you care about me. If not enough to tell me your secret, then at least enough to tell me why." I lowered my sword on his body to prevent him from escaping.

"That was low," Steven said.

Steven opened a bubble, blowing me backwards. I landed safely. I was angry for an instant; he was still pushing me away! But no, his defenses were weakening. He could have skewered me with a spiked bubble, there and then. But he chose not to.

I ran foreward and slashed the bubble down once again. My sword again met with his shield. "Is it because you don't want to break a promise?"

No reaction.

"Is it because it doesn't affect me?"

Nothing.

"So it does affect me in some way, then?"

The grip on his shield loosened. I knocked it away with my sword and kicked him to the ground. "I don't suppose you're going to try to write that off as sweaty hands?"

Again, he launched me away with a bubble. And again, I charged. He barely had a chance to summon another shield to parry it.

"You have shame written all over your face. But why?"

For a few seconds, I was met with silence. Then, he fought back in a burst of pure power I wasn't expecting. This time, the bubble he summoned was filled with spikes again. It knocked my sword out of my hands. I scrambled to pick it up.

"Fine!" he said. "If you can read me this well, I might was well just tell you. It's only a matter of time before your game of 20 questions gets you there. It's because I did something that I shouldn't have. And then I didn't tell you, which only made it worse. I've probably put you in danger. And I'm afraid that if I tell you now, we might never be friends again." He dropped his shield. "And I don't want to lose you." Steven sunk to the ground inside his spiky bubble. It disintegrated, leaving only Steven, curled in a ball, his eyes closed.

I took a shaky breath. "I promise. Whatever it is, it won't tear us apart as much as we've already been torn. What did you do?"

I was met with silence once again.

"Do you want me to use my other 15 questions to figure it out?"

More silence.

"It has something to do with my notebook, right? The vision and all?"

His silence was unreadable. He shut his eyes and was still.

I had a flash of anger. After all of that, he still refused to tell the truth. He shut me out again. Like he didn't know how much it was tearing us apart already. All he cared about was keeping his little secret, no matter the cost.

His shield was down. He was defeated. Yet I did something I was taught never to do. I slowly walked over to Steven's crouching body. The ruins around me allowed my footsteps to echo against the walls around me. Still, he didn't move. I slowly raised my sword to a target who had already admitted defeat.

I stared at Steven. Curled in a ball, the controller fallen to the ground. Through his closed eyes, I slapped Steven across the face. The world seemed to stop for a second as I hit, like as an impact effect in some sort of fighting game. Before anybody could say anything, I walked away.

We didn't talk for the rest of the day. I fell asleep with tears pooling in my eyes.

- - -Day 15- - -

When I awoke, I felt awful. My anger subsided, and I was left with guilt and shame. I let my emotions get the better of me. I ruined the last chance we would get to mend our friendship.

With closed eyes, I reached for the clasp of the cage beside my bed. But… there was no cage.

My eyes shot open. I rocketed my attention towards the desk. It was completely empty. I kept my pen in my pocket, but the notebook…

I looked to the floor. And there it was. I would call it peaceful, but it wasn't. I didn't have to measure the gem to know how it got bigger. Somehow, someway, it destroyed the cage. That scared me. I didn't know how many times it would have to do that to become a gem mutant.

A gem mutant who had the power to control reality to its will…

I hesitated for a second or two. Steven and I didn't seem to be on speaking terms. But this was more important than all of that. I needed him to destroy it. If it could not only escape, but eviscerate an iron cage, we needed to destroy it before it had a chance to do the same to us.

I activated my rocket boots to brush the clouds away from my feet and walked towards Steven's bed.

"Steven, wake up," I said. I shook him several times.

His eyes opened and saw me. They lit up. "Oh, hey, Connie!…" he trailed off, remembering yesterday. "Is there, um, anything you want?"

"The gem got bigger," I said. "Somehow, it destroyed the cage. We need to put our differences aside. I'm done whining about sentimental value. Just destroy it."

