#i already did a thorough deconstruction of this chapter a couple years ago and i am not going to do it again

[radioactive-earthshine]

Impulse (1995) #6

After discovering (as Impulse) that Preston's mother Susan was behind the abuse all along and not the father like we were led to believe, Bart makes the decision to sacrifice his hero identity and report to Mr. Sheridan what he saw. This is after weeks of Max drilling into him that keeping his ID secret is paramount. Bart knows and accepts that some things are just not worth having if it means someone else is suffering.

I do wonder though if Bart talked to Max again and warned him that he was going to do this - Max earlier gave him the go ahead that if he did witness the abuse as Impulse that there was little they could do and his ID would be forfeit in this situation. I wonder if Max gave the warning to Wally and they were already bracing for the fallout but naturally, because the universe just likes to align itself for Bart he was spared having to out himself at all.

[mimik-u]

Flower Child (Chapter 14): Night

AO3 Link

6:10PM:

For the last fifteen years, Jay Zircon had been Diamond Electric’s top lawyer alongside her sister and fellow counsel, Gilda. Whatever lawsuits the company faced—and it had faced more than its fair share—the pair headed the legal team which incisively ensured victory for their illustrious CEO, Yellow Diamond. 

Where Gilda was aggressive and willing to snipe beneath the belt, a style that suited their similarly minded boss, Jay was more circumspect in her methodology, able to work through all the variables of a given case to create a slower but undeniably thorough position. When the two of them worked together, they made a dichotomous but somehow remarkably fluid team.

They didn’t lose very often.

They couldn’t afford to lose given the status, prestige, and formidable demand of their employer, who also didn’t lose.

Very often.

(Yellow Diamond had lost her only child four years ago, and it was clear to everyone, to all who knew her, that she hadn’t been the same since.)

The Zircons worked together often in the sense that they were continually forced into close proximity to each other by the nature of their jobs and painful holidays with their aging mother… but as far as working together in a more metaphorical sense went, aliens would invade Earth first before the siblings would ever find common ground for longer than a day.

And somehow, aliens were less of a far-stretch.

“I’m looking at all the facts now, and I truly think, if I-I’m allowed to be frank, Mrs. Diamond, that it is in our best interest to settle for this particular case.” Jay’s voice trembled as she carefully addressed the figure at the head of the conference table.

Arranged in a black three piece suit, Yellow Diamond was simply—there was no other word for it—striking, a slightly slouched but otherwise imperial statue cut from marble in her hardback chair. There was always an air about her, an impression, that she was an impenetrable fortress, her tall walls fortified with sharp weaponry and stone.

Her architecture was magnificent, but in its harshness and angularity, all lines and geometrical edges, it always emphasized an implicit message: She was a woman who it would be unwise to cross.

She stared between the sisters impassively, finger interlocked below her sharp chin as she listened, though Jay couldn’t help but notice that the CEO’s attention was divided between them and her phone, which sat dormant on the table, a silent specter.

“That’s your go-to solution, isn’t it?” Gilda scoffed, her arrogance impressively balanced in the haughty tilt of her nose. “Settle. What is this? A petty traffic ticket? We shouldn’t be settling anything! We could have them on the ropes if we just—”

“Gilda!” She interrupted incredulously, splaying her hands forcibly on the table. “Loosen your cravat so you can see the big picture for heaven’s sake! The factory‘s waste has been unlawfully leaking on a protected reservation for twelve years. We can contest that until we’re blue in the face, but no judge on this green earth is going to rule in our favor.”

Her sister opened that insufferable mouth of hers, likely to argue some asinine point that Jay would spend the next thirty minutes trying to meticulously deconstruct, but the familiar tango was harshly interrupted by the ringing of a phone that was neither of theirs.

“Quiet!” Yellow Diamond hissed, fluidly pulling the device up to her ear, and there was a viciousness in her ordinarily well-regimented face that neither lawyer felt particularly equipped to contest.

So they blanched into obedient silence on either side of the tense CEO.

Gilda uncomfortably picked at her portfolio.

“Blue? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

On the other end of the line, the woman who Jay knew to be Yellow Diamond’s wife, seemed to reply. 

Fifteen years was a long time to have known the Diamonds, and during that span—all those days, weeks, and months—Jay understood both very little about them and an incredible lot. 

Fifteen years ago, Pink Diamond had been a precocious ten-year old who had accompanied her mother to work from time to time. She used to play on the elevator, zipping from the lobby to the fortieth floor constantly, as though it was some exciting game called Annoy the Poor Elevator Attendant. Jay had been awkward and clumsy then, a young lawyer still trying to find her footing as the newest addition to one of the most elite legal teams in the entire city, and one of her most vivid memories from that time was the youngest Diamond accidentally bumping into her on said elevator, causing her to spill her scalding coffee all over her favorite portfolio.

The child had apologized profusely and even proffered her own jacket as a napkin because she was sweet like that—if a little impish. Freckles crossed the bridge of her nose like trailing dandelion dust; there was a gap in her mouth where she’d just lost a tooth.

For a couple of years there, Jay became familiarized with the heiress’s occasional presence in the building. She was the shock of pink hair bobbing impatiently in the elevator, and she was the flash of red converses heeling off down the hallway and around the corner. She was the lone bubbly voice in a sea of sober business droning. She was ten, and then she was thirteen, and then she was sixteen, obnoxiously jingling the keys to her new convertible around everywhere, as though just begging someone to ask about them.

She was the rare smile on Yellow Diamond’s unbending mouth—crooked there, stiff.

Almost reluctant.

But undoubtedly there.

And then, just like that, she was gone.

The hallways of Diamond Electric felt a little less… vibrant without the spontaneity of those red converses and the climbing octaves of that high, lilting laugh.

Mischievous.

To the last.

As for Blue Diamond, Jay could only claim to have seen her maybe a handful of times in the course of her employ at DE, though only one occasion was stark in the lawyer’s well-ordered recollections.

At the trial where Pink Diamond’s killers were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the Zircons’ euphoria at having argued their cased well was immediately tempered as the entire courtroom watched a tragedy unfold before their eyes. There was no applause as Yellow Diamond stood and held her wife in her arms.

There was only silence.

And baited breath.

And a mutual, unspoken, dirty relief that they were not the Diamonds and only passive voyeurs to what was assuredly unspeakable misery.

That night, Jay and Gilda were quite polite to each other as they taxied away from the courthouse.

A mutual, unspoken, dirty truce.

“No, no, I’m, of course I’m not busy,” Yellow said, standing up with an abruptness that startled the Zircons. She was already halfway to the door before at least one of them recovered their wits.

“But, Mrs. Diamond!” Gilda interjected. “The lawsuit. We—”

“We’re done for the night,” Yellow called over her shoulder, a brusqueness in her voice that left no room for argument. “We can reconvene in the morning.” “But—”

The door slammed on Gilda’s final protestation.

A framed picture of the Empire City skyline comically fell from its place on the wall at the force of the exit, landing facedown on the floor with a pathetic ker-clunk.

Jay glanced down at the neatly compiled packet below her—the efforts of at least two weeks worth of joint research.

They had barely made it past page four; there were fifty-two pages total.

“Her head’s just not in the game anymore,” Gilda sniffed, scooping up her own papers with a roughness that wasn’t entirely impersonal. “Hasn’t been in years now.”

“Gilda,” Jay chided sharply, her voice low, but even she knew that whispering was an exercise in futility.

Their boss was long gone.

“Oh, don’t give me that holier than thou nonsense, sister mine. You know it. Everyone in this office—nay!—this building knows it.” She shoved her portfolio back into her briefcase and closed it, harshly palming the brass clasps. “Our stalwart leader has been compromised.”

