Fanfic / Red Sadie

Twenty years ago, Clancy Miller left Beach City, leaving his ex-wife Barb and their daughter, Sadie.

Now he's back in town for a job, and Sadie hopes to learn more about him - sometimes, though, it's best to just let sleeping dogs lie...

Red Sadie is a series of Steven Universe fanfics by E350tb, where Sadie's father is a government agent, and his sudden return changes the lives of everyone involved - especially Sadie's.

There are currently two works in this series: The Eye of the Storm, and Ruby Stars.

Note: all spoilers for The Eye of the Storm will be unmarked. You have been warned.

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Tropes for the series as a whole:

• Connected All Along: In The Eye of the Storm, Garnet and Pearl speculate that Kay and the other gems with her came to investigate the Cluster. in Ruby Stars, Sadie's talk with Kay's spirit has the latter confirm she was guarding a Peridot tasked with investigating the mega-gem. Kay regrets never having the courage to tell Rose about it before Clancy shot at her gem, but Sadie tells her that Steven took care of it.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Eye of the Storm: Amethyst mentions that she thinks Peridot getting mad at Marzio Party is really funny.
  • Ruby Stars:
    • In response to Sadie saying that she's never seen Buck angry before, Jenny says she should see him playing "Super Bash Bros.", to which Buck bitterly replies that Smirby is incredibly cheep.
    • In one chapter, Connie notes that a jukebox was unplugged because "Someone set it up to play What's New Pussycat 21 times in a row."

Tropes for The Eye of the Storm:

• Cerebus Retcon: Within canon, Amethyst and Greg's interest in Li'l Butler was obsessive but relatively tame, simply serving as the eventual backdrop for their falling out, while Rose, Garnet and Pearl did nothing to stop them. Eye of the Storm reveals that Rose, Garnet, and Pearl purposefully used the two's love for the show to keep Kay a secret from them while she adjusted to Earth.
• Downer Ending: Sadie finds out that she is Half-Gem and her other mom was a Ruby, but that also includes finding out her mother Barb lied to her about her parentage and the reason her "father" Clancy left. Upset at her mother, Sadie leaves and is convinced by Steven to stay at the temple until things calm down, while Barb is left guilt-ridden by her actions to keep her daughter safe. Amethyst is furious that not only was she Locked Out of the Loop regarding Kay but that Rose and the others used her and Greg's love of Li'l Butler to keep them out of the way, turning back some of her Character Development. Clancy allows Sadie to keep her mother's gem and comes up with a cover story for his superiors, but he gets reassigned to spy the gems.
• Entertainingly Wrong: To keep Clancy from taking Kay's gem back to the government, Barb asks Greg to pick up the box the gem was in to hide it. Greg, however, had no idea what was in the box or that Barb and Clancy had any involvement with the Gems, so he assumed it was a gift for Sadie's birthday, and figured the safest place to hide it would be in Barb's closet; he also had no idea that as he was walking into the Miller residence, Steven, Connie, Amethyst, and Sadie were ransacking Barb's room to figure out what she was hiding.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Clancy learns that Sadie is the lead singer of her band, he suggests that she has her mother's singing voice. This baffles Sadie since she never heard her mom sing. Clancy was referring to Sadie's other mother Kay.
  • Before Clancy leaves her office, Nanefua notes that despite being her dad, Sadie looks nothing like him. It's later revealed that he isn't actually her father.
• The Reveal: Clancy isn't Sadie's father. Her "father" is actually Kay, a Ruby, meaning Sadie is half Gem.
• Wham Shot: Sadie digs through Clancy's dropped wallet in an attempt to learn more about him, and instead stumbles upon an old picture of him and Barb discovering a crashed Roaming Eye, revealing they both have more stake in the Gems then she thought.

Tropes for Ruby Stars:

