The warp pad deposited them in a grove of gently sloping trees, and crystal ruins long since overgrown.
Pearl felt the mid-morning sunlight as a weight on her shoulders, warm and soft, and sighed in relief. Beach City had been covered in fog since well before dawn, the oppressive sort that smothered breath and sight, and although the air here lacked the sea breeze and ocean scent that caressed the shoreline by which the temple stood, at least the sky was clear.
"Ah, that's much better," she said, stepping off the warp pad.
Amethyst was close behind her, jumping more than walking off the warp pad while stretching her arms high over her head. Pearl heard a joint pop; smiling, Amethyst yawned and rocked back and forth on her feet.
"Wow," said Amethyst as she made her way to Pearl's side. "Something we can agree on."
Pearl gave Amethyst the best scowl she could muster. She was only half sure that that was a joke.
At last, Garnet met up with them, her shadow swallowing theirs almost entirely. She said nothing, at first, and Pearl couldn't tell by her expression alone what she thought of their bickering. It had only grown in its consistency over the years — even Pearl could recognize that. But Garnet very rarely had anything to say about more than the matter at hand.
She looked down at Amethyst and Pearl, and then at the grove. "We don't have a lot of time."
Amethyst looked to Pearl. "How many of these are we going to need, anyway?"
Pearl peered at the trees, taking count in her head. The trees' trunks weren't necessarily thick, though they easily dwarfed Pearl in girth, and their branches, while long and draped over all manner of collapsed pillars and broken statues, were thin and sparse. Garnet was easily more than half of most of their heights.
"Just a couple should do it. Five, at most."
Pearl took a step forward, and summoned her spear with a swipe of her hand, letting it hover for a moment above her head before grasping it. It caught a ray of dappled light as she swung it down, splitting it in to a sheen of several colors on its surface. A flash behind her bounced off her spear as well — Garnet and Amethyst had also brought their weapons forth.
Pearl could hear Amethyst's whip sliding across the grass, readied, and she heard Garnet crack her knuckles. They stood beside her again. "Gems," began Garnet, "Let's get to work."
Their mission was simple, if you could even call it one. Together, they split the trees from their roots as cleanly as they could, what was left of their trunks uneven and splintered where they sat. Garnet caught each of them as they fell. And, with a weapon that was only partially viable for this sort of work, Pearl tried her best to neatly trim the bark from the trunks and cut them in to manageable planks. She passed each one to Garnet as she finished them.
It was a rough-looking result - their lack of time meant they had to improvise - but they left the grove with several trees' worth of a vague approximation of actual human carpentry. Garnet carried all of it to the warp pad atop her shoulders, unbothered by the weight. There, she propped them upward on the warp pad and leaned them all against herself, so that the other Gems could fit and nothing would be lost in the return trip.
As Amethyst uprooted the remains of the fallen trees from the soil, some of them still clinging to the buried rubble of crystal architecture, Pearl followed behind her and smoothed out the dirt. This place had been so thoroughly covered that Pearl could feel all manner of crystal and glass pebbles, intermixed with the soil and smoothed by time, as she ran her slippers over the earth. The structure that had once existed here was several times the size of even the temple in Beach City, practically a giant prism in the way the sunlight streamed through it, but she found this grove fascinating in its own way. She was positive that one day, they would return to find the space they had cleared this morning overgrown all over again.
Things would inevitably regrow. This was why she loved the Earth.
Amethyst and Pearl joined Garnet on the warp pad, and they let its light wash over them, the sheer force of it blowing their hair upwards and lifting them off of the ground. The green of the grove, sun now directly overhead, made way for a stream of blues and whites.
#
They returned to their own warp pad, surrounded again by familiar wooden walls and the smell of the ocean.
Pearl and Amethyst stepped off of it, from crystal to wood flooring, and the planks precariously leaning on Garnet fell in a heap around her. The two shorter Gems flinched, but Garnet bent down and hoisted up the entirety of the mess in her arms in one fluid motion.
The fog had lifted with morning's passing, but the sky was still gray with low-hanging clouds. Normally Pearl preferred to retreat to her room on days like these, but they were running short on time, and there was still much to be done.
The house that protected the temple's door from the elements had, until then, very rarely been any of the Crystal Gems' concern. But they found themselves with only so much time to get the place back in working order, and tomorrow was their deadline. Everything was furnished, and everything was wired, but there were still parts of the building in various states of disrepair. The staircase, especially, was rotting and splitting by where it met the front porch — Pearl could hear it creak unsteadily every time she put weight on those steps or on the boards beside the doorway, but none of the Gems had ever cared enough about it to fix them. They had just avoided the steps entirely when they could.