“She’s still grieving obviously. She’s taking care of her wife…”

Gilda only shook her head, standing up from her own chair. Her impeccable coif—tall and vaguely impossible looking—gleamed beneath the warm overheads. 

“And I’m sympathetic towards her,” she said. “I am. But you cannot run a multibillion dollar business on sentiment.”

It was an effective closing statement to which Jay Zircon had no reasonable rebuttal. 

Her sister swept out of the conference room with a last harrumph of contempt, while she alone remained, the last diner at that long, empty table. She shuffled a few of her papers absentmindedly and glanced out of the yellow-tinted windows as the sky slowly turned over to night, charcoaling.

Sentiment.

This company had no use for it.

6:44PM:

The conversation had lasted maybe ten minutes, two of which were lost to clumsy silence as Yellow Diamond navigated from the conference room to her office around the corner, closing the door behind her with a resolute click.

They spent three minutes more on useless pleasantries because that was just what a phone call between two spouses who didn’t really talk anymore entailed.

The barely breathed, Hello.

The awkwardly returned, Hi.

The shuffling of their reluctant breaths, all static and white noise over the line, before Yellow ripped the bandage off with all the indelicacy she centered her brutal facade around, exposing the wound raw.

Did you mean it? Are you sure you’re… okay ?

Because the bleak truth was that she wasn’t sure she believed Blue when she said that she was fine. Four years of perpetual mourning had taught her entirely too much about silent, grief stricken nights and very little about belief, hope, and all of those other empty platitudes. Blue Diamond could say that she was fine and leave a suicide note in the wastebasket three hours later. Blue Diamond could promise that she was okay, only to dissolve on a balcony full of sun because she was light five minutes ago… and now—and forevermore—she was not. She could build a cathedral out of reassurances and condemn it to the ground with just the thought, the remembrance, and the overwhelming absence of Pink Diamond, who haunted them both perpetually and always. 

They’d been in the ruins for four years now, and the bottom line was that Yellow Diamond didn’t trust mere words.

And maybe, just maybe, she didn’t trust Bl—

Pleasantries and silence—that was what a phone call between two spouses who didn’t really talk anymore entailed.

There was breathing, and there was the swelling darkness just outside the gold colored windows of Diamond Electric.

In and out and in and out.

Inhale.

Exhale.

And there was a long pause as Blue Diamond collected her thoughts in that quietly precise way of hers; she was always so meticulous in how she used her words, as though they were instruments to be handled with delicate care.

Yes? She replied gently, her voice lilting upwards as though she was asking a question. And no… perhaps both at the same time if those emotions can coexist without contradiction… Yellow, I—

What? Because Yellow had abruptly cut in, unable to stand the tension.

So impatient to the last.

Unfailingly.

The coldness of the office pressed upon her like a vice, its hard edges sinking in her skin. She dug her fingers into the smooth surface of her desk as though to ground herself, but there was nothing to hold on to but the grains. It was always like this when she talked to Blue; the expansive scope of her world narrowed down to her and her alone. Gravity meant nothing; time meant nothing; everything in the world meant nothing.

Except.

And always.

Blue.

I’m sorry, she simply said. 

It was only two words; they landed in the pit of Yellow’s stomach like a blow.

I’ve hurt you—immeasurably—in all these collected years, and I’m sorry for that, Yellow, she continued, her voice soft, for all the immeasurable, collected hurts. I am.

Two weeks ago, Blue Diamond had been lying catatonic in her bed, decomposing.

And now, she was apologizing for four years worth of hurt.

It was inconceivable.

Impossible.

It felt wrong.

Surreal.

Why? Yellow’s voice was strangled in her throat, dry and parched. Why now?

Why not a year ago when Yellow knelt by her bedside and pleaded with her—begged her—to stay goddammit? Why not all those hundreds upon hundred of nights that she had slept in the study on a damn leather couch, keeping one eye on the half-opened door in her study, even in the throes of sleep? Why today, of all days, when the consummate businesswoman was in the middle of yet another crucial meeting she would easily abandon all for the sake of one person?

Why?

The question scratched her chest; it punctured her beating lungs.

Why now?

And why… why was Yellow never enough?

(She had wanted to be enough.)

I visited a boy who is fighting for his life today, came the quiet reply. And it reminded me, quickly, of how fragile this all really is.

She had paused then.

The unspoken name nestled between them; the memory of their daughter wreathed her neck.

Pink used to love coming up to this very office just because she liked spinning around in her mother’s chair. Her shoes would briefly flash against the floor just so she could gain momentum, and then she would spin, spin, spin, her head tilted back in the beginnings of a long laugh.

Yellow glanced at it then, the worn leather shining dully in the light glancing in from the windows. 

It was completely and utterly empty.

I have to go, Blue. Sorry. I stepped out of a meeting.

She had dismissed the meeting.

Oh, I—

We can talk when I get home tonight.

And then she had clicked the phone off unceremoniously and shoved it across the desk as though it offended.

Ten minutes.

For the last twenty, Yellow Diamond had been sitting in the darkness of her office in that damn leather chair, nursing a glass of scotch between her trembling hands. She downed one smooth shot and then another; she drank and she drank until the expensive decanter was all gone, and the after notes of vanilla and barley and peat smoke burned her aching mouth. She drank and she drank, rummaging through her liqueur cabinet with a kind of desperation that made her feel less like a human and more like a rabid dog, hunting for just a drop of water.

Anything to take off the edge.

She drank until all the memories went away, until four years worth of them were walled off by the dulling buzz of Lagavulin.

And when a single tear crept down the hardened architecture of her face, collecting pitifully on the point of her sharp shin, she was so damn drunk, that she didn’t even know what she was crying about anymore.

Why?

Why now?

And why was she not enough?

She had wanted to be enough.

The beginnings of stars rose from the fire of the sky, and Yellow Diamond watched them as they crashed and burned.

7:01PM:

See, the trouble started when the vending machine near their hotel room stopped working. 

Nose wrinkling, stomach rumbling for the want of a snack that would tide her over until Greg got back with pizza, Amethyst tried shaking it, kicking it, and even pleading with the stupid thing all for the sake of a Twinkie she knew probably wouldn’t even taste that good.

But to no avail.

The Twinkie gods hated her apparently.

And so, with a sigh that sounded a hell of a lot more like a groan, she punched the refund button and got her dollar twenty five back in quarters before deciding to try the vending machine in the hospital lobby, moving along the smooth, carpeted floor with new purpose. The rubber sole of her left boot flapped noisily as she walked, having come loose a few weeks ago; she’d been meaning to get it repaired, but between work and Steven, time had been less of a quantity that she possessed, so much as it was something that she chased after.

Every second was a gift, and every minute was a fucking lottery.

There was an elevator ride down and accompanying elevator music, jingling and jangling rhythmically to the beat of her antsy nerves. And there was a text from Vidalia asking how Steven was doing, which she didn’t know how to answer, so she just didn’t reply. (V would get it better than most. Her hubs was a quiet man, so she knew the language of silence entirely too well, whereas Amethyst was still getting the hang of it. Silence was a stalker she had spent half of her life trying to avoid.)

And finally, there was the elevator prying itself open into an atrium that was darkening with the gathering night. Only a few visitors remained, scattered in various hardback chairs and wearing the same tired, careworn faces.

Amethyst didn’t doubt that she looked the same to them.

Because these were faces, sure enough, of loving someone and being afraid to lose them. There was a depletion to the act, a necessary consumption, that united them together beneath the flat roof of the Empire City Regional Medical Center.