Steven's brain seemed to run at a million miles an hour as he processed what I said. His face switched between a hundred expressions: happy, sad, angry, hopeless, hopeful, and everywhere in between.

Finally, he said, "I can't."

I blinked a few times. "What? What do you mean, you can't?

He stared at me for what felt like an eternity. He said nothing. And just before I said something more, he unfroze. He still said nothing as he slowly raised his hand to a position which beckoned me to grab it. A handshake? No… he wanted to dance.

I sighed. I wished so badly we could do it, but I knew it couldn't work. We could only fuse when we were emotionally resonant, and if we were as apart as one another as the two of us, there wasn't a way in the world we could fuse. Or glow, or some subset of glow, either. In the moment, I wasn't sure if we could have ever fused again.

Before I could say all that, he snapped. "Just do it."

Maybe against my better judgement, I grabbed Steven's hand.

Neither one of us willing to look the other in the eye, we began to dance.

I immediately noticed that Steven's dance was uneven. While normally he preferred to dance loose, to go with the flow, his moves were stiff. I guessed his dance matched his mental thought process: it was uneven and disorganized. I could see an earnestness in his attempt, but that earnestness didn't seem to be paying off.

Though, I was one to talk. I looked at my own feet. Like Steven, my dance was a mess. I tried to force my feet to cooperate, but it was hopeless. It wasn't that I wasn't trying, of course I was! But I couldn't get my mind to agree with my heart, and I couldn't get either of those to agree with the rest of my body.

I glanced into Steven's eyes. I felt a flash of emotion. Shame. Anger. Sadness. And maybe a little bit of hope.

I sympathized with those emotions, of course. I was…

Wait a minute. What just happened? How did I… We weren't anywhere close to fusion, right?! And yet I saw his thoughts all the same, something that could only happen as we closed in on a glow. I didn't stop my awkward dance. Maybe it got a little more awkward. I tried to rationalize that it didn't matter that my dance was sloppy, we weren't going to glow, anyways. But now I wasn't so sure.

I glanced at my feet again. I noticed something I hadn't the first time. Even though both of our moves were clunky and robotic, our feet lined up perfectly to an extent that would be difficult to do with practice. It didn't make sense, but it was happening all the same.

I thought back to our first bout of fusion training. Garnet's song about letting go of negative thoughts. How could we be so close to fusion if we each held such animosities?

But I realized, maybe there was something more to it. We weren't hiding our thoughts. He was hiding something he did, but he wasn't hiding from his thoughts. Same with me: I made mistakes yesterday, but I wasn't trying to avoid them. I was facing them. I was literally facing the person I slapped in the face head-on.

As I saw Steven began to glow, I had flashes of my own emotions. Shame, that I couldn't stop myself from slapping him. Anger, that he wouldn't tell me the truth until now. Sadness, that we were drifting apart. And now, just a little bit of hope we could grow closer.

Finally, I gave in. Our bodies each glowed and entered that state so close to fusion.

I saw Steven's fear, most of all. Even now, he didn't want to say it. But he didn't have to. As he thought of it, I saw it like some sort of movie.

He had just woken up on day 12. He seemed to be fine at that point. As he walked to my side to see if I was awake, he stepped on something. He looked down and I saw my notebook, sitting on the floor. It echoed the image I saw yesterday. Here it was, the secret Steven tried so hard to hide.

I didn't hear his thoughts, but I felt his emotions. First, confusion. Then, realization. He realized the reason for the notebook's erratic behavior and its gem. It unnaturally fell to the floor day after day, and he realized why it was important. The floor was the reason for everything going sour, we both already knew that. So it didn't take much to realize that objects left on the floor would be affected as well.

On impulse, he muttered it under his breath. "Room, I want you to erase Connie's notebook."

The vision nearly snapped, then and there. The wave of anger I felt nearly severed the connection. Not that he tried to destroy it, that was rational, but that he didn't tell me. I calmed myself. I needed to see everything, first.

The clouds swirled around the grounded notebook. My eyes widened. My anger rose when I realized the implications. He erased my book and replaced it with an identical one! And he didn't tell me? Why!?

