The first time Rose did it, it was out of ignorance.
The second was desperation.
The third time she did not do it. If she had, it would have been purely malicious.
She resisted it the fourth time too, and the fifth, the sixth and the seventh.
The eighth time she never got the choice: she died first.
The first, though—the first was Adam. An eager and honest bucktooth man with blond hair in ringlets that reminded Rose just a bit of her own. Adam was the first human Rose fell in love with, and it was different. It wasn’t her normal human love, that soft and gentle maternal kind. This love was bubbly and effervescent. It was walks alone just the two of them that felt giddy and new and anxious eager jolts in her mind of touching his skin and investigating his lips and getting close, close like humans do, in a way that wasn’t fusion.
And 58 was far too young an age, Rose thought, for Adam to fade. He burst out in sores that corrupted his human form and could not heal, would not heal, and no human could save him. So Rose did. Adam died, and Rose shed just enough tears to bring him back into existence.
Things didn’t change all at once. For years nothing was different than the novelty of Adam’s ringleted hair truly matching Rose’s. But humans experience the passing of decades different from Gems. Adam grew solemn when all his friends died. He made new ones. Then 50 years later, they all died as well.
Adam’s body remained healthy. But it seemed the human mind wasn’t equipped for centuries of life. Maybe humans had a finite amount of love packaged into them, meant to well up from the soul for 70 or 80 years at most. Adam ran out of love. He packed his things, just a single bag on his shoulder, and he told Rose he would leave forever.
Rose let him go, but her heart still broke, because Gems work on a much larger time scale.
Samuel was the next man in her life, a mere 30 years later, and he was spry, bubbly, energetic, overflowing with a sort of giddy love that Rose felt would last and last. She swept him up in her arms and spun with him on the briny beach front, her bare feet molding in the sand as they swirled and danced, day after day, year after year. She and Samuel married, as was a custom among Samuel’s kind, and he gathered a batch of humans larger than Rose had seen since the victory against Homeworld.
Samuel turned 75 faster than Rose could measure. He was gray and worn, thin and knotted at the joints, senile and immobile when Rose still wanted to dance with him on the beach. He did not wake up one morning, and it was too soon for Rose. She wept, honest heavy wet tears that poured the life back into a husk that dried too soon.
Samuel lasted another 75 years after that. But he burned down, slower than Adam but still the same. His human light died. He wept too hard for his family and friends, for the children of his first marriage and his children’s children, and their children… He grew solemn, and cold, and inconsolable, and one day he told Rose he wanted to explore the ocean with his infinite age. Alone. Without her. His human love had burnt itself to the wick.
The heartache hit worse. Rose gave her hand and heart and time to no other man for decades. Not the curious sailors who came hat-in-hand to the Temple. Not the outcast townsfolk who came to investigate the myths of the magical women out by the briny shore. She waited, and waited, until that ache in her chest grew too heavy, and she let a young and spindly man named Wilson woo her. He took her out to sea on a rickety hand-crafted boat, and he pointed out the wonders of the vast sea to her, and Rose wondered silently if ever they might cross Samuel’s path.
Wilson grew old when Rose was not paying attention. She went to visit him one day, and found only a sickly man curled up in bed, breathing in wheezes, blinking through milky eyes. Garnet found her that evening, Garnet with the ability to see the paths laid out ahead of her. She warned Rose not to follow through this time, and Rose did not. And Wilson died.
Mark with the thick orange brows was slowly whittled down to thin scraggly gray hairs, like fuzzy caterpillars resting on his lip and brow the day he died. Seth had only hit 30 when his carriage was lost off the side of the road in a blizzard, his body found days after. Wallace made it to 76. Jeremy to 64…
When she met Greg, Rose reached a selfish conclusion. She would be the human this time. She would be the human wife that Adam, Samuel, Wilson, Seth, Mark, Wallace, Jeremy never had…she would be the one to give him a child.
And she would die first this time.
The other men had seemed so peaceful when they passed, Rose thought in hindsight. A life well-lived. A life fulfilled. Not like Adam, not like Samuel, whittled down to husks and then nothing but a puppet on strings, in a body strewn about, too spent and stressed for a human. She wanted to know that peace of a life lived to its end. She wanted to pass on her chance of experiencing the world to a new human, a new generation, like all humans were so happy to do.
Rose died first. Steven lived on.
Lars has not visited Beach City in centuries. Pearl, Garnet, and Amethyst still live there, he knows that, but he never knew them well. He never properly met the green and blue ones either.
He travels sometimes. Mostly he lingers. Wherever he ends up. It’s all a blur. Where he’s been and where he’s going. Just not Beach City. He’s visited those old homes too many times, and he saw them all demolished over time. Nothing’s left for him there.
Lars does not quite know where he is. He does not particularly care. It’s indoors, and dim, and a man is logging orders on a holographic tablet one table over. It’s a restaurant of sorts. Lars doesn’t need to eat, but if he orders a coffee, they will probably let him linger longer.
Lars stares out the window. He does that often. He’s run out of other things to do over the years. He’s gotten numb to most of it.
A shadow of a man slides into the booth with Lars. He takes the space on the opposite side of the table. He’s wearing a rain poncho, a thin and ultra-light orange material for maximum hydrophobic effect. He looks old, eyes lined with wrinkles beneath the hood. Lars swallows the urge to ask him what he wants as the man lowers the hood.
His hair cascades in ringlets, each the same pale and luminous pink as the hair on Lars’ head.
He sticks a hand out, and offers a thin smile that doesn’t quite touch his eyes.
“I’m Adam. I noticed your hair from the other side of the bar. Sorry to intrude, but could we talk a moment…?”
