I’m curious because it’s a unique ship. What made you want to ship Centi with Amethyst?
It’s because of this fanfic that I started & never finished (it was killed off due to the show’s decline in quality) called Song Seekers. basically Steven’s healing spit sort of worked, to the point where Centi was constantly reverting & recovering; parts of her body would heal and then go back to being bug-like, but gradually she was getting better, to the point where she could maintain a normal form most of the time. however her mind was also affected by the corruption to the point where her sensory processing was affected and she also couldn’t do stuff like draw her weapon or use her abilities.
the reason why I started shipping her with Amethyst was bc Amethyst knew what it felt like to be “wrong” or “defective”, and out of all the gems, she was the one who spent the most time with Centi. they also bonded over their love of human food.
3. The aftermath of a bad fight; 7. “You didn’t have to do this, you know.”
Centi was knee-deep in the jungle brush by the time she heard the distinct note that a warp pad sang out when it activated. Scowling, she continued tramping through the foliage, hoping that her black-and-green color scheme would camouflage her -- but if it helped at all, it was probably negated by her mane of pale hair. Sure enough, Amethyst’s distinctive forceful footsteps caught up with her in less than a minute.
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.”
“Seriously, Centi...” Amethyst lifted her hand, then seemed to think better of whatever gesture she was about to make. So she simply said, “You’re wrong, you know...”
1. Who goofs around in the kitchen more?Amethyst for sure. she’ll make all these weird food concoctions for them to try 2. How do they say ‘I love you’ without actually saying it? Ex- “Have you drank any water today?”for Amethyst it’s “are you doing okay?” which is her way of checking on Centi’s sensory overload issues. for Centi it’s “you’re the best!” because she legitimately sees Amethyst as a great fighter even if Amethyst doesn’t 3. What would they marathon?probably some kind of action cartoon…Centi likes Crying Breakfast Friends, but that’s a little too mellow for Amethyst, and Centi is honestly just confused by Lil’ Butler. and neither of them can really get into dramas like Camp Pining Hearts 4. What would their wedding song be?As Long As You’re Mine from Wicked 5. What is the first memory that they think of, when they think of the funniest moment they had together? i haven’t planned out their whole relationship so I’ll just say when Centi went to the ocean for the first time and they got in a splash fight 6. Who likes to hold the other in their arms?AMETHYST. even though Centi is taller than her. with or without shapeshifting bigger, she will hoist up her gf bridal style. 7. Who nuzzles into the other? Centi, she’s more tactile. 8. Who kisses the other on the forehead before they go to sleep?idk? it would have to be Amethyst at first, though, cause Centi wouldn’t know about kissing 9. What position do they fall asleep in when sleeping in the same bed?Amethyst just sort of flops down and spread out and Centi twists herself to lay in the remaining space 10. Who picks up the kids and/or animals from day care?uhhh they should not have kids but if animals…probably Centi because Amethyst would try to stage a jailbreak with all the boarded pets
1: Who makes the other hot chocolate? Amethyst. Hopefully she doesn’t add any “special ingredients” to it (though honestly Centi doesn’t often care about that.
2: Who knits the other a seasonal sweater? Centi, she likes crafts and creative stuff that she can do with her hands.
3: Who’s family hosts a bigger holiday gathering? What’s the gathering like for your OTP? I mean, they’re sort of part of the same “family”...it’s probably fairly low-key until some gem decides to mess up some traditional holiday thing spectacularly.
4: How would your OTP react to having a snow day? Centi has never seen snow before and doesn’t know what to do with it at first. Amethyst introduces her to it calmly before starting the inevitable snowball fight.
5: Who offers the other one their jacket? Amethyst. She knows that Centi is more affected by temperatures.
6: Who makes a snowman that looks like the other member of your OTP, or do they both do this? Centi would do her best, even though snow isn’t the best sculpting material.
7: Does your OTP ever have snowball fights? Yes. Amethyst starts them.
8: What gifts would they get each other for the holidays? Centi would give Amethyst something homemade that she worked really hard on, such as a portrait. Amethyst would give Centi something like a stim toy or a giant bag of seasonally-flavored CHAAAAPs.
9: How do they spend their winter holiday? Do they even celebrate the same holiday? There’s technically no Christmas in SU but let’s ignore that for the sake of this post
10: What sort of seasonal treats does your OTP like to eat? Amethyst likes EVERYTHING, and she introduces Centi to holiday foods. Centi likes the desserts such as cookies and pumpkin pie, and also deviled eggs.
11: How do they spend New Year’s Eve? They go out to count down and watch fireworks wth Steven and the other gems.
12: Who initiates the New Year’s kiss? Amethyst, definitely. Centi wouldn’t know that kissing on New Year’s is a tradition.
13: Who tries to get a secret gift for the other one for Valentine’s Day? Centi. Amethyst doesn’t do anything secretly.
14: Would your OTP take a walk together in the snow? I think so!
15: Which one gets more excited over the first snow of winter? Amethyst.
Ooo, and Centithyst, picking up the pieces. Wreck me.
I’d like to thank my friends for indulging my weird obscure OTPs.
Also, this one might be slightly spoiler-ish, unlike the last Centithyst story. You have been warned.
Picking Up the Pieces
If Centi had needed any further proof that she had the absolute worst luck in the world, than this day had certainly provided it.
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…
“And I’m really sorry, Centi. For what that’s worth.”
Judging by the way that Amethyst was raising her eyebrows at the anteroom of Centi’s ship, it must have been a while since she’d last been here, longer than Centi had even realized. In here, it was as dim as ever – the lighting system of the ship having long since given up on this place – and the aroma of jungle vegetation, moss and vines thickly plastering every wall, made the place seem almost like a greenhouse.
But the decor made it seem more like an art gallery.
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.
She was happy with that portrait, and it was a good reminder. But it hardly seemed to compare to the real thing.
Who cooks: Amethyst. Centi doesn’t know how to use a human kitchen, and besides, Amethyst likes that Centi will try almost anything.
Who does the laundry and other chores: Probably Centi. Amethyst is more of a slob and Centi keeps things neat because it helps her keep her mind in order.
How many children do they have: YOU SHOULDNT LET THEM HAVE KIDS
Who’s more dominant: Amethyst. Despite being a captain, Centi treats everyone as an equal.
Favorite nonsexual activity: Snacking!
Their favorite place to be together: Anywhere they can just chill together. The temple and Centi’s ship are both good places.
Any traditions: whenever they go to the beach, Amethyst throws Centi into the water.
Their “song”: I haven’t come up with one yet.
What they do for each other on holidays: Amethyst has to teach Centi about the holidays, with Steven’s help, of course. Then they would probably make Christmas cookies for each other!
Where did they go for their honeymoon: If they actually got married? I bet they’d go on a cruise or something.
Where did they first meet: Technically at the temple when corrupted Centi attacked.
Any pets: a pet tarantula!
What do they fight over: Centi would criticize Amethyst for her messiness and tendency to be mean to others. Amethyst would criticize Centi for not standing up for herself more.
Do they go on vacations, if so where: Not sure that they would, Centi doesn’t always do too well with new places.