Those same steps moaned as Pearl walked across them for what she hoped would be the last time, passing through the threshold and making her way down the stairs. They nearly collapsed right then and there under Garnet's weight when she followed, still carrying her cargo, and Amethyst bypassed them entirely with a running leap from the front porch to the sand.
Once she reached the ground as well, Pearl surveyed the wreck that was the underside of the staircase. "We'll have to rip out some of what's there," she said, pointing at a particularly bad looking spot. "There's a lot of damage on the staircase itself, and it wouldn't hurt to rebuild the bottom of the entire top half, and that part below the porch...we should re-enforce the underside near the back, too, to make up for all the additions inside..."
She focused for a moment, and then projected her best guess of where things should go and how they should fit together from her gem. She let the hologram float there, unhindered, while Garnet and Amethyst observed it from multiple angles.
The revving of an engine caused the hologram to flicker along with Pearl's tightening shoulders. She looked to the others, hoping it wasn't who she thought it was.
A car horn interrupted her again, and the hologram faded away entirely. No, it was definitely Greg.
Garnet put the planks down, more gently this time. "We can take it from here," she said with a reassuring smile. Even Amethyst offered Pearl half of a grin. As much as Pearl didn't want to deal with the man, she was touched all the same.
"I'll be right back," she said, and ran towards Greg Universe's van.
He had parked halfway on the sand, wheels haphazardly turned away from the curb, and he stumbled out of the front seat as she approached. Greg looked about the same as he always did — loose pants, dirty shirt, woefully sunburnt, essentially like he'd just crawled out of bed — and Pearl tried to keep her disdain for it off of her face when he came to greet her.
"Hey! Pearl! Uh, hi."
"Hello, Greg."
He grinned, somehow seeming sincere despite Pearl's level stare. "So...how's it hanging?"
"Did you need something, Greg? We weren't expecting you until tomorrow."
"Right! Yeah. I mean, no! I just wanted to check on how things were going. See if things were ready on your end."
He looked over Pearl's shoulder, and she looked back as well. Behind her, Amethyst was balanced on the outer fence of the porch, doing something-or-other that definitely wasn't delicately removing the rotted wood from underneath the staircase, while Garnet watched from the ground, arms crossed.
Pearl turned back to Greg, deadpan. "We're working on it." Maybe if Amethyst got it out of her system, they'd be able to finish this faster than if she interrupted every half hour with her antics. At least, Pearl hoped that was Garnet's logic. "...I'm sorry, but if that's all you were here for—"
"Actually, there was one more thing."
Before Pearl could groan in disapproval, Greg dug into his pants pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper, handing it to her with a loose, uncertain grip. She took it, and peeled the ball of paper apart fold by fold until the entire sheet was readable — as readable as his handwriting was, with it getting worse and worse as her eyes travelled down the page.
"I wrote down everything I could think of: clothing sizes sizes and stuff, games he likes to play... I thought that it might help, a little."
Pearl looked up at Greg. He was no longer looking her in the eyes, but instead down at his feet, his vision trained on something she could not see. Pearl could feel her expression loosen, just a bit.
"Of course, Greg. We'll take care of everything."
He looked at her again and smiled. "Thank you. Seriously, it means a lot to me."
The stood quiet for a moment, neither sure what to say to the other. Amethyst's voice, excited but incomprehensible over the wind, formed the muffled background to their silent exchange of understanding.
"So..." Greg finally continued, "Are you sure you've got this handled? There anything I can do to help?"
"No! No." Once that fleeting panic fled, Pearl smiled, a little less forced that she would have expected. "Stop worrying! We have everything..." — the entire front porch collapsed behind her, Amethyst yelping in surprise as she was buried — "...under control."
Greg didn't look particularly reassured.
Still, she wished him farewell over the din of Garnet and Amethyst struggling through the wreckage, and shooed him off despite his slight resistance. She smoothed out the list as she watched his van pull away from the beach and turn a corner in the distance. Pearl folded it in to a neat, tiny square as she jogged back toward the other Gems to help.
#
Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl walked up the finished stairway and in to the house, their steps now nearly silent. It had been a while since they were so relieved about anything that didn't involve the fate of the Earth.
They had managed to create the semblance of a human apartment very nicely, in Pearl's opinion. There was a bed — on a raised platform as if a room in and of itself — a kitchen with a refrigerator and a microwave, a restroom...everything a human being needed to live comfortably. And there was more than enough open space, and easy access to the temple if it was needed. She almost spun in giddiness — everything had gone better than she'd expected.
