I've been really nostalgic for Steven Universe lately, and I have so much love and appreciation for the show I grew up with, so I thought I should make something nice to sort of give back, y'know? Anyways, I hope you enjoy. <3
pearlnet mob boss au // alt universe pearlnet, 973 words :]
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Garnet has a cigarette between her fingers. Pearl's nose wrinkles, but she doesn't say anything; only shakes her head, leaning back on the dirt-brick walls. Grit digs into the ridges of her shoulders. There's graffiti — of course there's graffiti — scrawled behind Garnet. Almost illegible. DREAM BLUE, one reads. FUCK LIFE!
She would've thought it childish, once.
The cold cuts through the night: in the small opening towering above, soft plumes of smoke curl up to meet the solid silver of the moon. It's stark tonight, the light. Enough that Pearl can make out the softness of her knuckles when she looks back at her.
"Care to share?" she asks.
(She sighs, first. But that's inconsequential.)
Garnet raises an eyebrow.
"You sure about that?"
Her voice is dense. She speaks slowly, like they have all the time in the world. They don't, really. But it's almost like they do, and it's different from the battle-ragged silence Pearl is used to hear heaving through the comms, the sharp orders ringing through them on most days. It does things to her, like making her stare at Garnet. Like making her ask for a drag when she quit years ago, back when Steven was born.
Stupid things.
"I can handle it," she snaps, warmth rising to her face. Wind rustles the thin film of paper ads rolling around the street, but it's — she's warm. Hot, even. The type of heat that doesn't belong here, not on these streets, especially not on days like this — this isn't something she's supposed to keep, she knows, she's not supposed to have this —
"I didn't say that."
Wanting is a different matter altogether. Pearl prides herself on her rationality, which is why she chooses not to think about the way Garnet's voice rocks through her like a storm.
She huffs instead. It's easier, not thinking about it.
"Your eyes did."
She's better than this. Better at this.
Usually.
Garnet holds it out, lips pressed. Pearl still notices the way her lips twitch into a near smile. She takes it with less bravado than she'd initially planned. And — there, she has it now. It's there, right between her fingers.
Right between her fingers.
It's been a while. She can't — when was the last time they had the time? After Steven was born. After Rose died. After the cleanup, the handover, the shifting, the end of war, the age of the Renegade.
"Well?"
All too quickly, Garnet drags her out of her musings, pulling her back to the surface. Her breath catches.
Garnet's gaze drags across her skin, a palpable weight: she's staring at her like she can see, see all of Pearl's jumbled insides and the way she's trembling because of who-knows-what. Presses her into the rawness of the moment until nothing else is real, only the still embers of the cigarette and them, the two of them.
It's funny, she'd been the one who'd asked for it — but it feels as if Garnet is the one daring her now.
Waiting.
Pearl raises the cigarette up to her lips, inhales. The burning smoke drags through her lungs. It sits on her tongue, dry and dusty and bitter.
(And, look, this is the world she balances between her fingers, this small white stick of lung cancer that glows, a spot of red in this night — her lips where Garnet's had been moments ago.
It tastes like her.)
The smoke spills, drifting.
She's still staring.
"Told you I can," she says under her breath, indigance lost on the way Garnet hasn't stopped looking at her lips. She hasn't stopped looking at hers, either. "Told you I haven't forgotten," she mutters weakly, as Garnet steps into her space to pluck the cigarette back, crushing the butt in one fluid motion.
She doesn't step back.
"Remember what happens next?" Garnet asks, low. Head tilted over. Tall strong big. Her hand hovers in the tight space between them, skimming her lapels. Pearl's breath shudders, biting her lips — she shouldn't, they shouldn't, but —
"Remind me?"
+)
Beneath the dim lights of the back alley, flashing neon signs that read closed and 50% off!! and - here's a funny one - adults only, they stagnate.
Stagnate, as in Pearl's fingers draw lazy circles on Garnet's skin, almost entirely slumped over her shoulder from where she's perched on her leg.
Stagnate, as in Garnet does nothing but hum in response, keeping her held against the gritty brick walls of the building.
