It was sometime in the morning, just after the day when the message was received. Rose had woken up just as yesterday, after having had another chat with Steven in her dreams. When she woke up, though, she felt something being held up in her lower abdomen, and wanted to close in her legs further.
The moments after the morning were to be as usual as human life could be to a nigh-immortal polymorphic sentient rock, but it seemed to be otherwise. When the other Crystal Gems returned, Amethyst immediately saw how funnily Rose walked and laughed. "Don't hold it, man! You gotta go to the bathroom and poop it out."
"What? The bathroom again? But this is different from..." Rose began to say, but found herself pushed by Amethyst to the bathroom door. Despite being much shorter than Rose, Amethyst could easily be considered stronger, and soon Rose was facing the door that was clearly too big for her.
"Oh, sorry." Rose backed away, and Amethyst punched a large chunk of the wall to the bathroom, also ripping the door off. In the door's former place there was now a gaping hole, easily high enough for Rose to walk through and sit on the white appliance.
"We'll get a new, bigger door soon... uh, no, you've gotta raise the thing. And raise your dress." Rose stood up again, raised "the thing" and lifted the layers of her dress until she felt pieces of meat - her own meat, nonetheless - and then sat down, still holding her dress and feeling the meat touch down on the appliance.
Suddenly, the something in her lower abdomen began forcing itself through the buttcheeks and out of her body completely. This lasted for a while, with more of the material being conjured and wanting to be out. When the process was done and there was nothing in that part of the body, she stood up, only to see what the obstacle inside her was: a brown, sausage-like object that smelled real bad. She couldn't bear to see it too much, so she pushed the button on the appliance, as she had done last time, and the water inside took the brown object down.
Given that the door was literally ripped from its hinges, Amethyst had been staring intensely at the whole process and was sure that Rose was forgetting something also very important. Rose herself also thought this; as she stood up, it seemed as if not everything had escaped her lower hole (assuming there was just one), and something had gotten stuck inside. Rose wondered which of the objects on the appliance could be used to clean this pesky thing, and Amethyst pointed at the roll of white paper-like material. "Yeah, you're also supposed to get the toilet paper."
Rose shrugged and picked up one sheet of the "toilet paper" from the roll, also lifting her dress so that she could reach where it needed to be clean. She wiped the place, and when she put it away, the feeling there seemed to be better. But now the paper had to be thrown away to the trash bin (which Rose thankfully found)... and her hands were dirty.
Amethyst decided to assist her friend in need slightly. She pulled the tap again, and water began flowing. She then put Rose's hands in the water, and Rose immediately pulled them away, since the water was ice cold. It turned out that the different orientations of the handle of the tap meant different temperatures of the water, and by fiddling around enough, Amethyst was able to get the water that was the right temperature for Rose.
"Alright, now brush your hands. Why am I even the one to teach you how to be clean? That's Pearl's job. Oh, whatever, I was here." Amethyst wondered, but just then Pearl appeared from the warp pad and immediately noticed the broken wall.
"What happened to the toilet door?" She asked, shrieking.
"Rose needed to human poop and couldn't get in, so I ripped off the whole door."
"You watched Rose doing this human... human... thing?" Pearl was completely horrified, and Rose even forgot what she was supposed to be doing. She decided to just turn off the tap and clean off all the water that had gotten on her with the nearby towel.
Pearl, though, grabbed Amethyst by the hand and pulled her outside the house, just so this stuff could be dealt with. Rose thus was left alone, in the house, hoping that there was something to do there.
By the end of the day, Rose concluded that she was disillusioned about humans, and didn't think that anything noteworthy had happened this day that hadn't happened last day.
When she first came to existence after her "unfortunate event", she had been under the preconception that being a human was amazing, and that each new day would bring exciting adventures, but now that she actually got into human life, it seemed to be rather boring, with no day different from the rest. It was as if humans did little more than just eat, drink and reverse the processes in the ugliest manner possible.
They apparently couldn't even go on the same missions as gems, since those missions required to put your life on the line. When Garnet shook it off at midday, saying that the other gems were just relaxing in their rooms, it was obvious that they didn't, because they went on the warp pad, not through the door of the Crystal Temple.
That evening, they even returned with a bubbled gem, and Amethyst had very obviously lied: "Oh, we were just playing around with this thing. You were literally missing out on the funniest throw that Garnet ever did! And then she said this joke, you should have heard of it!"
"You went on a mission." Rose decided to break the illusion.
