“They don’t care,” Tourmaline answered. “You’re right. They don’t. Not about anything you do, not about anything that happens to you. ‘The Diamonds will notice my absence’? Ha! Like they noticed Peridot-2F5L’s?"

“She was disposable.”

“And you’re not?”

Cinnabar bared her teeth. Her fingers twitched for her sword. “I’m in charge of an entire System.”

Tourmaline laughed. “You’re in charge of a festering, abandoned garbage dump. They’d sooner forget it even existed.”

"The Diamonds trusted me with it because I alone could handle it! I’ve proven myself for millennia! I’ve been nothing but loyal to them!”

“And that peridot wasn’t!?” came Tourmaline’s response, and their voice cracked as they spoke. “She did everything that was asked of her! Without question, without hesitation! She worked and breathed and lived for the glory of Homeworld! And they left her here to rot.”

“You four attacked her!”

“Yeah and we— she attacked first. At Homeworld’s orders. And when the mission failed, what did Homeworld do?”

“They left her! On a barren, hostile, Gem-independent planet. The peridot hid herself away in caves while the organic life on this planet stalked her and ripped at her—wet, hot, filthy things. And she sent out message after message, requests and notices and pleas for rescue. Every day for months. And they did nothing. They left her to oxidize in this planet’s atmosphere and lose her mind and senses and decay like the obsolete machines rusting away in the Kindergartens! And that’s when she was found, already so panicked and unstable and broken, and then she was cracked, and arms torn off, and locked away, and she watched her life dangled in front of her face every moment, every second, until she was begging for death.”