They were exhausted—all of them.

So damn weary.

Amethyst had already slumped halfway to the vending machine when she saw her.

One of those same tired, careworn faces.

But a very particular tired, careworn face at the same time.

Blue Diamond, looking incredibly uncomfortable in the chair upon which she sat, her metal cane gleaming by her side.

Amethyst flicked her phone upwards so that the home screen briefly flashed on—it was 7:07. Hella late, and yet, the old lady was still here, looking for all the world like someone had killed her cat or something equally as egregious. Her plump lips were all twisted in a quiet, gnawing sort of frown as she played a little with her long hands on her lap.

Her eyes stared at the ground, but Amethyst could tell—the woman wasn’t really seeing it.

And there was something so singularly sad about this image.

Vulnerable.

That made Amethyst push her Twinkie quest to the back of her mind. 

Shoving her curled fists into the pockets of her joggers, Amethyst took one step and then another across the tiled floor until she was standing right in front of the puzzle of Blue Diamond, the multibillionaire who had worn a bathrobe to a cemetery.

And she knew it was insensitive of her to think that way. Regardless of the woman’s faults, numerous though Amethyst assumed they were, she hadn’t asked for her griefs to be handed to her on a silver platter. 

She hadn’t asked to be undone.

To be fair, though, no one ever did.

That was just the dice of life, rolled across a slanting table.

Snake eyes.

Sorry.

Better luck next time.

“Anyone sittin’ here?” She asked gruffly, jerking her thumb towards the empty chair on Blue Diamond’s left.

Startled from her solemn reverie, Blue looked up then, mouth parting slightly in a soft ‘o’ of surprise as recognition pinched her silvery brow. She shifted in her seat, hunched shoulders straightening with an understated kind of elegance that Amethyst had come to closely associate with Pearl. 

This wasn’t an especially welcome analogy, though. After all, while she’d gotten used to Pearl’s various quirks by now, for a long time there—years even—she’d always felt… condescended by her in a way.

Patronized.

Small.

That feeling took a long ass while to go away with a person whom she considered to be one of her closest friends; how much longer would the sensation last with a total effing stranger, especially the very one she was, like, supposed to hate just on mere principle?

Amethyst ran a habitual hand through her hair in the awkwardness of it all and shifted her weight from one shoe to the other, rocking back and forth. The sole of the left one went flap, flap, flap.

“You’re… one of Steven’s guardians, yes?”

“Yup, one of many.” And then, because she knew that probably didn’t clarify matters, brusquely added, “Amethyst. I was the one who brought him to your suite the other day. Can I sit?”

She once again gestured pointedly to the chair, raising a lavender brow in such a way that more or less communicated, Jeez, woman, get it together.

“Oh, yes! My apologies,” came the appropriately abashed reply. “Please. Be my guest.”

And so, with a little more force than was necessary, Amethyst threw herself into the empty seat, ass already chafing against its hard bottom, the tips of her boots just barely scraping the clinically white floor. 

She could feel Blue Diamond’s tallness next to her more than she dared to look at it for herself; her presence was overwhelming as it was without having to look at her dead on—the shadows turning circles beneath her huge eyes, the parentheses around her quivering mouth, and that air of misery that the twenty-nine year old knew well enough without needing to observe it in a perfect stranger. Out of the corner of her eye, though, she could see that the woman had gone back to staring at her wrinkled hands, templing them delicately on the blue fabric of her lap.

“My valet is coming to pick me up,” she offered without prompting, “but I believe traffic is delaying her.”

“S’always cray cray around this time of night,” Amethyst returned knowledgeably. She couldn’t claim to like Empire City, but after a few months of driving up here so often, she supposed she at least couldn’t refute that she knew it. “Lotsa idiots out n about.”

“Reckless, are they not?”

“The absolute wooooorst.”

And both of their mouths briefly quirked at exactly the same time before silence fell between them again, clumsy and awkward, like an entity still growing into its feet.

They were talking about traffic.

Neither of them really wanted to talk about traffic.

Amethyst broke the stillness first, studiously continuing to not look at her companion. Instead, she drew her leg upwards into her chair, so she could pick at her boot some more.

Flap, flap, flap.

“So you saw him, huh?”

It wasn’t necessary to evoke his name; after all, she was pretty sure that the image of him laying in that hospital bed, all swarming with tubes, haunted the both of them even now, invading the sanctity of their minds and eyes.

Flap, flap, flap.

She was going to tear her shoe to shreds if she kept it up.

(She kept it up.)

“I saw him, yes,” Blue agreed quietly, her fingers stilling in their cathedral position. One thumb was balanced carefully atop of the other, bricks without mortar, construction without foundation. “I... wasn't ready… he was so small... and I almost looked away... I'm ashamed to even admit it."

The confession was broken into tiny fragments, each splinter slow and painful in the rolling of her accent.

Amethyst couldn’t help herself then—restraint had never been the name by which she was known. 

She was blunt.

She parried back, “You still could, y’know. You don’t have to be here for this.”

You don’t have to put yourself through this if you can help it.

(We can’t help it.)

“Not your circus, not your monkeys, and all that jazz.”

And maybe that was the crux of it, the beating heart behind the entanglement of her reluctance when it came to the wealthy woman sitting next to her. The Crystal Gem couldn’t understand why someone, anyone, would willingly partake in this exhibition when they had every blessed out in the world. Blue Diamond didn’t have to care for Steven. She didn’t have to be here. She could go back to the fiftieth floor of her penthouse suite and wall herself away from one care of this world more. Just from her looks alone, Amethyst could tell that she couldn’t afford another loss, and yet, she could absolutely afford to get away from the possibility of another loss if she just, well, left.

If she hurried.

Before the boy who was kind enough to extend flowers to random ladies in the cemetery could worm his way into a heart that had already had its reckoning.

But—and Amethyst was just now realizing this with the force of a collision—maybe that was the crux of it, too.

That simple goodness of a proffered hand had been enough.

It had changed a life.

Maybe, quite possibly, it had saved one.

“I… just got off the phone with my wife,” Blue Diamond whispered, “and she asked a singular question to which I couldn’t provide the answer. Why? Such a simple beast, and yet a devastatingly complex one.”

Why Rose all those many years ago?

Why Steven now? Why couldn’t they find him a damn kidney?

Why couldn’t life give them one damn break?

Why?

The familiarity of the question rose like a lump in Amethyst’s throat.

“I’ve looked away from her—from everything, really—for so many years, even before my daughter…” The woman trailed away, her voice hitching. It took her a few seconds to regroup. She placed a steadying hand on her chest. “… and now, for reasons I cannot necessarily explain myself… I don’t want to anymore. Maybe, Yellow, it is because a child in a cemetery told me that it was quite possible to still feel the pain of my loss and still live? Maybe, Yellow, it is because I sat upon a balcony with him and envied the hunger he had for life, and wondered, for the first time in years, if it was still possible to obtain a modicum of it for myself? Maybe, Yellow, I saw him in a hospital bed today—sick—and it reminded me of a truth that I’d long forgotten.”

Amethyst chanced a peek at Blue Diamond then, stole it ashamedly, as though she was a child reaching a hand into the cookie jar.

The dim incandescence of the overheads crowned her silvery head in soft, white light as she glanced upwards, her half-moon gaze angled to a spot that the Crystal Gem couldn’t quite see.

She almost looked beautiful—a portrait in melancholy, all feathery brushstrokes.

Steven would have thought so anyway.

Hell, he was the type of person who would have even said it.

“And what that’d be?” She asked.