Stagnate, as in the world hasn't stopped but maybe we have. Bones liquified. Caught in their own bubble, if only for a moment.
(The truth is that they don't have time for this — they never do — but here they are, anyway. Like always.)
They had been kissing moments ago. Garnet still tastes Pearl on her lips; still tastes the ocean. Salt and seawater and loneliness. The aftertaste of smoke. She kisses like the ocean, too. Like avalanches that crash down and fade into lapping waves, anger underbellied by a softness even the streets hadn't been able to calcify.
"Remember now?" Garnet prods again, just to tease. It's funny to see the way Pearl flushes all over, apple-cheeked and full of fight. She hasn't changed at all, despite what she likes to claim. She's still Pearl: easily bruised, easily flustered, easy to love.
It doesn't go exactly as planned. It must be Garnet's turn to blush — an exceedingly rare happening these days, truly — because 'Never forgot' is all the answer she gets, mumbled into her shoulder from where her forehead rests. Pearl's still a little out of it, clearly. It's a good thing. She won't see the dusting of red on her cheeks, for one.
It'd do good to keep her that way.
Very carefully, she nudges her head off. Pearl blinks, too confused to protest. "Wha—"
Times shift. Things change. Gems change: it isn't about the forms you phase through but the nonexistent heart that pulses beneath it, the things you know. The catalogue of memories revolving in the nonexistent brain and which ones you choose to keep at front. Pearl knows she's changed, for one — she's gotten better at using human analogies. Hearts. Brains. Organs.
It's a thing about living as long as she does. You can't help but pick up things along the way, no matter how unpractical it seems. Phrases like my heart hurts. Things like aging. She hasn't, not physically — isn't supposed to at all, really — but maybe Pearl has become a little more human than necessary these past years, because she can't find another explanation for the growing ache in her shoulders.
(She could say loneliness, too. Humans, after all, are infinitely more prone to it than pearls are meant to be. She'd be lying, then, though.
The loneliness had been hers from the very start.
Pearl's always been one from the odd bunch.)
Pearl barely registers how the months fly away, these days, but still notices this: the way her joints seem to creak louder. The growing ache in her shoulders. Her swordwork, arcs falling with mellowed agression, in a way she would've overdone a century ago, in a way she wouldn't have attempted at all a century before that.
pt.2 of the things you said saga // pearlnet through the years, 1195 words :]
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"Don't," is the first word Pearl hisses out to Garnet after Steven's birth.
(Or, alternatively: Rose's death. It's the first time she speaks at all.)
They're on the beach. The wind lashes out against the waves, whipping spray straight into their faces. Pearl hardly blinks. Garnet stares at the curve of her spine - she's so small like this, curled up in a miserable ball - and wonders, not for the first time, what she is supposed to do.
They've all been a little lost since Rose died.
"Pearl - " she starts, her voice low.
Pearl cuts in. "Garnet, don't."
She says it through clenched teeth, voice low and distorted. It means don't come closer. It means don't talk to me. It means don't talk about her, I knew her better than you, I'm lost and hurt and I know you mean well but if you keep trying to help I'll get at you and-
"I don't want to get mad at you, Garnet."
It means you don't deserve that. Please.
Her head drops to her knees.
Garnet knows this isn't healthy - far from it. Healthy is the last word she'd use to describe this situation. But Pearl sounds so broken just then, such a stark contrast from the renegade that she knows that she can't help but take a step back.
"...you know where I am if you need me," she ends up saying before turning back.
(And she does, but several years slip by before Pearl knocks on her door.)
:
It's not that they get over it, or that they stop hurting. Garnet would know. The knowledge sits uncomfortably beneath her tongue, burning through her words like acid. Pearl doesn't seek her out after their conversation - if you could call it one - on the beach, but her voice doesn't stop trembling for a while, either. She stops speaking for a while. Amethyst stays confused and starts shifting a lot. Garnet tries to be a leader. She doesn't know if she suceeds.
So no, they don't get over it at all. They just get better at playing hide and seek.