"Not bad," said Garnet.
"I like it," said Amethyst.
"It's certainly something," said Pearl.
They stood there, admiring their work, but after a moment uncertainty dragged at their expressions. They couldn't shake the feeling that they had forgotten something extremely important...
They looked at each other, and then at the room, and then the three of them remembered all at once.
"Food!"
#
"I thought the point of all of that was to avoid dealing with human stores."
"Well, shopping for groceries should be far less complicated than shopping for lumber. …Uh, it should be, right? Garnet?"
Garnet shrugged in response to Pearl's question, and Amethyst pouted, crossing her arms. Pearl only partially managed to hide her chagrin, and put a little more effort in to pushing their shopping cart.
The grocery store was crowded, a throng of people and families passing through in their late-week rituals. And so many of them were staring... Pearl had been positive that their presence in Beach City was common and constant enough that people had long since taken notice and gotten used to it, but apparently that wasn't the case. Perhaps they'd been more secluded than she'd thought. She supposed they made quite the group — Garnet would attract just as much attention on her own, her hair reaching the tops of the aisles, and Pearl didn't exactly blend in, herself. And Amethyst was being Amethyst, returning the looks of a mother and child as they passed with a mischievous grin.
Pearl tried to take note of what was in the carts of the people the trio passed as subtly as she could, but all it did was remind her of the vast variety of things people could eat. She wasn't sure where they should begin.
"Oh! There's the food!"
Pearl had to grab Amethyst by the back of her shirt to keep her from running straight toward a display of soda cans and bags of chips at the end of the aisle.
"Amethyst! We can't just buy the sort of food you eat all the time!"
"What, it's food, isn't it? If it all tastes fine, then it shouldn't be a problem!" She fought against Pearls's hold.
"It's not for us," said Garnet.
Amethyst stopped struggling, defeat drawn all over her face. Pearl let go of her, and Amethyst, to Pearl's surprise, didn't try to resume her sprint.
"Besides," she said, "look at all of this!" Pearl spread her arms out wide. "Humans can eat any and all of this. They have to derive the entirety of their nutrition from their diets! We should purchase a large sample of products to make sure we've gotten anything we might need." Garnet nodded in agreement.
"So...does that mean I can get some chips?"
Pearl grumbled and held her forehead in one of her hands, which Amethyst decided was a sign of approval. She bounded ahead of Garnet and Pearl, who followed behind her at a much more subdued pace.
They weaved through the grocery store, one aisle at a time. By the time they returned to the front of the store to pay, Garnet had switched to pushing the cart — she was the only one who could see over all of the food they had gathered, piled as high as her chest.
A line started to form behind them as Amethyst unloaded everything one by one, and Pearl slowly and carefully sorted through the bag of money they had brought.
"Eighty-three, eighty-four... How much was it, again?" Pearl asked, looking up at the cashier for what must have been the fourth time. The cashier, a teenager with freckles plastered alls cross his cheeks, seemed started at being addressed.
"F-five hundred ten dollars and ninety seven cents, Ma'am."
"Thanks you. Ugh, human currency is so confusing."
Pearl returned to counting, and was so focused on her task that she hardly noticed Amethyst walk up to her.
"Uh, Pearl? What are you doing? We're all ready to go over here."
"I'm counting out the exact change. Oh, it's such a specific number—"
Garnet put a hand on Pearl's shoulder and pushed her aside, about as gently as she could manage, and Amethyst had to navigate around the tower of grocery bags balanced precariously in one of Garnet's arms and atop her shoulder. With her free hand, she rummaged through their bag of money, pulling out a fistful of bills and placing them unceremoniously in front of the cashier.
"Will this cover it?" she asked.
The cashier gulped, intimidated, and leaned over the pile. After nearly a minute of silent counting, he nodded.
"Yeah, I think so. Just let me count out your change..."
But the Crystal Gems were already at the door, walking out with half their bags in their cart and half in a Garnet's arms.
#
Amethyst jumped on to the couch, bouncing twice where she landed before leaning back into the cushions. She had already opened a bag of chips, and she dug into the bag, eating a handful and chewing them loudly.
"Well, I'm glad that's over," said Pearl, sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, legs neatly crossed. "I had no idea today would become so complicated."
"But we did it," said Garnet, standing somewhere between the two of them.
"Yeah," replied Pearl, leaning back so her elbows were on the counter, and she couldn't help but smile. "Yeah, we did."
