You Do It For Him

"Who were you talking to?" Pearl asked as Steven caught his breath.

Garnet kept her face emotionless, trying to act as if she didn't know every corner and curve of the face below, her nose buried in a book, her white dress sprawled across the sand. She forced herself to act as if her vision from so many years ago had simply never been...

Garnet warped back to the Temple, weary from the battle. Amethyst and Pearl retreated wordlessly to their rooms; Pearl's arm had been badly injured, and Amethyst's pride had fared even worse.

Garnet glanced up to where Ro-Steven slept soundly.

It had been six years since Rose had... left, and Steven had arrived, and Garnet still couldn't claim to entirely understand the small creature; she looked at him and saw nothing of the great general Rose Quartz, the famed Warrior of Love. She did see plenty of the child's... father, the humans called him?

Garnet unconsciously clasped her hands together, the gems in her palms meeting with a barely audible tink. Garnet knew that although it might be difficult, only she could understand Steven. She understood that he was the physical expression of Rose's love for Greg; that he was both of them, combined into a single beautiful whole. Of the surviving Crystal Gems, Garnet was the only one who knew exactly how precious that was. Amethyst was a child herself, more concerned with enjoying her newfound existence than dwelling on the past or taking care to plan for the future. Pearl, predictably, had taken it upon herself to protect the child, as overzealous and dubiously effective as always.

But the war was long over. The Corrupted remained dangerous, of course, but Garnet was confident that plenty of time lay ahead of the child; time to come to grips with his strangeness, and to sound out the extent of his abilities as a Gem and as a human.

Garnet climbed the stairs to where the boy slept. His gem glinted in the moonlight, and his resting face held a serene kindness that proved him to be as much Rose as he was human.

But then she opened her Eye, and saw.

Fires raged across the human city by the sea. The Temple lay in ruins, the wooden house in its arms smashed to pieces and strewn across the sand. A massive beast growled and leapt at an unseen foe behind the flames. Gems were scattered along the beach, sparkling in the light of the flames; one of red, two of blue, one of purple, one round and milky white, and two of green.

Rose's bubble gleamed amidst the chaos; a single beacon of hope. When Garnet looked within, however, she could only watch helplessly as Steven held hope in his hands – and watched it die.

In his arms he cradled a dark, broken, bloodstained body. Her black hair was matted with sand and sweat and blood, and in her hand, Rose's saber dangled limply. Steven took it from her hand and stabbed it into the beach.

"Don't go," he whispered, pleading.

" - It'll mess up my funky flow!" Steven declared.

Garnet looked down at the girl on the beach, whose unmoving face she had seen Steven stroke and clutch to his chest, whose eyes she had seen close for the last time.

"We won't watch," she assured him, and adjusted her glasses, trying to hide the tear that had fallen from Ruby's eye.