The next few years are spent grinding down their teeth.
Garnet says everything through gritted teeth and it's called determination and a promise of sorts, something like we'll get through this, we'll survive. Pearl mutters platitudes through a strained smile, all teeth, and that's her bracing herself for the pain but also what comes after it all. Amethyst's ire leaks through her clamped jaw, staining all her words and it's mostly anger but also I want you to be okay.
Slowly as ever, the clock ticks by.
:
Grief is a strange thing. There's no proper way to grieve, but maybe there is a wrong way to do it; it hits Pearl on one rather drafty night, staring up at Rose's portrait.
'What have you done to us?' she asks to her figure, looming and kind. For the first time, the question has a narrow edge to it, more accusing than anything else. She doesn't say it outloud; the rest of the gems are inside. Just mouths it, lips twitching over closed teeth.
Pearl grieves.
(These days, it's the only thing she thinks she's good for.)
It isn't grieving in the sense of missing Rose, or, hell, missing them - Rose and Pearl, Pearl and Rose - together. It's staring up for too long until her neck aches when it isn't supposed to, and flitting her eyes back down to realise how empty the living room has become. It's grieving, but this time Pearl is grieving the present instead of the future. What they are now instead of what could have been.
Rose took something from them all when she died. In some sense, they all died a little.
She sighs.
For a second, Garnet's door seems impossibly close. She could just... knock, and Garnet would be on the other side. The idea seems incredibly tempting.
But the moment passes, and the idea flutters away like a wren, leaving nothing but a vague feeling of homesickness behind.
For what, exactly, Pearl is not sure.
:
It happens, though.
Pearl thought she knew pain, but this is something different - not the gem-deep shock of a fractured gem or the dull weight of a battlefield splayed out in her mind but an acute, stabbing kind in her gut that gems normally don't feel. A kind that gems aren't supposed to feel. A flash of panic rises in her; Rose isn't here is her first thought, before - Garnet. Garnet would know what to do.
(Garnet, who became their leader after Rose died. Garnet, who still looks at her like she'll fall apart sometimes. Garnet, who has been waiting all this time - maybe even since that conversation on the beach, so many years ago. Garnet. Garnet. She's been thinking of her a lot lately.)
She stands hunched over in front of Garnet's door and attempts to knock, attempt being the key word. The door slides open before her fist reaches the metal plate.
Garnet is in front of her.
"You're not okay," she says. It isn't a question.
"Maybe," she grimaces through clenched teeth. "I don't know why. Something's wrong."
"...it'll pass."
"Did you see that too?"
"It'll pass," she says again, in lieu of an answer. "Come in."
Garnet's room is, as expected, warm. She holds on to her with a stubborness that could rival mountains; in the end, Pearl stops squirming and falls back into her arms. It's been a while, she thinks.
(The ache inside her dissolved the moment she stepped into her room.)
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Later, on a mission: "I can handle it," Garnet mutters through her teeth, arms faintly trembling. "Go."
(Pearl knows that tone of her voice. It's called stubborness.)
"You can't hold up an avalanche by yourself," Pearl says.
"I will."
To no one's - and everyone's - surprise, she does.
(Her self-assured smirk afterwards is infuriating, but Pearl's mostly just glad that she's okay.)
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Sometime in between, Pearl asks Did you know?, dreading the answer but still itching to know.
Sometime in between, Garnet tells her no, I couldn't, I didn't think she'd leave you behind, wondering how many miscalculations she had made.
Sometime in between, the baby wakes up crying. Pearl rocks him back to sleep, whispering shhhh to Garnet through her teeth.
Things get better for a while, sometime in between.
:
Decades float by. A little more easily, this time.
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"Don't," is also Garnet's first word to Pearl after their date, but she hardly means it.
Pearl's fingers close around Garnet's wrist. Her eyes take on a sly glint; the slant of her lips and the way the moonlight pools into her collarbones makes Garnet ache.
It's still longing, in a way, but it isn't grief this time.
"Why not?" she asks.