• Bullying the Dragon: Clancy sees any chance the US Government has with antagonizing the Gems as futile, with the Crystal Gems not only being powerful fighters but possessing technology thousands of years advance than the US has. The Gems acknowledge this when the military surrounds the temple and they easily fight the soldiers off, but are forced to stand down when Bradshaw shows he has their friend Greg hostage.
• Character Development: Inverted. Amethyst's relationship with Pearl temporarily deteriorates back to the constant, heated arguments of Season 1 due to her fury at her and Garnet for not telling her about Kay.
• Call-Back: When Amethyst finds out that Ronaldo got injured falling off the edge of the lighthouse cliff, she thinks the fence nearby should have prevented it after she damaged her gem the same way in An Indirect Kiss. This leads her to take Ronaldo and his family to Rose's healing fountain to heal him like her gem was, which leads Sadie to consider using the fountain to put her gem back into her.
• The Dragon: Seraphinite is White Diamond's right-hand Gem, acting as her voice and being there in her place when White can't or doesn't want to be. White trusts her enough that she gifted Seraphinite a weapon imbued with her Mind Control powers should she ever need them.
• Dreaming of Times Gone By: While Sadie's passed out, she experiences the day Kay emerged from her hole, which occurred thousands of years ago.
• Exact Words: When Bradshaw confirms with Seraphinite that she will leave Earth alone when she leaves with Steven, Sadie, and Connie, she says they will be nothing to return to. She is omitting that Homeworld plans for the Cluster to destroy the Earth at emergence, but she isn't aware that the Cluster has bubbled itself to protect the planet.
• Eye Colour Change: Sadie's eyes permanently change from green to red after Kay's gemstone melds back into her.
• Fusion Dance: In "Beta Buddies", Steven and Connie Fuse into Stevonnie to combat a giant Corrupted worm. After they, Amethyst and Sadie cling to the worm while it burrows underground, Stevonnie and Amethyst in turn Fuse together to become "Smokonnie Quartz" to poof the worm before she can dig back up and attack them again.
• I Choose to Stay: Even before falling for Barb and still afraid of Earth, Kay still wanted to stay on the alien world rather than go back to Homeworld, or more specifically to fall under White Diamond's psychic control network again.
• I Never Told You My Name: During Sadie's sleep shapeshifting, she transforms into Lapis at the end, which shocks Garnet since Sadie never met Lapis in person. Sadie had earlier seen Lapis in a dream thanks to remnant of White Diamond's network in her gem, the same network that Lapis has been forced into.
• Internal Reveal: Seraphinite uses her powers to read Pearl's mind after noticing her hands automatically swoop up to cover her mouth, discovering that Rose Quartz, and by extension Steven, is Pink Diamond.
• Irony:
  • Lapis fled the Earth to escape the Diamonds' wrath, only to get captured and used by White Diamond's Dragon.
  • Buck, one of the most chill and levelheaded people in Beach City, tells Sadie that if she needs to scream or let out her anger, she should do it.
• Hidden Depths: Buck shares with Sadie that he's a fan of old steam locomotives while in an abandoned train yard they were shooting a music video in. As he's The Stoic cool guy, Sadie is a bit taken aback by it.
  Buck: Pretty cool backdrop, huh? I think it's a Baldwin E2 Atlantic. Early 1900s. Pretty rare, huh?
  Sadie: (Beat) Never took you for a train buff.
  Buck I used to sit in the corner of the library during recess as a kid. Train books had the biggest pictures.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • The fic's summary wastes no time in saying that Sadie is half Gem, something that was built up to in the previous fic.
  • Later chapters casually incorporate the show's reveal of Rose Quartz being Pink Diamond, which took years and a curveball before it was revealed.
• No-Sell: Seraphinite's staff lets her use some of White Diamond's power to not only Mind Rape gems but also read their minds. However, when she tries to read Steven, she can only gets glimpses of Rose's memories such as Pink Diamond, suspecting his human half is interfering. She's also concerned her powers don't work on humans like Connie and Major King.
• Playing with Fire: As she's part Ruby, Sadie has the ability to summon fire, which she unfortunately finds out by accidentally setting a wooden support beam on fire and causing the warehouse they were in to go up in flames.
• Poor Communication Kills: In Amethyst's anger over being kept in the dark about Kay, she convinces the others to not tell Garnet and Pearl that they're going to try to put Sadie's gem back into her. Sadie later passes out due to the incredibly poor reaction between her body and her gem, which forces a visit to the Sun Incinerator so Peridot has the right technology to resuscitate her.
• Properly Paranoid: Connie is initially suspicious that Lapis not only returned to Earth despite fearing the Diamond's will come there, but also tells her and Steven that there's a gem that wants to escape to Earth in spite of the risk. As it turns out, Lapis is currently brainwashed by Seraphinite to lure Steven into a trap and capture him.
• Sudden Eye Colour: Sadie's eyes are described as green pre-gem lodging, while they're black in the show.
• Supering in Your Sleep: In chapter 10, dealing with exhaustion and frustration on not getting a hold of her shapeshifting, Sadie enters a trance where she frequently turns into other members of the Crystal Gems, finishing with Lapis, who she saw in a dream at the start when Garnet snaps her out of it.
• Super-Senses: Peridot licks and taste Sadie's gem to determine where on Kay's body it used to be, and from there where on Sadie's body it needs to go.
  Peridot: Steven, I'm a certified kindergartener. If I couldn't tell where a gem's placement was just from taste, I wouldn't have become such a big deal on Homeworld.
• Tautological Templar: Lieutenant-Colonel Bradshaw, the leader of Task Force Gem, acts in what he believes is the best course for the United States. In practice this includes spying on the Crystal Gems, Earth's frequent saviors, for any advantages to steal; put Beach City under house arrest and arrest anyone with tangible connection to the Gems, allow Seraphinite to take Steven, Connie, and Sadie despite the three being US citizens plus offering his subordinate Major King despite the Gem saying she has no interest besides experimenting, and shooting Barb in the leg when she tries to rescue her daughter, the last of which he smugly claimed was to preserve "diplomacy."
  Steven: I thought you're supposed to be protecting people! This isn't protecting humanity!
  Bradshaw: It is. In a very pragmatic way.
• Wham Line: Clancy states that Sadie having Kay's gem is very bad, and not because the government wants it or because it's giving her powers she doesn't know how to control. It's because of "the network", the systematic mind control used by White Diamond to keep the Gems in her court under her power at all times.
  "The psychic control network," replied Barb, "That kept the Gems that belonged to White Diamond in line."
• A Wizard Did It: When Greg asks how Rose was able to remove Sadie's gem with no consequences, as Steven needs his to live, Barb and Clancy simply reply, "Gem magic".