Amethyst swallowed her chips, and wiped her hands on her shirt. "So...what do we do now?"
"We wait," answered Garnet. She crossed her arms and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "It'll be morning soon enough."
"Why do humans have to sleep?" complained Amethyst.
"You know it'll be like this every night, right?" asked Pearl.
Amethyst fell back in to the couch cushions again. She hated having to admit when Pearl was right, and Pearl liked that even more than the satisfaction of being correct.
She suddenly shot up from her spot, and sat at the edge of the couch. "What do you think he's going to be like?"
"We already know what he looks like."
"No, like, how do you think he'll act?"
"Well," said Pearl after a moment of thought, sitting upright again, "I'm sure he'll be a very thoughtful boy. Sincere, and kind and..tidy."
"No way! I bet he'll be a huge troublemaker. I could get behind that."
"Most certainly not — he'll be far too responsible for your manner of reckless endangerment."
"And he'll be too fun for your stuffiness!"
"Maybe," interrupted Garnet, "he'll be like Rose."
The three Gems each looked in different directions, caught in their own wistfulness. Raindrops started to strum against the roof of the finally-completed room, light and rhythmic.
"...I guess we'll find out tomorrow," said Pearl at last.
#
Greg pulled his van up to the same spot as yesterday, though he was sure to park entirely off of the beach.
He was still exhausted from the day before, and from the night that followed it. He'd spent the entire afternoon at Funland with his son — an extremely rare event for the two of them as of late — only leaving when it started to drizzle, and then the evening helping with the last of the unfinished packing. Greg personally couldn't remember the last time before yesterday that he had shut down the car wash for an entire day.
His night was spent staring at the roof of the van, and at the photos he'd hung on its walls out of the corner of his eye. And even when he finally fell asleep, he was awoken constantly by rainfall, heavier as time progressed, and by his own restlessness, a hole somewhere inside of him that he'd forgotten about until that very night.
The rain hadn't let up today, either. Greg made sure his jacket was completely zipped up before stepping out of the van.
His son followed his lead, and Steven opened the passenger door. He slid off of his seat, rain boots meeting a puddle just beyond the van door with a splash. His dad walked around the van and met him by the door, closing it and locking the van behind them.
Greg looked down at Steven. He wasn't used to seeing his son like this, so strangely unreadable.
"Well, here we are!
"We'll get the bags after you've met everyone.
"I'm sure they're really excited to finally meet you!
"...
"...You ready, kiddo?"
Greg held out a hand, and Steven took it. He nodded, offering a small smile.
"Yeah, Dad."
Together, they walked across the beach and to the temple, the massive statue's arms trying in vain to collect the rain, never letting go of each-other's hands. Steven looked up at the statue until he could no longer crane his neck back far enough to see the whole thing, and even Greg couldn't keep himself from stealing a glance, despite willing himself to only look forward.
They walked up the stairs to a tiny house, held in two of the statue's hands, their footsteps as silent as if they weren't really there at all. The long, thick arms of their jackets rubbing against one-another was the only sound the two made over the rainfall.
When they made it to the door, Greg took a steadying breath, and knocked twice. When there was no response, he squeezed his son's hand and opened the door himself.
The door creaked just s little as it opened. There was nobody, and nothing, there. The lack of lighting made the place seem abandoned.
Uncertain, Steven let go of his dad's hand, and took a step inside. Greg entered immediately behind him, standing as close as he could.
"H-hello?" Steven called out to the empty room.
As if in response to his voice, a bright light erupted from the center of the room. And in the center of that stood three silhouettes.
"We are the Crystal Gems," declared the largest shadow, the light's intensity fading enough that Steven could make out colors and shapes.
The tallest of what he could now tell were women, a lady in reds and blacks with her dense hair nearly a cube around her head, held out her hands, and a pair of gauntlets formed over them.
"Garnet!"
The shortest one, in purples and grays, everything from her hair to her torn pants just a little unkempt, pulled a whip from somewhere around her chest.
"Amethyst!"
And the one firmly between the two of them in height, all whites and blues with a burst of orange-pink hair, touched her hand to her forehead — to the gem on her forehead — and a spear twisted its way into her hands.
"Pearl!"
The Crystal Gems posed there with their weapons until the light faded entirely to a regular brightness.
"Welcome home, Steven," said Garnet.
Greg was squinting, looking to the side with just a bit of bashfulness, but Steven stared at them with stars in his eyes.
"That was so cool!"
Maybe things would be alright after all.
A/N: So, how long until this is no longer canon-compliant? I give it a week, maybe.