Still don't own. This is redundant.
It was morning two weeks later, and even after having his cheeseburger backpack (and it was the same one, he checked) delivered to him, Steven felt like he was missing something.
It was too early to meet Connie for the first time, and he'd checked the beach every day either way. The teacups was after that, so it wasn't that either.
Maybe it was something mundane. Something like getting rid of the old, boring backpack that he'd had to use. He'd found a place for that inside his cheeseburger backpack though, so it wasn't like he'd forgotten about it.
Maybe he'd get his answer when the Gems were back. Seriously, why were they taking so long? He knew that they didn't really need sleep or food to live, but it still made him feel better when they stayed at home for the night. Even though he knew they'd handled everything fine until the handship came, their past selves seemed determined to act differently than last time, and he was afraid that they'd find a gem mutant or something equally timeline-changing while they were away.
He was about to give up and look around the beach for Connie again (it wasn't paranoia, she definitely could be there at any time) when the warp pad glowed and Garnet stood there, posed with a hand on her hip and one in her hair.
He wondered how she'd gotten in that position. Maybe Ruby and Sapphire were flirting in her head?
He nodded. That had to be it.
Then he noticed the wrapped up scroll in her hand. "Hey Garnet, what's that?" he asked, pointing it out.
She unraveled it, revealing some vaguely familiar markings. "I need to burn it," she said.
"But what is it?" A heavy silence ensued. "Garnet, what aren't you telling me?"
The silence continued, and Steven found himself staring at the markings once more. There was something about them that just seemed-
n-ee- - fhrrrrr-
"It's... A gem?"
"Dunno," Garnet said. Steven clutched at the tight feeling in his chest, and she manoeuvred him to the bench, sitting down alongside him. "Your mother was able to hear the thoughts of broken gems, sometimes," she told him after another silence. He knew that Ruby and Sapphire was arguing about this, so he didn't push. "I think you're hearing them now."
The scroll was emitting what seemed to be static noises, but every now and then he could almost make out a word.
paaaiin
He whimpered, and Garnet drew him into a hug.
"Steven, I-I know how it feels to see something I hate, and not be able to change it." The unsureness in her voice made Steven stare at her. "I can see the future, possible paths that we may or may not take. I have the map, and I steer the ship, but..." She sighed, resting her head in her hands. "A ship is heavy, and no matter how much you turn the wheel, sometimes you can't go where you want. Sometimes the map is wrong, a landslide closed off a river and the current changed when you weren't looking. Sometimes, no matter what you want to happen, something else will make it impossible."
They sat together for a good while, Steven listening to the broken voice of the shattered gem and Garnet comforting him silently.
After what felt like hours, he rubbed his eyes and the last of his tears came off on his arm. Garnet did the same behind her visor, and he pretended not to notice.
"...Why do you need to burn it?" he asked once he felt like he could talk again. "I-isn't there some way to fix gems like this?"
Garnet hummed. "There was. Your mother could heal a broken gem, and she had a fountain that could do the same."
"Then if we take her to the fountain, we could make her better!"
How Steven didn't remember this tortured gem, he didn't know, but he wasn't about to fail her again. The desperation in his voice was clear.
"Can't," Garnet's single-worded answer shattered his hopes. "This gem is too far gone. I can release her from her prison and bubble her, but the fountain was never potent enough to fix a gem that couldn't even form. With this kind of damage, even Rose Quartz might have failed."
Steven weighed his options. He didn't want to reveal any more of his secret abilities without making a good excuse as to how he'd learned about them, but he needed to save this gem.
Lapis.
That wasn't the broken gem talking, and Steven paused. Lapis was in the mirror right now, wasn't she? Why would they want him to think about her? She wasn't relevent right now. He couldn't save her until Pearl gave the mirror to him, and he couldn't use her to save the new gem...
But he could use something related.
"Garnet, I have healing spit," he confessed, thinking fast. "I burned my hand on the sand yesterday, and when I put it in my mouth it healed!" That had actually happened, so it wasn't something Garnet could easily question.
Garnet shook her head. "Right now, the gem fragments are stuck to the paper, so you can't heal it. If we burn her off the paper, she could take refuge in organic matter, and that includes you if you get too close. It's too dangerous."