What was the answer to that devastatingly simple, that horribly complex question, Why?

If there was even an answer at all.

What truth had a woman as seemingly erudite as Blue Diamond so guiltily forgotten?

Blue looked down then, a strand of wavy hair falling between her eyes. It curled a little at the end.

“Why?” She murmured, her strained voice barely above a whisper. Amethyst had to lean in just to catch what she said next. “Because I love you, Yellow—so much. That is why.”

The rawness of the proclamation, the sincerity of it, seared the both of them, landing cleanly between them like the precise swing of an axe. It was always such a vulnerable gamble to admit to love, and perhaps it was even revolutionary to proffer it as the solution to why.

Why am I trying?

Why am I still here?

Why can’t I look away, Steven?

Because I love you—so much. That is it.

That is all.

And that is why.

It was a simple phrase, and it was a profound one. It was scarcely said; in Blue Diamond’s case, it was forgotten.

“You should tell that to her,” Amethyst suddenly said, and just for a moment there, it didn’t matter that the person in question was the dread Yellow Diamond, her mortal enemy or whatever.

Just for a moment, Yellow Diamond was merely a person who was loved by another.

“Exactly like that,” she pressed before glancing away, her bangs falling across her eyes. She played with her busted shoe again as heat clambered up her face—flap, flap, flap. It was surreal to be sitting here, giving advice to a woman so different from her and so alien. It was only chance that they were both sitting here—here, of all places—beneath the roof of this hospital.

Tired and careworn.

Alike but not especially.

Perfect strangers.

Connected simply by a flower and a boy.

Now it was Blue Diamond’s turn to stare; her tall, sickle-shaped eyes were drawn to the noise of flap, flap, flap, which made Amethyst self-conscious about the fact that the woman was likely wearing a designer dress.

Damn these rich people.

“I fear it may be too late. I’ve done my damage.”

“Maybe,” Amethyst shrugged. It was all she could do. “But ya won’t know until you’ve tried.”

They were both silent again. Outside the glass windows, the world had taken on the dull purple of night, pulling it over its shoulders like a cozy, star-spangled nightgown.

“Thank you… Amethyst.” 

Blue Diamond offered her a parenthetical smile of an olive branch of a truce; it was a reluctant little gesture, still stiff and foreign on the mouth of someone who looked like she hadn’t smiled in years.

“Nah, don’t mention it, dude," she shrugged.

It was not forgiveness, nor was it absolution.

But it was a tiny concession.

It was a tired half-smile pulling at her lips.

“I needed the reminder, too.”

7:39PM:

Traffic in Empire City was always a risky gamble of a business, especially at night when the only rule of the six lane seemed to be, “Everything goes, and good luck with the going, buddy, old pal, my friend.”

Having spent years driving up here with Rose for various doctor appointments and then relearning the routine all over again with Steven these past few months, Greg liked to fancy that he could navigate the beast as well as any boardie from a small beach town could ever claim to. But even still, all the ample driving experience in the world was no match for what a car wreck could do to the flow of vehicles streaming down the neon lit highway. 

Somewhere a little up above his van, there was a cacophony of sirens—red and blue and shrill and insistent. In the passenger seat, the pizzas he’d picked up nearly an hour ago were cooling, the rich, greasy smell of them sidling up to his shoulder temptingly. He thought about taking a bite because it was late and he was hungry, but ultimately decided against it.

Amethyst would never let him hear the end of it.

So he thought about the accident up ahead and hoped that no one had been seriously injured. (He had his doubts, though. There were so many sirens, wailing.) His van slowly crept forward as the cars ahead were painstakingly navigated around the ruins. People honked up and down the endless line because patience wasn’t Empire City’s strong suit; the big city, the golden apple, didn’t wait for anyone, least of all everyone, and sometimes, it felt like everyone in the world lived here, a population made of skyscrapers and cars and brilliant lights.

But thinking about the wreck didn’t entertain him for very long—his apologies to those affected—so he thought about the soulful tunes crooning through his staticky radio. Some R&B band from the eighties whose name just barely escaped him. They sung about love and loss and red Corvettes that shined beneath the hot, sticky sun. Greg’s thumbs slapped the wheel rhythmically to the melody, picking out the notes with an easiness that might have made old Marty proud on a good day.

But then the music suddenly shuddered off, the jockey apologizing for the inconvenience. 

They’d try to get the station back up shortly.

The silence was unbearable.

So he popped in the closest CD, thinking it was his relaxing music compilation.

But nope.

It was death metal, the sudden explosion of the heavy bass and snare drums nearly sending his car veering into the next lane over as his hands jerked on the wheel.

“Wrong one!” He panted, chest heaving with feral panic. “Stop! Eject!”

And with a slap harder than intended, he punched the panel of buttons at random, the noise screeching to a stop, the CD comically popping out like toast from a toaster.

Ding.

And silence filled all the empty spaces once again.

In the silence, Greg had no choice but to think of Steven.

He took great gulps of air, his shoulders still shaking from the reverberations of the abruptly snuffed music, and could find no more distractions.

This was the end of the road on an endless road of snailing cars.

His hands clenched painfully around the wheel, the images revving across his mind’s eye—unbidden, quick, ugly, and unwanted.

His son.

His only son.

Laying in that hospital bed.

Dying.

Was this all life had to offer? He wondered to himself, and in the place of noise, there was emotion; there was sadness and horror and anger roaring up the column of his throat.

Rising.

Leaking.

Dripping.

Down his ruddy cheeks and into his beard.

Down his throat.

Draining.

Loving people who were gonna always leave him in the end? Finding home only for it to immediately forsake him? Maybe old Andy had had it right, always up there in that great, blue oasis of sky—never touching the ground long enough for people to find him and love him and hurt him.

Maybe there was something to the idea of giving up.

But no. “Stop that,” Greg scolded himself harshly. “Stop.”

He’d spent his entire teen years running away from his folks and all their shiny expectations, so he was done running away. He had told himself that the moment he kicked Marty outta his van and turned it back around to Beach City and its sprawling sands—to the little oceanside town and the big woman with pink hair.

Right then and there, he’d been ready to accept the consequences of his actions.

The starchild had grown into a man.

And that meant staying the course, no looking back or skywards, no regrets or what-could-have-beens.

For Steven Universe, he would stay until the end… no matter what that end happened to be.

That was responsibility.

And that, above all, was love.

Love was solidity, and it was thereness, and it was warmth.

It was patience, and it was risk that never quite guaranteed reward.

Love was staying.

Even when things got tough, and maybe especially when they did.

(Stay, he'd pleaded with Rose when Dr. Howard turned the ventilator off. He had held her hand. He didn't want her to be alone.)

(Please, he begged as the lines that measured the beating of her heart began to falter and fade away.)

His bushy brow furrowed in quiet sympathy as he finally maneuvered around the scene of the accident, going slowly as a traffic officer signaled him on with a hand and a whistle. He saw the carnage out of the corner of his eye, all twisted metal and climbing smoke. What looked like a Nissan had plowed right into the back of a fancy lookin’ black town car, not unlike the one which had brought Blue Diamond to the hospital earlier…

His heart lurched.

But then he thought about it.

He considered.

Nah.

Couldn’t be her.

From what he understood, her high rise was somewhere past the hospital.

8:54PM:

“Pearl, go home before I tell Gunga on you,” Kiki teased, but all the same, there was concern in her voice, a hint of seriousness that didn’t quite mark her playful threat as simply playful. It flashed in the depths of her warm, brown eyes. And it brushed against Pearl’s shoulder with a gentleness she had come to expect from the younger Pizza sister.

