Blooming Rose: A Pink Diamond Character Study

A Clouded Judgment

She couldn't tell who she was.

She couldn't tell what she was.

She couldn't tell anything meaningful about the world she lived in.

That is, unless the world she lived in was truly nothing more than splitting pain and an endless scenery of pink, fluffy clouds.

She wanted to reach for the clouds, to know what they feel like, but she seemed to lack a physical form to do so.

Or did she? There was no way of telling, and it's not like she could reach out to anyone else when she wasn't even sure if anyone else existed.

Did she, or did she not, have a physical form in the first place? That was the question, and it was kind of difficult to answer, but so far, all evidence pointed towards her not having one.

If she concentrated on the clouds, if she thought she was one of the clouds, then the pain even seemed to fade away. And nothing felt better than the feeling of pain going away and giving way to calmness.

That way, the way of realization and self-fulfillment, there would be pain.

This way, the way of bliss and ignorance, there would be serenity.

However, serenity proved to be a very fleeting feeling, difficult to achieve in practice, and soon enough, and she was struck by pain once again - now, with something else added to her complete list of experiences: a figure, lying on her side, unable to move.

Was this who she was? But she didn't feel like a motionless person in pain. It would have helped her cognitive dissonance much more if she truly were a cloud, in a world of nothing but clouds: free, careless and unaware of what a demand even is, let alone that she had demands to fulfill.

If she could just go back to being a cloud, this time, the pain would go away for real, and she would be able to live out the rest of her existence without a single care in the world, and without ever needing to answer the pesky question of who she was or what her name was.

Yet, the more she tried to focus on being a cloud, the more she came to think of other details, which she realized were, in fact, facts of her own world.

For one, strangely enough, all of her pain was actually concentrated in her head.

That was a strange place for pain to be concentrated. Was she actually getting better, with the rest of her body - and yes, she definitely did have a body; now that her palette of feelings had broadened, this fact was undeniable - slowly healing? Or was she always hurting in her head, and simply gained enough awareness to realize it?

For another thing, she finally came to realize that she was a Gem.

A Gem: a projection of light from a gemstone, able to manipulate itself to take any form that she desired (though, a "preferred" configuration always existed, and trying to go away from it for an extended amount of time was not desirable), with powers usually dependent on the gemstone's chemistry and cut.

A Gem: a cog in the great Gem Empire, always expected to heed the orders of the Diamond Authority and other superiors, in order to maintain the Empire's prosperity, throughout the galaxy.

Yet, trying to remember what she knew of Gems, this did not look like anything from any of the Gem worlds. With the information she currently had, the only reasonable conclusion she could make was that she was shattered, in one way or another, and this was some sort of Gem afterlife.

She slowly raised herself, stood on her feet and opened her eyes to better look around the Gem afterlife.

Wait, no, she absolutely did not do that. It felt like her soul was standing tall, ready to face the troubles that were simply not a part of this world, but her body remained limp and motionless, lying on her side. The two positions seemed irreconcilable, and yet, here her mind was, perfectly reconciling between them.