#||closedrp

{Being alone right now probably wasn’t the best idea. Steven was with   Connie and her family and the other Crystal Gems were either away  or held up in their individual rooms. Normally, Garnet could cope  with the destruction of something that had once been sacred to her  former leader but today, for some reason, it was just sitting wrong.

Standing from her computer, the fusion made her way out the door of  the Temple House and down into the City. The Big Donut wasn’t too  far from the beach, really. It was a wonder Steven didn’t live there  more often. That child had a sweet tooth the size of a blue whale and  deep pockets filled with money gathered over the centuries of Gem  occupation. Garnet smiled to herself briefly over the strings of thought  regarding Steven until she stepped up onto the boardwalk and  continued on to the small cafe. 

As per usual, the fusion had to duck her head just slightly to pass  through the doorway, nothing she wasn’t used to. The semi-familiar  sight of one of Steven’s human friends was welcomed whole-heartedly  as Garnet made her way to the front counter, giving a nod of  acknowledgement to the shorter girl she knew as Sadie.}

            “ Howdy.”

{Though she’d been busy and absent, Garnet had been keeping  an eye on what Howl was up to; through both intermittent bursts  of internet activity, and calculated hypothesis on which trajectories  were most plausible. It came as no surprise to her that Howl had  been victorious against Maw Sit Sit, though for some reason it  had never crossed her mind that she would be needed after the  strife was over.

Again, she followed the path from the Warp to the small farmhouse  she’d come to know as Howl’s home. It seemed to go quicker  and quicker each time. Her surroundings were nothing but a blur  of vaguely familiar shapes and plantlife. Even the stride through  the fields was white noise. It wasn’t until she could hear her own  footsteps on the path up to Howl’s porch that she snapped back  into the current. With a waive, the fusion moved towards the other   Gem, looking them over for the hint of the Gem Monster they’d  managed to defeat.}

            --” Glad to see you’re okay.                   Not a lot of Gems can square-off against a monster an’ walk away                     from it. 

                             Good job.”

hersoleconfidante:

“G-Garnet!”

Of course. What was she thinking, doing this in Steven’s room? Whether the others had gone out for food following a mission or not, this was something she shouldn’t have risked being discovered.

She felt her cheeks heating up. This was so embarrassing. All because she didn’t take the extra precaution before making sure she wasn’t as damaged as she felt. Her eyes were on the verge of watering when she finally continued.

“W-what are you doing back so early?”

{Garnet wasn’t entirely sure what she was going to see when she returned to the Temple House, but it certainly hadn’t been this.

A slight curl of her fingers was all she could really do at first, a minuscule movement and a stare as the cogs and gears of her brain turned. How had she not realized Pearl was injured during battle? She was supposed to protect everyone. That   was   her   job.

The fusion managed to break herself from her trance, shutting her lips and bringing a stoic expression to her face once more.}

  “Pearl.     Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”

{Garnet asked flatly, closing the distance between them. Her knee fell to the ground with a solid thunk, getting down to Pearl’s level. 

All she could do was rationalize-- If Pearl was still in-body, she couldn’t have been that damaged. It wasn’t life-threatening.

Or maybe her Gem was  d a m a g e d.

Garnet didn’t let that thought sit idly for long.}

                    – “ Urgent Starter Sentences:  "You're safe with me."  “

[uktenas-and-redbirds]

                      {Civilian involvement in Gem battles were always                          a risk but rarely actually happened. 

The corrupted Gem was furious and scared, lashing out at the small Human City because it couldn’t think of anything else to do. Of course it couldn’t-- t h i n k i n g   was   beyond   its   comprehension in this form. The Crystal Gems were doing their best to stop it’s terror, to lead it out of the City before anyone got hurt, but it was dead-set on destruction and mayhem. 

Garnet had taken it on herself to evacuate as much of the city as she could. Most people were understanding, if not the slightest bit belligerent, but she had managed to clear almost all of them in a matter of about twenty minutes. She was finishing up, moving gird-locked vehicles out of the way and getting civilians on their way to minimize casualties. Time was moving much faster than she wanted it to and she could hear the distant cries of battle reverberating through the alleys and roadways.

On her way to the battle, Garnet noticed something--                                                                 More accurately, someone.

They were trapped under the half-crippled floors of some sort of building, pinned in an opening too cramped to climb out of. The ground itself was trembling, sending debris and dust tumbling down the collapsed rebar and concrete. The Gem Beast, somewhere not too far from where the fusion stood, let out something between a twisted dimensions’ idea of music and an intense roar of some primal animal. Garnet had to move.