When the clouds stopped swirling, and all semblance of my part of knowing what was going on disappeared. The notebook was still there.

Steven spiked with fear. He tried again. "Room, I want you to destroy this notebook."

Again, once the clouds stopped swirling, nothing.

He tried, again and again. He rephrased it every time, each time a bit louder, but nothing worked.

He quickly picked up the book and set it on my table. He was ashamed he would even try that without asking me. But more than that, he was scared. Scared that he had no power over this. He had been able to do anything except leave. But now he could do anything except leave and wish gems away. He knew the danger of a mutant with the ability to wish anything into existence but didn't know what to do about it.

So, he tried to distract himself. He put up a façade and pretended that everything was fine. At some points in time, he almost believed it. But at others, it was all a lie. He wanted to tell me, but every time, he told himself, "Not now, later." And when later came, his shame rose over his fear. He knew he should have told me, and every minute he waited, it got harder to tell the truth. Not only that he tried to destroy my notebook, but that he lied about it, over and over again. And that he put me in danger because of that lie. The pain was almost unbearable.

When I snapped back to reality, the glow was gone. Steven had his head hung.

I said nothing.

"So?" he said. "Aren't you going to berate me? Aren't you going to slap me again? It's not like I don't deserve it."

"Tell me the truth," I said. "If you had poofed my book, what would you have done?"

He looked me straight in the eye. "I was going to tell you, right away. The only reason I didn't do so was because-"

I didn't let him finish. I just hugged him.

"Then I don't need to punish you. You acted on impulse, you probably did what I would've if I realized the truth. Yeah, you didn't tell me. Yeah, I'm a little mad about that. But I think you've beaten yourself up about it enough. If I wanted to punish you, then you've done that enough yourself."

"But it put you in danger!"

"We can worry about that later. I'm just glad you told me."

After a few more moments, we broke from our hug.

"You're really not mad at me?"

"Oh, I'm mad at you, all right. But you needed a hug. Besides, you know what you did wrong, it's not like scolding you would give you any new information."

"T-thanks, Connie."

I turned my attention to the notebook. Its gem seemed to taunt me. Despite my brave face, the implications of this were harsh. Sometime soon, it was almost guaranteed my book would go sour, and I didn't know what I could do to fix it.

"What about a hammer?" I said.

"Huh?"

I drew a hammer and tried to smash the gem. The moment it touched the gem, the hammer vanished into pink clouds.

"Well, there goes that idea."

Steven was baffled. "Can you please stop joking around?! We might only have a day to prepare before this thing attacks."

Suddenly, a light bulb turned on inside my brain.

"You're right, we might only have a day to prepare… so what are you waiting for?"

"Huh?"

"Keep up, Steven! Traps! We need to set them! So let's go!"

"R-right!"

Steven started frantically drawing in his notebook.

I smiled at Steven. I would talk to him later, but right now, most of all, he needed to move on. So I was doing my best to show I wasn't scared.

He probably knew I was, of course. He'd been in my head probably a dozen times in the last week. But sometimes a façade's what somebody needs.

I'd talk to him about this more. But maybe I'd wait until after we beat up my notebook.

Tomorrow, then. Or whenever it appeared. I'd be ready.

A/N: So! Lot's of stuff in this chapter. It took me a while to make sure the stuff I wanted to happen, happened, without twisting the characters to be horribly out of character, and without making it seem too jarring. Hope it all worked out!

I have BIG plans for the chapter either after this one, or maybe the one after that. For now, though, I wanted to leave you guys without a major cliffhanger, just in case it takes me another 3 months to make a new chapter.

BTW, sorry about the lack of chapter within a week. Again, I forgot the finals were approaching, and suddenly, my schedule completely vanished.

FFR: Favorite, Follow, Review.

Oh, and hey, Connie?

"Yeah?"

Good luck next chapter.

"…Huh?"

No spoilers!

"Wait a minute, now I want to know! What are you gonna do to me! Come on, we're prepared for the monster this time…"

Next time: We figure out what I'm gonna do to her. See you guys then!