The two of them were both working behind the bar of Fish Stew Cuisine tonight, the restaurant Kiki’s father and grandmother owned. It used to be just a casual place for locals—then called Fish Stew Pizza—but with time, effort, and a considerable amount of increased tourism when vacationers realized that there was a lovely beach here to visit and trash, it had expanded into one of Beach City’s finest restaurants.

It was a slow night, though, rain coming down in heavy sheets outside the tall, glass windows.

At this late hour, only a few diners remained, casually enjoying their dinners to the rhythmic tattoo of the storm—mostly regulars, people who understood that through rain, hail, sleet, or snow, Fish Stew would always be here for patient guests, arms open wide and plates steaming with good food. The amber light strewn from the dusky lamps made the place feel warm, as though it was full of quiet fire, flickering in so many overhanging hearths.

Pearl swiped persistently at a stain on the glass she was cleaning.

She’d been working on it for five minutes now in the absence of a new customer to tend to.

“I can’t just leave,” she returned exasperatedly, still scrubbing away at the mark. She was starting to think that it was yet another lost cause.

(She seemed to have a penchant for those lately.)

“I promised to work until closing.”

And I have to.

There are bills to pay and possible surgeries to fund.

But she didn’t say this part aloud; she didn’t want to put that weight on a seventeen-year old who meant well.

“Girl, closing isn’t ’til eleven, and you’ve been here since two,” Jenny Pizza laughed, glancing up from her phone long enough to do so. She was Kiki’s older sister and a bit of a rebel to the boot. Though she was technically on the clock, too, she had been sitting on the other side of the bar for the past half hour now, sending something she called “snaps” to her friends. These “snaps” often involved her making funny faces at her camera, ninety percent of these compelling her to poke her lips out. “Go home, and get some shut eye. Seriously.”

“Seriously,” Kiki parroted, snatching the glass from out of Pearl’s hands when she wasn’t looking.

With a certain primness, she chunked it into the nearest recycling bin as the bell on the door pealed, signaling an incoming customer.

“Kiki!”

“The new ones are coming in next week anyway,” the girl only replied with a shrug of mischievous shoulder. “Now, Pearl, go the eff home. We got this. Right, Jenny?”

“Mhm.” Jenny made a vague noise of agreement without looking up again. “Yeah, you’ve got this, Kiki. Get it.”

“Well,” Kiki only rolled her eyes, “I’ve got this anyway.”

Two massive arms, both scarred and tattooed, slammed down on the countertop then, and Pearl’s mouth immediately twitched into a smile to see that it was none other than Bismuth, a local construction worker for the city and a fellow Crystal Gem. Her spectacularly colorful dreads were thrown upwards into a haphazard ponytail, and her mouth was wide with one of those trademark Bismuth smiles, all lopsided, shining with white teeth.

“Pearl,” she scolded in that wry way of hers, “are you givin’ these pretty ladies trouble again?”

“Yesssssss,” Kiki replied, already starting on the woman’s usual order. (Jerk chicken and eggs.) “Homegirl won’t go home even though she’s been here all day. Just look at her.” The teenager gestured vaguely at Pearl’s body. “She looks dead on her feet.”

“You’re being incredibly rude tonight, you know,” Pearl huffed, unable to resist the urge to glance down. There was an unidentifiable stain on the collar of her shirt. 

She hated unidentifiable stains on the collars of her shirts.

“It’s for your own good,” she replied sagely, turning away as her saucepan began to sizzle on the stove. With Jenny also occupied, Pearl was left to the mercy of Bismuth, who’d always had a way of seeing through her, down to her deepest core. 

Nothing escaped those dark eyes of hers, not a tool, not a loose screw, not the quiet, aching sadnesses of a friend. With a self-assuredness that Pearl had always lacked and a gentleness that she had always loved, her old companion reached across the bar and placed a calloused palm atop of the pale ridges of Pearl’s knuckles, covering them completely.

“C’mere, sugar,” she said softly, “and tell me all about it.”

“It’s late,” Pearl whispered automatically, glancing away. She always had some excuse or another. “And you’ve been working. You must be tired.”

“Hell,” Bismuth snorted as Kiki pushed a soda towards her, “if I’m tired, then you must be exhausted. The kid’s right. You look it.”

“The kid’s always right,” Kiki chimed in knowingly before moving away again.

And so, as the breath of rain continued to hiss on the roof, Pearl drew up a stool and sat across the bar from Bismuth, her hand warm beneath the other’s surprisingly gentle touch.

And they talked.

Softly.

Pearl told her everything. 

She told her about the cemetery and Steven and the tiny hibiscus flower that passed from his hand to that of Blue Diamond’s, watching as Bismuth’s expressive face twisted in the same sort of horror and disgust that she herself had been grappling with ever since the bathrobed woman had somehow made her way into the entanglement of their lives. And Pearl told her about the last trip to Empire City, how Steven had almost needed a blood transfusion, and how that almost had become their reality when he’d collapsed in the beach house, hitting those wooden slats with a thunk that still echoed in the hollows of her head. 

“I yelled at Amethyst,” she whispered, horrified, trying to withdraw her hand from beneath Bismuth’s.

Bismuth’s grip only tightened.

“I said some horrible things.”

“We all say horrible things,” the woman only replied, looking down, ever so subtly glancing away. Fifteen years ago, she and Rose had had a falling out over how to protest Diamond Electric. They hadn’t made up before she died. “The fixin’ part is what matters.”

And so Pearl, swallowing hard in acceptance of this lived-through truth, went on and on until her voice was scratchy from the strain of it. She told Bismuth about how small Steven was in the hospital bed and how sickly. She told her, fingernails digging into the grains of the bar, about how Priyanka Maheswaran, who always had a solution, didn’t really have an answer. She told her about the IVs and the wires and the blood transfusions and the possibility of a feeding tube.

And she told her, without saying a word, that she was scared.

Admissions did not come easily to the woman, but they were written across the physiognomy of her entire body anyway.

The desperation leaked from her pale eyes.

And all the sleepless nights lined her pointed face.

And there was a stiffness in the way she held herself, so harshly, with studied discipline.

But by definition, discipline was necessarily repression, and repress, repress, repress was the motto and model by which Pearl lived her life. It was the lone vanguard which kept her from shattering to pieces on the floor—just another mess for Kiki to sweep up with the rest of the clutter.

It was her last defense against total dissolution.

When she had nothing, at least she could put a smile on her face and pretend otherwise.

“So it’s been a long week,” she smiled wearily at the end of this.

She smiled because the alternative was to fall apart.

"To say the least.”

But, again, that was the thing about Bismuth.

Nothing escaped those dark eyes of hers, not a tool, not a loose screw, not the quiet, aching sadnesses of a friend. 

With that familiar self-assuredness, her old companion rose from her seat and walked around to the other side of the bar.

“Bismuth, wait, I—”

And then, without hesitating, she crushed Pearl into her strong arms.

The engineer smelled faintly of oil and flavored tobacco.

Peppermint.

Crisp and sharp.

“To say the least,” she only agreed as Pearl’s lower lip began to tremble.

Her arms were limp, useless, by her sides, hanging over the edges of the stool.

“I’m fine,” she tried. The word fell flat on her tongue. “Really.”

“I don't doubt that you are. I never would. But you don’t have to be, hon,” Bismuth replied softly, her breath kindling warm against her ear. “You work so hard… and you care so much… that it ain’t a crime to need some tender love n care, too. It ain't weakness to be kind to yourself, Pearl."