"We're outside. If anything, you should be more scandalized."
"Love changes gems," Pearl hums. She twists up and the stars hit her eyes just right; there's an ocean in them and more. Garnet wants, a primal thirst that licks her insides and could devour her whole.
And - in her defense, Pearl started it. It only makes sense that Garnet ends it, right?
This is what it all comes down to: Pearl loves Garnet. But there are things that run deeper and ache rawer; things called devotion and reverence and she taught me how to use a sword and tried to set me free before I ever wanted it for myself.
Things like, I loved her more than I thought I could love.
Things like, I would do anything for her.
(I still do everything for her.)
Pearl loves Garnet, but she adored Rose. Adores her still, even in her death.
Had Garnet loved herself any less, she would have loved Pearl, too.
what you get when you mix pool hopping + the future + things you said prompts together. // post-su future pearlnet, 1492 words :]
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12:17 am in the beach house is a little more lonely than Pearl is used to, if only because she is missing three people instead of one. Even with Greg still around, the house has been quiet lately. It was only after he left that Pearl realised it: Steven had always been the glue of their family, the reason why they had still gravitated to this place after their worlds had stretched and spilled beyond its wooden walls.
He's the sun, Pearl remembers thinking once, not too long after Rose's death. He's the sun and he pulls us in and he turned this house into a home.
His departure had essentially dissolved the ties that used to guide them back here every night.
(That, and the fact that the silence reminded them all a little too much of the spaces he used to fill for it not to hurt.)
None of them dropped in quite as often as they used to these days.
She supposes she should be celebrating all the worlds they've curated for themselves outside of this house - no, a home, she tells herself, because it is still a home to her - but she can't help feeling melancholy about it sometimes, just a bit.
Like tonight.
It's summer. The night air outside the window should be sickeningly warm, but it's cold inside in a way she's never felt before, in a way she shouldn't be able to feel. Greg is snoring upstairs, but that's about it. There's no one else around: Amethyst hardly sleeps here nowadays, and Pearl never knows where Garnet is anymore. She can't remember the last time she saw them, properly, outside of their weekly phone calls with Steven.
She misses them.
Her fingers pick absentmindedly at the couch. One step forward, two steps back, she muses. In retrospect, missing someone has been a perpetual state of being for Pearl for over a millenia. She's always been one easy to linger, after all, especially on the past. It had been disconcerting to realise once Steven had left that she was still not above clinging on to the past, after all the effort she'd put in to try - and succeed in - getting over Rose.
A different past, but still the past nonetheless.
(This beach house had been alive not too long ago. It feels strange to have to remember it that way.)
The door clicks open at 12:48; something she only knows because she's spent the last half hour staring blankly at the clock. Pearl looks up, knocked out of her stupor.
And... oh. Isn't that -
"Garnet?" Her voice pitches slightly, caught in mild surprise.
She doesn't mean to say it out loud. It's just - hi, hello, it's been a while, she can't help but think. Between Steven's absence and Sapphire and Ruby's increasingly frequent appearances, Pearl can't remember the last time they were alone together. It's not that she's not fond of them because she is (Pearl will always have a soft spot for Ruby's earnest adorations and the way Sapphire blushes at them) but Garnet is another matter altogether.
Garnet is Garnet.
"Hello, Pearl."
"Hello!" she squeaks out. Maybe a little too eagerly. She flushes, hands fluttering in the air, unsure what to do. A voice in her head winces - get yourself together, Pearl - but everything seems so awkward in a way she can't explain. Garnet doesn't seem to be heading to the temple, which could only mean...
"Do you need anything?" she asks, lost.
"Is something wrong?" she asks, next, when Garnet does little more than stare at her - she seems to be staring at least, Pearl can never be sure with that visor - and cock her head.
All of a sudden, she marches to her and plops down on the couch, patting the space next to her. In a daze, Pearl scoots closer. She still doesn't know what to do. It's an unsettling feeling - like she doesn't know Garnet anymore, which is stupid because she does, she should.
5800 years, Pearl, give or take. It shouldn't be this hard.