Maintaining structural integrity on a half-decimated building while trying to get someone out was a lot harder than it sounded. Every torn-free piece of wall had to be predicted like a game of Jenga, carefully removed to stop the rest from crumbling. Eventually, the fusion put herself underneath the rubble, holding it up in the palms of her gauntlets and straining upwards to make a big enough opening for the trapped civilian to get out easily.}

   “Move. Quickly.

             You’re safe with me.”

{She felt as though she had to confirm that she wasn’t like the Gem that was rampaging through the streets. This person didn’t need to be scared, they just needed   to   move.

The building groaned and bore down on Garnet with an increasing desire to be level with the ground. The fusion shifted her feet in amongst the pebbles of the former structure, supporting it like Atlas with fiery determination.}

                           {Of course a corrupted Gem had found Howlite.

So soon after any kind of interaction with Garnet, too. Anyone else might have chalked it up to an unfortunate aura the Crystal Gems put out, maybe some kind of twisted karma that bled into anyone they interacted with. Garnet knew better than that.

The world was full of  coincidence  and she understood it more than anybody.

Garnet had been idly toying with the device Steven had given her to create her online social media outlet, relaxed on the sofa and waiting for him to wake up. She was going to make him breakfast, considering she was home in the morning; a situation that was often not the case. Breakfast wasn’t in the cards, however. There was work to be done.

Through brief calculations and the ever-present help of her Future Vision, Garnet pulled herself from the sofa and situated on the Warp.  The nearest location was about twenty, thirty miles out from Howlite’s actual location; definitely not the farthest she’d had to traverse for a Gem, but not a walk in the park either. She had better get moving.

The Warp chimed as it sung to life, dumping the Gem out in the middle of nowhere in nearly an instant. Now, she only had to get walking.}

                   {Garnet managed to do the trip in about fourty-five minutes. Every second wasted                     was a risk of the corruption reforming and causing more damage and destruction.

                                      Cautiously, Garnet closed in on Howlite’s location.

{The facility itself was several hours out from Beach City-- Some sort of Government compound. It was far more technologically advanced than the human devices littering their home, but it was still some years behind anything the Earth-bound Gems had at their disposal; different, sure, but still inferior.

The Crystal Gems had caught wind of a particular piece of scientific inquiry the facility had on lock down-- a Homeworld Gem that they had been searching for just as fervently as their quest for Malachite. 

The buildings were large and unmarked. There were many of them and, honestly, the best plan of action had been to split up, distract, and get inside. Doing so was easy, with the help of Amethyst’s shape-shifting and Garnet’s Gauntlets, and soon the fusion found herself wandering the various hallways and preparing for confrontation. 

It was starting to feel as though every hallway lead to a dead end. Doorways provided little more than the illusion of progress, only to disappoint in being Offices, Laboratories, or Storage Closets. It was monotonous and irritating, failure after failure-- until the hallways took on an aesthetic change. Everything here looked more sterile. Cleaner, Cold.

The doors here were far   more   promising. It only took three empty rooms before the fusion found a door that wouldn’t open on its own. Powerful fingers drove themselves through the sheet metal of the blockade, rending the doorknob clear off and letting it swing submissively open.

Inside was exactly what she had come here for, though she hadn’t been expecting anything quite like what she saw.}

      “ Peridot.         What... have they done to you?”

{The warp pad roared to life in the stillness of the Temple House, manifesting the tall, square-headed fusion who often haunted the place. Garnet, as usual, had left without a word-- off to defeat and capture another wayward Gem the tendrils of her future-sight tangled in its grasp. 

The house was empty. Steven had gone out, probably to stay with his Father, and Amethyst was nowhere to be found; but that wasn’t what Garnet noticed about the room. 

On the futon, surrounded by the staircase and the shelves, sat Pearl; g i f t s  in hand-- A rose, a card, and a box of chocolates that sat uneaten beside the pale Gem on the futon, like a paperweight. Had she even noticed Garnet return home? The universal splits of predicted conversation were torn on the matter and useless in providing a solid answer.

A flex of the fusion’s fingers sent the bubbled Gemstone to the pits of the Crystal Heart in a soundless, practiced blink. Garnet’s observation of Pearl lasted only a moment between her appearing and the decision to involve herself, broken only when she stepped from the warp and towards the other in several fluid steps.}

         “...Is this seat taken?”