Pearl was frozen, statuesque, even as the world somehow continued to spin around her. Diners chatted, rain fell, and the eggs sizzled in their frying pan. Everything and everyone else had their place in this world.

She wasn’t sure where that left her and all the griefs she so tightly wrapped herself around—scars and still-bleeding wounds.

“How can I break,” she asked, her voice tight, “knowing he’s lying in that hospital bed? What right do I have to fall to pieces when what he’s fighting is a hundred times worse?”

Somehow, Bismuth had an answer to this, too; she seemed to always have an answer.

She rubbed gentle circles into Pearl’s back.

She didn't let go.

“Pain isn’t a competition, Pearl,” she admonished. “When you’re hurting, you’re hurting.”

There was a matter-of-factness to this statement, a sense of finality, and perhaps that was what did it in the end; the raw truth of it confronted her, and it scalded her, and it forced her to confess.

Pearl shattered, and Bismuth was there to scoop up all the pretty, broken pieces.

“It hurts all over,” she admitted as the tears wrenched themselves loose from her eyes.

“I know, sugar."

Outside the restaurant, the rain continued to beat its relentless dirge into the Boardwalk, the sky falling in shards and unholy music, all needle sharp notes.

If the crescendo screamed, it absolutely roared.

10:03PM:

Outside the window of Room 11037, night wrapped its velvety arms around a sky shivering with stars, and Garnet, attentive of every wire and tube, wrapped her warm arms around Steven as they laid in his hospital bed together, watching a late night re-run of Crying Breakfast Friends. This was the episode where Pear betrayed the stoic Spoon’s trust, and all the assorted breakfast people cried about it for a good seven minutes of the show’s eleven minute runtime.

For some odd reason, the animation on Spoon’s tears was exceptionally well done, the liquid fluidly running down the curvature of their face as they wailed incoherently.

“Wahhhhhhhhhh.”

(Not for the first time, Garnet absently wondered who had been paid to write this.)

Beneath her, Steven sniffed noisily, bringing up the less-encumbered of his hands to swipe tentatively at his nose; it was an awkward movement with the oxygen cannulas in the way.

“You’ve seen this one before,” Garnet teased softly, her voice landing somewhere in his dark hair. “Twice that I know of. It can’t be that sad anymore.”

She waited for a laugh and a witty retort—for a remarkably insightful analysis into why it was okay to cry over crying breakfast utensils—but one wasn’t forthcoming, even though the child’s shoulders were conspicuously shaking.

She looked down at him then, catching a sliver of his face in the light wash of the television; tears streamed silently from his eyes and down the sunken hollows of his face, down into the collar of his gown, down past the spiral of wires.

“Steven.” Garnet propped herself up with an abruptness that was almost violent, though when she cupped his face between her long fingers, her touch was exceedingly gentle. “What’s wrong?”

But Steven shook his head, burying it into the front of her sweatshirt as a low whine escaped past his anemic lips.

His chubby fingers twisted into the fabric next to her stomach.

“Steven!” Panic slipped up the rungs of her voice. 

She looked around wildly her for the call button on the railing, but they were surrounded by so many tubes and blankets.

And it was dark.

And Steven was crying.

“Garnet,” he finally moaned, “my back hurts.”

It was a common symptom with his disease. Because the kidneys were located right below the ribcage, his upper back often spasmed when they were being particularly bothersome.

At home, they would give him medicine and press a heating pad to his spine, hoping against both hell and hope that the warmth would sooth the worst of the pain.

Here in the hospital, they could give him morphine.

They could even sedate him.

Make the pain go away for a few hours if that was mercy.

(Once, after a particularly bad attack that’d almost brought them to the hospital, Steven had described the pain like being stung by a jellyfish over and over again, as though its tentacles were wrapped around his torso, wringing him out all over.)

“I have to get a nurse,” she said automatically, her throat dry. He clung to her so tightly that she didn’t dare move an inch. On the TV, Spoon was still crying, their keening overwrought next to Steven, who cried so quietly these days that it was almost like he hated for anyone to hear.

“They’ll drug me?” He asked astutely, the sound muffled in her shirt.

“Yes.”

“It’d make me sleep.”

“Maybe... yes.” Garnet couldn’t see where he was going with this until his fingers tightened just a fraction more where they gripped her. 

Her lips parted.

And there was silence.

And there was crying.

And there was understanding most of all. It scorched Garnet and simply ruined her.

“You don’t want to go to sleep.” 

It was a statement, hoarsely dragged from her mouth.

She received a minimal head shake as her answer.

“You’re scared.”

And somehow, she knew the veracity of her words before he nodded his assent into her chest.

Steven was scared to fall asleep��afraid, maybe even terrified, that he wouldn’t wake up. The horror of it, the awfulness and the unfairness, and the cruelty of it rose up in Garnet’s chest like a tsunami, a fire, a hurricane, a storm.

Yet, she remained immobile.

She didn’t move.

What could she even say to that?

What was she supposed to say?

Words were insufficient.

(She couldn’t even reassure herself.)

The small TV screen suddenly faded to black as Crying Breakfast Friends ended, and the credits rolled, the show’s elegiac theme song playing softly in the background, all piano notes and somber violin strings.

It was a little easier, at least, when she couldn’t see his face.

“I’m scared, too,” she admitted.

It was only three words, but they exacted her, and they excavated her; heat clambered up her cheeks, settling somewhere behind her burning eyes.

Steven’s shoulders briefly stilled, though all the machines keeping him alive continued to whir on.

“Y-you are?”

“All the time.” Scared to touch him, scared to even look at him. Scared that one day, she would wake up and he would be gone, a shell finally reclaimed by its shore. Scared to leave this hospital room lest she miss a single moment, and scared to stay if that meant watching him go. Scared that they wouldn’t find him a kidney in time, and scared that if they did, they couldn’t afford it.

Garnet was a wreck, barely holding together.

She was Garnet.

She had to hold together anyway.

“And sometimes, Steven,” she whispered, hugging him to her chest as much as the tubing would allow, “that is what love is—being scared and moving forward anyway.”

Into the darkness, hand in hand.

Without the promise of safe return.

Her mothers had done it.

Rose Quartz had done it.

And the footprints they had left behind were big to fill, but Garnet didn’t have to fill them; she just had to follow their lead.

Steven was quiet for a couple more heartbeats still before he slowly withdrew his head from her chest to look up at her; he didn’t quite let go of her shirt; he took ragged, rasping breaths, his shoulders heaving to the rhythmic whirring of his heart monitor.

“You can call the nurse now.”

“Okay,” she whispered.

It was all she could manage.

“And, Garnet?”

“Yes, Steven?”

“I love you.”

10:45PM:

Cooling down after a long day of work was always struggle for Priyanka, whose mind was such that it was perpetually working ahead to the next day of work—all the patients she had to do rounds upon, all the charts she had to fill out, and all the procedures she had to meticulously prep for, spending as much time in the hospital’s library as she did the operating room. 

If the table of her head wasn’t perpetually well-set, her thoughts surgically arranged on a porcelain plate, scalpels placed in descending order by size on the adjacent napkin, then the doctor felt unmoored from the trait which made her feel fundamentally herself.

Her precision—unerring, diligent, and unpretentious.

She checked and double-checked and was a better nephrologist for it. By the nature of the temperamental organ she was dealing with, her patient mortality rate was high, but no one, by the nature of her methodology, could say that it was because of human error.

She checked and double-checked, trying to quantify every conceivable possibility before they could make themselves known in the real world, and when she neglected to deconstruct a hypothetical, which was a rarity in and of itself, she would chastise herself for it both before and better than anyone else ever could.