"You're thinking too loud again," Garnet says out of the blue.
Pearl squints at her. "Did you -"
"No."
"Oh."
An arm goes around behind her back. It pulls her in and suddenly she's warm again, huddled next to Garnet's chest in a pile of pointy limbs. Pearl buries her face there. She's not crying. She's not.
"I don't need to look into the future to know when you're overthinking," Garnet says above her head.
"Besides," she adds, almost as an afterthought, "I can't."
"Hhmph?"
"I can't - "
She lifts her head. The visor stares back at her.
Oh, she realises a second time.
(In any other universe, Pearl would be puzzled. Unsettled. Concerned. Asking what?! in a strangled voice, confusion bubbling into her frown. But this isn't the first time it's happened in this one; there's a sinking feeling in her chest and it reads something like dread and deja vu and resignation but most of all a horrifying familiarity. Her heart, if she had one, would be pulsing madly right now.)
"...you don't know me anymore." It's another thing that slips without her meaning to. Less of a question and more of an understanding, but it makes sense, really. The fact that she has to admit it makes it hurt more than it should.
She's cold again. She moves to pull back, but Garnet's arms tighten around her.
"It means my perception of you is not up to date. There's a difference."
"I know what it means, Garnet, it's not like I don't remember..."
"We've moved past that."
"But it happened then. It's happening now."
"Not for the same reason."
"Is this any better?"
Pearl's fingers are trembling and she isn't sure why.
Silence settles in the space between them. Garnet remains stiff and unwavering for a few minutes. She's looking, Pearl thinks. Or at least, she's trying to.
Garnet moves again after a few minutes, sinking into the couch and holding her impossibly closer. Pearl notices she is trembling too: this isn't normal Garnet behaviour, she finds herself worrying, even as her body melts into hers. But then again, who is she to say that?
They don't know each other anymore. She doubts this interaction is normal Pearl behaviour to Garnet, either.
"I didn't notice," Garnet says in a way of apology. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be."
"Pearl."
"Garnet."
"Steven's departure affected me more than I would've liked it to. I distanced myself from the beach house because it provoked emotions that I thought to be pointless at the time. I wanted to be strong enough for the rest of us. I hurt you in the process." The delivery is clinical, stoic. The sigh that follows is not. "I'm sorry, Pearl. I didn't mean to."
Pearl twitches uncomfortably. "He's why we were a family," she reasons. He's why you came back here every night. "We're fine! Excellent, really. It's alright, I understand."
She even punctuates it with a smile. Pearl wonders if it looks like a grimace: she hopes it doesn't.
"We are a family. You and I. I love you. You're reason enough, and I made you think that you weren't."
"I -"
The clock trills. It's 1:00 am. Something in her - the pretence, perhaps - drains out at that, and she ends up buried against Garnet's chest again. "I miss you," she confesses listlessly, "I miss you and Amethyst and yes, Steven, but also you because you're never home these days. And I know, I do, there are worlds outside of this home we've created. The birds are leaving the nest, or whatever the human saying is. And I'm proud of it - of the people I know now, the places we've built, the lives we've created outside of each other but lately it seems like us doesn't exist anymore and I miss back when I could come home and expect to find you somewhere."
"I know."
"I don't want to be strangers, Garnet."
"We aren't."
"Aren't we?"
"No. We aren't. We won't be."
"If you say so."
"You're still part of my world, Pearl."
Her fingers brush against her hair, skimming her gem. The warmth from earlier is back again, a grounding, anchoring weight on her skin. She hums. "I'd like to be," she tells her, half a smile tugging the corners of her lips. "I'd like to get to know you again."
Garnet smirks at that, seriousness fading, lifting her visor to peek at her beneath it. "Is that you asking for a date?" she teases.
She flushes again. And huffs. This is ridiculous. "So what if it is?" she fires back, all indignance and false bravado.
She doesn't expect Garnet to lean in so close, their foreheads almost touching. Her entire face turns blue, then. It's terrible.
"Well," Garnet says, "I suppose I will have to take you out, then."
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