However, even Pearl decided to join in on the masquerade. "Rose, there is nothing to worry about. You are safe here, because we are protecting humanity, and you will be fine until we figure out a way to bring Steven back."
Pearl. Rose's sole confidante, apparently the most heartbroken after her pregnancy and Steven's birth, now actually wanted Steven to come back.
For a while, Rose denied that there could be an actual bond between the two. Initially, she thought that from a logistical standpoint, Steven was easier to take care of. During the thousands of years on Earth, she had noted that larger humans (and larger animals in general) needed to eat and drink more, and from the bedside photos, Steven was basically a midget, even shorter than Amethyst. (Though, it was kind of hard to judge since Amethyst had also grown considerably during the time, due to reasons yet unknown to Rose.)
But the more Rose thought about it, the more it seemed likely. For the longest time, Pearl was surrounded by gems that were either stronger, taller or more noble than herself, and as a servant class gem, was simply taught to look up to them. Rose herself, as one of the highest-ranked nobles of the Homeworld society and, later on, the leader of the Crystal Gems, was the perfect "ultimate person to look up to". And even though, over time, she had lost her status, she still had that constant in her life: she had at least one gem to trust all her secrets to.
Steven, though, apparently changed everything. Since the Gems now had to prove themselves to be worthy guardians to his father, they began taking care of Steven, and sometimes, they would become rather involved in the process. Each of them had adopted a different attitude towards him: Amethyst took a "big sister" approach to the raising, Garnet watched from the sidelines, only mentoring Steven sometimes and taking care of the other two...
And Pearl must have been like a mother to Steven.
Essentially, Rose Quartz had been replaced: sometimes with Steven, sometimes with Garnet and sometimes even with the very person who had grieved her loss. As she lay in bed that night, still unable to sleep after the emotional turmoil that she had witnessed, she briefly thought that there was no place for her in the Crystal Gems anymore.
She began loudly sobbing.
It went on for a while, with tears dropping down from her face and onto the bed. Eventually, though, it got wet, and Rose had to turn her head. That, though, was the moment when she came across the portrait of herself once again. As she looked at it more carefully, the sobbing stopped, just as quickly as it had started.
But... Rose began thinking, now that her mind was a bit clearer than just "the Gems hate me now".
Pearl still grieved her. She still was in that moment at the floating platform, with Steven, recounting a memory with Rose when she first very briefly came into consciousness. Rose wasn't forgotten; far from it. The giant picture reminded her that she still had a certain place in the Crystal Gems' hearts, and it was just a matter of reclaiming some niches where she had been replaced, so that she would truly be accepted again.
Right now, Rose decided as she noticed Pearl, Amethyst and Garnet doing something with some device in the beach.
At the moment, Pearl was holding a robotic device with handles and an antenna, while Amethyst was pinning down one of the lime spheres, known as "Plug Robonoids", making sure that she didn't crush it. As much as she had loved smashing them and tasting the goo (much to Pearl's horror), this was a mission that needed to be done. Garnet, in the meantime, was a simple bystander.
"Robonoid ready?" Garnet asked, knowing for certain with Future Vision that she would not have a bigger role than this.
"Ready!" Amethyst practically shouted.
"Discharge device ready." Pearl said, as if reading from the device itself. "Let's see, Steven is not even remotely here to bother us and likewise, Rose is fast a..." She looked up and saw the familiar pink silhouette. "...sleep! Rose! What do you think you're doing here?"
"Bonding together with the other Crystal Gems?" Rose said, since she couldn't think of anything better.
"Rose, you do realize that you're a human. You could die here, and then we would have neither you nor Steven around!" Holding the device with one hand, Pearl put another one on her side.
"Yo, Steven's been out in the night many times and hasn't died yet! Rose will be fine. Now stop fussing and start... sciencing!" Amethyst glared back at Pearl, making both Rose and Garnet look across the entire gathering.
"Sciencing?" Pearl narrowed her eyes at the non word as she put her other hand back on the device.
"Science it up, man. You're sciencing right now!" It showed that Amethyst had a particular liking to human culture and especially Internet videos. She was a gem raised on the Earth, after all.
"Please go on with the experiment." Rose pointed to Pearl's device. Surely enough, the white hands finally activated it by pushing the big red button, as was the case in a stereotypical science montage. The device activated, and on its top, a small bubble popped, emitting a blast that knocked all four Crystal Gems backwards. The blast went through Beach City, shutting its lights off block by block, until the entire city was shrouded in darkness.