Priyanka Maheswaran was a study in precision, never shirking away from the reward that often laid at the end of hard labor.

But what no one had ever told her was that a side effect of being precise was being so damn tired.

All the time.

She struggled to cool down, and she was exhausted. She desperately wanted to sleep, but her mind whirred and whirled and calculated and thought. The dichotomous interplay of these qualities led to her sipping hot tea in bed with a pinched expression on her face as her husband stretched out next to her, reading his tattered copy of Crime and Punishment and sometimes laughing aloud when a line struck him as funny.

“Ha,” he snorted after awhile of this before replacing his bookmark (an old grocery store receipt) in his new spot and closing the heavy tome. “I love Dostoevsky.”

Lips pressed to the rim of her nearly empty mug, Priyanka arched a sharp brow at him, smiling wryly.

Her husband was a dork.

“Should I be jealous, dear?”

“Naturally,” Doug returned, reaching over to place the book on his nightstand before turning back towards her. “Dostoevsky has it all. A great grasp on existentialism and a beard for days. He could tone it down on the heavy moralism, though.”

“That’s what you said about Tolstoy,” she reminded him with a tilt of her head. “Good beard, too much sermonizing.”

“It’s a running theme,” her husband admitted sadly, and then, catching each other’s eye, the two Maheswarans suddenly laughed, the sounds loud in the otherwise quiet room.

It was moments like these, after nearly seventeen years together, that kept them going strong. They loved each other, and they liked each other, and they especially liked to make each other laugh.

Even if it was about something as specific as Russian literature titans.

And maybe especially if it was about something as specific as Russian literature titans.

“We’re going to wake our daughter up,” Priyanka finally said, setting her mug down on her own nightstand. In the lamplight, the dark ceramic gleamed. Her phone, sitting next to it, showed that she had a new message from one of the surgical interns she was training. 

She’d open it in a minute.

Knowing the group of fools she’d gotten this year, whoever it was had probably stabbed themselves with a syringe.

(Again.)

“It’s never too early for Connie to have an opinion on old Russian men,” Doug chuckled, but he, too, was settling down as the heaviness of night began to sweep across them both.

He sighed fondly and took her hand then, intertwining their fingers on top of the blankets.

Priyanka wasn’t much of a touchy-feely person, but her husband absolutely was, and she knew, from all the coagulated years of having been married to him, that this simple gesture was about being close to her, about reacquainting himself to her presence.

So she didn’t let go.

Instead, she squeezed once, resting her head against the backboard of their bed and closing her eyes for the first time in what felt like days. The darkness was nice and inviting, blanketing her head like a cozy throw.

It was just all the thoughts, buzzing like bees at the velvety, black edges, that made it so unbearable.

Patients, charts, and procedures.

And Steven Universe most of all.

She worried for him constantly now that he was in the hospital; she carried his sunken face with her everywhere that she went; he made her half-sick.

He forced her to become undone.

Caring.

It did something to her.

“You look tired, honey,” Doug said softly. “Shall we put a nightcap on the evening?”

Priyanka opened her eyes again and nodded ever so briskly. She tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear and let out a small, exacting sigh.

“I think that’d be in order,” she agreed, and it was a sign of her exhaustion that she acquiesced so easily. Usually, he had to plead with her to close down shop for the night.

These weren’t usual times.

Without letting go of her hand, her husband twisted away and turned the latch of his lamp with a click, thrusting half of the room into darkness. 

And she was about to do the same when the rectangular light of her phone caught her attention again.

Instead of just one message from her intern—a perky blonde named Dr. Stephens—now she had eight of them in total and a missed call. 

The doctor always put her phone on silent when she drank her nightly tea so she didn’t have to be a doctor for fifteen minutes.

She could simply be Priyanka.

Her stomach clenched.

An influx of messages was never a good thing; her mind raced ahead of her; it anticipated the worst.

“Hon?” 

Doug’s questioning concern pressed against her side, and Priyanka found herself clenching his hand all the tighter as she used her free one to pick up the phone, unlocking it with a quick swipe and clicking the message app with a suddenness that was brutal.

Monday, 10:57PM:

Dr. Stephens: DR. MAHESWARAN!!!!!

Dr. Stephens: UNOS JUST CALLED.

Dr. Stephens: WE HAVE A KIDNEY FOR STEVEN UNIVERSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dr. Stephens: Car crash on the lower East Side. The donor is brain dead, but all their other organs are viable.

Dr. Stephens: And they’re a match for Steven.

Dr. Stephens: Seriously. I’ve checked and double-checked. 

Dr. Stephens: This is our person.

Dr. Stephens: The surgeon at Empire Gen’s gonna perform the harvest procedure tomorrow morning at 10AM, and I told them you’d be there. 

In the half-darkness of her room, Priyanka held that phone aloft like it was priceless gold and let out a breath she had been holding for a very long time. Her shoulders heaved with the sensation of it, the feeling, the emotion.

Of goddamn relief.

Warm, sweeping, glorious relief.

A kidney.

Steven Universe was getting a kidney.

[edwad]

If you had to choose 10 marxian econ books for someone who has only read marx, what would you recommend

by “marx” i have to assume you mean capital because that really is the root of “marxian econ”. it won’t suffice to just have read the manifesto or something like that and i don’t want to recommend books that will be saying things that you’re totally unfamiliar with because you’re skipping straight into the secondary literature which already largely assumes a reader which is familiar with capital. anyway, heres a list, which isnt in any particular order and which includes a few things that i’m still working through for myself:

1. essays on marxs theory of value - isaak rubin 

hugely important book which essentially all value-form theory derives from. written by an extremely knowledgeable marx scholar who had a much better idea of what marx was doing in capital than most marxists today. last month brill published a book called “responses to marxs capital” which includes some of rubin’s other writings, most of them being published in english for the first time. hes a huge figure in the literature and definitely worth looking in to. 

2. marx, capital, and the madness of economic reason - david harvey

i was obviously going to put something of harvey’s in here and i think his last book is a fairly good summary of the best of what hes done up to this point with some welcome additions (the visualization of capital, the stuff on anti-value, etc). not perfect but he definitely provides a good framework for how to understand the geography of capital which doesnt require necessarily agreeing with him on everything. honestly, if you keep up with harvey at all you’ll be able to tell that its mostly just typical harveyisms with the inclusion of some stuff from his recent talks (which have all been almost exactly the same). 

3. in the long run we are all dead - geoff mann

maybe this looks more like a book on keynesian rather than marxian econ, but its real argument is that keynesianism as a long historical project (meaning long before and after keynes himself) has been an immanent critique of liberalism and revolution and that keynes is to us what hegel was to marx. a really great book that covers a lot of ground which isnt always explicitly economic, but definitely worth the read if you have the patience. if you want a longer review, i left a pretty lengthy one on amazon a few months ago where you can get a better idea of what i got from this book, what its limitations are, and why i think its so important. 

4. monopoly capital - paul baran & paul sweezy 

an older book which hasnt exactly aged well, but its thesis has become extremely popular again since the crisis. written by baran and sweezy, the fathers of “the monthly review school” of economics, its played a huge role in the direction of marxian debates from the 1960s up until today. the authors were both tending in the same intellectual direction in their earlier works (sweezy’s theory of capitalist development and baran’s political economy of growth, the former still being considered one of the best introductions to marxs work and its relevance to the 20th century, with much controversy of course) and this was the result of them coming together to talk about what they saw as a monopoly capitalism which was fairly different in character than the “competitive capitalism” of marx’s day and therefore had to be dealt with differently. 