"But what if we didn't burn her off? What if we soaked her off instead? We can soak the ink off the paper, and then we could mix in my healing spit and it could heal her!"
"And if not?"
"Then we could... Boil her out, or leave the water in the sun to disappear, and wait for my healing power to get stronger?"
"That could work..."
After a few more minutes of brainstorming (and hiding the scroll from Amethyst; they hadn't been quite ready to get it wet at that point), the pair had decided to take a few gallons of water to Garnet's room; enough to account for evaporation, but not enough to turn the lava into rock if they spilled it. They also took a cooking bowl for the actual soaking so that Steven's spit wasn't too dilute, and a cup so that they didn't have to tip the entire multiple-gallon container each time they needed to refill the bowl.
The soaking went well, and in a couple of minutes, they picked out the scroll itself, washed the few clinging fragments into the bowl, and discarded the paper. The shimmering mass of green and purple made Garnet cringe, until Steven tilted his head and the colors sparkled into each other. When he told her, she visibly relaxed.
After that, Garnet spent twenty minutes hovering the bowl over the lava. Steven would have helped, but he couldn't spend more than a minute at a time close enough, and lava still gave him the creeps after Bismuth.
"I... Guess it's ready then," Steven said once they'd both stared at the gem-encrusted water. They were both very nervous about this. For Steven, it meant that the whole future would change, and after his earlier conversation with Garnet, he wasn't sure that he was ready for that.
As for Garnet, who knew? Maybe this was one of the landslides she'd talked about, leading the future onto a different path. That made Steven more nervous than ever.
Finally, Steven willed up his courage and spat into the bowl.
Nothing happened at first, but as he added more spit, the fragments started to pool into the centre of the bowl, slowly fusing into larger chunks. Whenever they stopped, Garnet shook the bowl to help them along, and soon they'd reverse-tumbled a rectangular gem that shimmered between green and purple as the light caught it.
"The gem will need time to rebuild her form," Garnet told him. "Ame-"
Before she could finish her sentence, a purple light spread along the walls as the gem levitated out of the bowl, before exploding into a humanoid mass of white, purple and green - the same kind of mannequin that he'd seen when other gems remormed.
Then the form glitched visibly, collapsed in on itself and transformed into a shapeless blot of light. Garnet poofed it before it could form.
"Did you see that?" Steven asked after a moment of quiet. Garnet nodded.
"It was a risk," she replied. "A risk that I've taken too many times today. Do you regret it?"
He shook his head, sniffing. "I think it hurt more when it was shattered. I'm glad I could at least do something, even if it didn't work completely."
She smiled in return, and sat down against one of the walls. Steven joined her without hesitation. "I'm proud of you, Steven," she said, squeezing his shoulder. "You handled this like a true Crystal Gem."
"I guess sometimes you really can't change things," Steven echoed, and she gave a closed-mouthed chuckle.
"I think you proved me wrong in that," she beamed. "I had no idea how I could save her when I warped back. I was prepared to end a tortured gem's suffering, but you did so much better! Now she's safe and sound in a bubble, and you're the one who changed that. Like I said, I'm proud of you."
Steven could only smile.
I figured it was about time to start living up to the show on which this fanfic was based, so here is your overdue helping of feels.
You're welcome.
If you think about it, the first episodes have just as much horrific and creepy as the later ones, it's just that Steven, and by extension we, didn't think about it. My headcanon is that canon!Garnet burned Steven's phone because she didn't want him remembering that he incinerated the painting's gem and feeling bad about it when he learned more about the gems.
I went through many different ideas for this chapter. Steven could have stolen the painting and tried to heal it directly, or tried to burn it and then heal it, or tried to soak it and then heal it, or tried to take it to his mother's fountain; but eventually I went the route that happened to give us some bonding between Steven and Garnet.
And for more horrific/creepy, what are the gem shards in Frybo? I'm still torn on whether they used to be fully-fledged gems, or if they were just gem-shaped tools that weren't as sentient. Maybe I'll get a transcript of Pearl's speech to see if that answers it.
Next time, Frybo. Or not, maybe I'll just gloss over that instead. Cat Fingers too. Hmm.
And a small edit: No, the last two chapters haven't included their namesakes. Remember that this all happened around two years earlier from Steven's perspective, and he's the one that initiated those parts. He's bound to forget most of it.