However, gem technology seemed to work entirely differently. This was evidenced by the fact that the robonoid retracted its legs and started walking, stepping over each of the Gems separately.
"Well, that's that." Garnet supposed as she stood up.
"The best weapon ever!" Amethyst stood up and shook the dirt off her clothes. "Destroys what it should protect. But only that!"
As Pearl got up, she took the device and murmured some technobabble, likely because she was going to fix the device.
"Alright, I should go to sleep. In a human bed. Because I have a human body." Rose showed that she was barely able to string sentences together as she got up and walked across the beach. Though, before she could even make it halfway to the house, she fell over and put her hands on the sand, as if she had fallen asleep there.
"I will have to carry you, then." Garnet walked over to where Rose was, picked her up and carried her to the human bed.
Rose awoke to furious knocking on the door and a male voice which sounded oddly familiar, but never this stern. "Young Universe? The power is out and I need to talk to your... sisters!"
Steven has sisters? But I never became pregnant again, mainly because two consciousnesses in one gem is more than enough? Rose stumbled out of bed and gathered herself. While she was in this body, she tended to fall over... a lot, and each of the falls made her lose her confidence once again. In fact, being a restless soul staying inside another human almost seemed to be the preferable fate.
But the call from the man was to be answered, and as such Rose had to stand up. She got down the stairs and looked up to see one of those Dewey kids. There were at least several Deweys throughout the centuries, and weirdly enough, most of them had gotten to be the mayors of Beach City at one point or another. This Dewey kid was wearing a suit, so Rose immediately correctly assumed that he was the mayor.
However, Mayor Dewey was thinking about something entirely different, and became confused when he saw a body and face he thought he would never see again. "Rose... Quartz? Aren't you supposed to be dead at childbirth? Scratch that, this is even weirder than the other thing. You are coming with me." Dewey grabbed Rose's hand and wanted to pull her out of the house, but once again was confronted with the fact that the doors everywhere were too small for an eight-foot amazonian goddess.
"Nngh!" Dewey grunted as he continued to try and pull Rose through the door, rather unsuccessfully. "I need... to see... what all of this... is about!" The wood around the door began to crack.
"It's okay; if it happens more times, I will consider getting myself a smaller-" Rose's sentence was cut off as the wood finally snapped, breaking another door. Dewey and Rose were sent flying backwards onto the staircase, and once more onto the beach floor. Garnet, Amethyst and Pearl had appeared on the warp pad once again, and only caught a glimpse of pink as they looked at the newly formed hole where the front door used to be.
Before Rose could even try to stand up again, Dewey took her hand again and began dragging her through the sand. This, however, was painfully slow, and therefore he stopped so that Rose could stand up and run together with the mayor to wherever he was taking her. The three other Gems could only watch as their former leader and the city's leader got away, and because Lion... Leo wasn't at their disposal, they couldn't hope to save Rose from the man in time.
As she passed through Beach City, Rose could only briefly admire how it had changed between Steven's birth and the present day. The first shop across from the Temple, Big Donut, was completely unfamiliar to her, while some others kept the buildings, but changed the names. There wasn't much time to read the names; therefore, Rose couldn't pinpoint where the car wash was, no matter how much she wanted to see it.
One of the passers-by, though, noticed the two people running through the city. His blond hair was bound together in bundles which somewhat resembled French fries, and he was holding a portable electronic communications device not unlike Steven's, taking pictures with it, each of which resulted in a loud noise and a flash of light. He also followed Dewey and Rose during their run.
The three finally stopped at what Rose knew was the City Council. However, she was facing the problem with the doors once again, and Dewey ran inside, the stranger following him. Eventually, Dewey made it back outside and took Rose to behind the building, where a window was wide open, so Rose could easily float up and climb in.
The stranger finally decided to greet himself. "So, Mrs. Universe. Nice to meet you. I'm Ronaldo, and you might know me from my blog, Keep Beach City Weird."
"Your... blog?" Great. So now, the language is also different. Rose sighed and continued the conversation with Ronaldo.
Author's idiotisms: "Rose did it twice a day." - that deviantART comic by neodusk
Yeah... no. As far as actually doing human stuff like that goes, Rose and Pearl are literally on the same tier. It's just that this fic's Rose is in a human's body, and therefore has all the advantages (and disadvantages) of a human being.
Also, two YouTube references in one chapter. I feel disgusted with myself.