The swamp grass tickled the back of Pearl's neck as she lay in it. The sensation felt nice. It was grounding, after the slight burning, disconnected sensation that had been plaguing her since... well, since shortly after she moved here. Since Impulse ripped another wound in the world, forty-nine times larger than last time. He needed to stop doing that. She needed to find a better solution than stealing his redstone supplies.

"The moon's big." Gem spoke up, startling Pearl out of her thoughts - that's good, those things are like quicksand.

"Is it?" Pearl wondered aloud, tilting her head. "Oh no, yeah. It definitely is."

"Need to see it upside-down?" Gem joked. Pearl laughed.

The two sat in silence once the laughter died out. Pearl noticed how Gem's legs were oddly contorted in the position in which they were resting. She wondered how the hell Gem was comfortable like that. Still, she brushed the thought away in favour of other more pressing matters. The moon was big. That definitely wasn't good, seeing as it was the other end of the stitches holding together a tear in the fabric of reality, opposite Pearl.

"I wonder why." Gem expressed, eventually.

"The boatem hole. Octagon. Tango's bedrock. I don't know. It's worrying." Pearl replied, shrugging from her position on the ground.

"Of course you'd say that. You're Pearlescent Moon, after all."

"Yeah."

Gem had gotten too close, Pearl knew. It wasn't that Pearl didn't want to tell people what she was, it was that people tended to get scared of what she was, what she represented. She didn't want to imagine Gem's smiling face contorted into one of abject terror. She didn't want to see Grian flinch away from her like her presence burned. She didn't want to lose the home, the family, that she'd so quickly found amongst these people. So, naturally, she changed the subject.

"Clams."

"Clams?" Gem asked, confused by the sudden non-sequitur.

"Clams!" Pearl nodded. "You know what they do when hurt?"

"No?"

"They cover the thing hurting them in this stuff that then solidifies into a pearl."

"Wow."

"I like to think that the universe is like a giant clam, you know."

"I'm not gonna think about the implications of you in particular saying that, Pearl."

"Good. Don't."

"Is that a threat?" Gem asked, turning her head to face Pearl, grinning.

"Yes." Pearl replied, a spur-of-the-moment joke. "No." She clarified. "Never."

The two remained in the grass for a while longer, until Pearl felt her eyes growing heavy. She looked over at Gem, to see that the other was already sound asleep. Smiling softly, she let herself nod off too. The state of the moon was a problem, she knew, but it could wait until she had a healthy enough sleep schedule to tackle the issue. Or something.

She was asleep before she could finish that thought.

———

Ok, so originally Zed's reveal was gonna be next, but the current state of the moon on the server struck me with inspiration.

I just realised, Gem and Pearl haven't been properly introduced in this AU. Without further ado:

Gem - Faun, basically a deer person 

Pearl - Cryptid, exists to hold the fabric of reality together 

Anyway, that's all the A/N stuff out of the way.

I've been Entropy, peace out from the present!