5. capitalism - anwar shaikh

probably the most ambitious work the left has seen in a long time which tries to thoroughly critique neoclassical theory and develop an alternative economics which is rooted in what shaikh calls the “classical” school (”classical-marxian” would probably be more appropriate but i think hes trying to downplay his reliance on marx). in it, shaikh takes a good look at many of the competing schools of thought (neoclassical, post-keynesian, sraffian/neo-ricardian, etc) and sees how they stand up analytically and empirically, taking issue with their underlying assumptions and the inevitable problems which arise from building a theory on false foundations. 

one of his bigger points is that the neoclassical theory of “perfect competition” is nonsensical but wasnt thoroughly combatted by heterodox economists, who only made it so far as asserting the “imperfect” nature of competition, which, in shaikh’s eyes, is to simply add imperfections after the fact into the theory which necessarily begins with the absurd assumption of perfection. the book’s argument is that the theorists of “imperfect competition” still rely on the theory of “perfect competition” as their starting point and never really manage to escape the latter because they havent actually created an alternative way of thinking about competition, they’ve just inserted a complication into a theory which was a completely unrealistic assumption to begin with. much of his attack is directed at the monthly review school and the idea of a “monopoly capitalism” which is supposedly different in form than the allegedly “perfect competition” of capitalism during marxs life. in this sense, this book serves as a counterbalance to the MR approach and is also probably the most successful attempt at situating marxs TRPF within an empirical study of kondratiev waves. 

hes also got a website with a bunch of resources and a lecture series from a course he did on the material in the book which is pretty interesting, but it assumes a good deal of familiarity with economics. 

6. a history of marxian economics - michael howard & john king (2 volumes)

this is a pretty thorough history of the internal debates among marxian economists ever since the death of marx all the way up to 1990. it covers a lot of ground and doesnt shy away from controversies where marx didnt come out on top. of course, a good amount of this is subject to the interpretation of the authors and they definitely have a great deal of input, but its a very impressive work which i frequently use as a marxian encyclopedia of sorts. 

7. the making of marx’s capital - roman rosdolsky

despite some problems, rosdolsky’s classic book on the development of marx’s critique of political economy is easily one of the most important marxological works ever written and it still holds a lot of sway. taking the grundrisse as its starting point, the author unpacks marx’s project and constantly asserts marx’s method and in particular his explicit reliance on hegel’s logic, pitting marx (as he was in his drafts) against the then contemporary thinkers and critics which were prone to misusing or misunderstanding the arguments in capital. as a disclaimer and partial criticism of rosdolsky’s portrait of marx, i dont believe that we can simply say that marx in the late 50s was identical to the marx of the 60s and 70s that wrote and published capital, but i also dont think that means we necessarily have to discount the grundrisse (or theories of surplus value, etc) simply because they werent written at precisely the right time for marxs thinking. 

i only just got my own copy a couple of weeks ago so i cant say too much more but i have skimmed through chunks of the pdf and its totally unavoidable in the secondary literature so im not totally unfamiliar. its one i plan on tackling in full very soon.

8. moneybags must be so lucky - robert paul wolff

another marxological one, this tiny book is a literary analysis of capital and in particular the first part of volume 1. wolff does a great job of deconstructing the arguments in chapter 1 to try and clarify what marx is doing and why with a lot of humor and philosophical tangents. one of his biggest points is that marxs heavy reliance on irony was the only adequate way of capturing the contradictory nature of capitalism and is therefore part of the theory itself, rather than simply being a way to dress up the theory and make it more palatable to readers. i approached this book after id already “read marx” too, but it was extremely useful because it wasnt until i read it that i finally started to actually understand marx. for that reason, i dont feel particularly bad about recommending it to anyone thats already familiar with capital because it does a great job of making the most difficult part of volume 1 infinitely more exciting and comprehensible – especially since its never enough to just read capital once. 

9. the production of commodities by means of commodities - piero sraffa

against my better judgement, i’m putting this on the list knowing full-well that i’m going to be harassed by an anon which has been on my ass for about a year now ever since i first recommended sraffa’s book in a reading list despite the fact that ive never finished it (barely even read it to be more precise). i do, however, know that its had a huge influence on the trajectory of marxian thought since 1960 and that many of the thinkers are still trying to recover from the theoretical displacement implicit in sraffa’s thesis. 

its a math-heavy book (which is why i havent been able to wade through it) and its status as a work coming from the “marxian” approach is hotly contested, but its certainly had its way with the marxian school (not to mention the neoclassical school, which has an easier time simply ignoring sraffa entirely), generating countless debates among scholars, many of whom simply wish that this book had never been written. for a short summary of the debate and whats apparently at stake, ive got an old post where i worked out some of the initial responses to sraffa and how this has snowballed into the controversy that it is today. ive got it on this list because of how unavoidable it is. you cant go into the secondary literature at anything resembling an intermediate level without knowing sraffa’s name and why everyone feels so strongly about him.

10. an introduction to the three volumes of karl marxs capital - michael heinrich

i dont quite like that im ending this list with a book that presents itself as an “introduction” when we’ve already established that this is a bunch of recommendations for someone thats already acquainted with capital, but sadly this is the only full-length book that heinrich has in the english language and its reading of capital is so unorthodox that it feels totally alien against all the traditional interpretations of marx. honestly, it doesnt feel like an introduction in the first place, reading more like a challenge and an intervention into the secondary debates about what marx is saying in capital which derives from the german debates which constitute the parameters for the “neue marx-lekture”, or “the new reading of marx”, which sits uncomfortably among the more typical marxisms that surround it on all sides, especially among non-german theorists/readers. 

as far as the dominant reading of marx goes, nearly everything this book says betrays marx’s project, but heinrich knows marx very well, better than most of us (as even his biggest critics readily admit). this may be considered reflective of a “new reading”, but that doesnt mean the old ones are any better or that this one is necessarily a “revisionist” project as many claim (or at least, i wouldnt consider it to be revising marx even if its guilty of revising “marxism”, which is by no means necessarily a bad thing). on the contrary, i think heinrich has the best understanding of marx out of pretty much everyone else right now and thats why i wanted to end with this one. yes, you should read all of the others, especially since you cant understand the way we read and think about marx without coming across the work of people like sraffa and sweezy, but that doesnt really change the fact that heinrich points to a big problem with the way we read and think about marx, that the debates have been getting it wrong all along and largely misunderstanding marxs actual project, miscontextualizing it and falling into dogmatism for various political or academic reasons. 

what heinrich does is to show how the way marx is read and interpreted often misses or downplays the most crucial elements of what marx is actually trying to get across. marxs critique of political economy simply gets converted into a newer, more correct political economy which simply builds on the classical school (shaikh), or it suffers in the hands of those that believe its foundations need to be updated as if it isnt all that relevant anymore (sweezy and baran), or that many of its categories are lacking utility and can simply be done away with (sraffa). rubin’s work plays a big part in establishing the NML reading and harvey draws on heinrich’s scholarship a lot, but nobody really does it as well as heinrich himself and i genuinely think hes lightyears ahead of everyone else. a lot of people are starting to agree and i was one of the most recent converts on the heinrich hype train which has been growing for the last couple of years. 

any day now, we should be getting one of his older books, the science of value, in english and i plan on devouring it as fast as i can, but sadly its been in limbo for several years, with its initial release scheduled for 2014 (if i remember correctly). in the mean time though, we’ve only got his introduction to capital and a bunch of shorter pieces/videos.  

so i guess thats my list of 10 things to read after marx with some explanations on why i think theyre important, culminating in ideologically correct heinrich-worship. this was sorta fun and if you have any other questions feel free to ask.