Garnet was bruised, could feel it up and down her entire body, but she couldn’t stop. She moved mechanically through the now-deserted battlefield, scanning the floor as she went. Already she'd sent back a couple of gems that had retreated into their gems, but more often than not her search only revealed death - gem shards in numbers too great to count, numbers Garnet refused to count. It was crucial for the future of this planet that Garnet collected as many as she could, allies or foes, least they'd fall into the wrong hands. It was her duty to do this, she was able and moving, and that automatically had made it her duty.
She paused at the clear remains of a topaz, a thousand tiny pieces next to a long double handed blade, and went carefully to her knees. Garnet owed it to fallen friends too. She'd remembered Topaz from that very morning, the rough laugh Topaz had given her when Garnet had scolded her for being too loud. Garnet was as careful as she could be, picking each shard with the reverence the gem, another friend, was owed. She did not allow herself to weep, she could not - not here, and bubbled the collected topaz carefully away.
“Garnet.”
The relief Garnet felt at that voice was immediate, easing some of the tension Garnet had held in her shoulders since the battle had ended. She hadn’t dared to spare a thought about their leaders fate, not since they were all separated. Hope was a fickle thing in war, and just because someone was important did not guarantee anything about survival.
Garnet looked Rose over quickly, checking Rose over for injuries but Rose looked as hardy as she always did. Even with rips and stains in her dress and dirt in her hair, she still held herself like the gem so many had called out for when they’d engaged the Homeworld camp. She looked tired though, eyes sunken in her face as she nodded at Garnet, gaze lingering on her, like she was checking Garnet over as well.
“Thats the last of them.” Rose said, voice strained and Garnet wondered suddenly who else had died, “Lets go back.”
Garnet nodded again, and fell into step behind her, trying to restrain herself from asking who. She hadn’t seen Onyx since the battle started, nor Sodalite, but there was a worst possibility of who the fallen was, skirting on the edges of her thoughts. Rose did not have her loyal shadow behind her. Pearl had accepted Garnet as soon as Rose had introduced them, the first one to treat Garnet like a entity in her own right. The fact she wasn’t at Rose’s side was either a sign that she’d retreated into her gem… or had been finally shattered.
Garnet’s worry sunk like dread in her chest.
She didn't dare use future vision. Because one way or the other, she would find out if Pearl had been destroyed. Either Rose would show her pearl shards, or she wouldn’t, future vision wouldn't change that. If it had happened, Garnet was already too late. Future vision would have done nothing but making her live the moment twice, and Garnet, selfishly, could not tolerate that.
Their camp was quiet, gems nodding at them grimly as they passed, a couple of gems regenerating in shaking flashes. They’d won, but it had been a narrow margin, and Garnet saw a lot less of her comrades then there had been that morning. They'd suffered a higher loss than anyone had been expecting, Homeworld Gems were advancing so quickly the Crystal Gems's numbers started to mean less and less as the war wore ever on.
There was a flicker of something, right pass the tree line, and Garnet stopped dead in her tracks. Head turned slightly.
Rose paused, looking behind her, eyebrows creasing.
“Trouble?” Rose asked low, careful not to let the others around them know.
No, Garnet dismissed inwardly, it didn’t feel like a lurking danger. But that didn’t mean Garnet could just walk past it all together. Worry about Pearl or not, she had a job.
“Go ahead.” She told Rose, “I’ll see you later.”
Thankfully Rose had long passed the point of being of offended by Garnet’s abruptness. She merely slopped her head in a silent acknowledgement and kept moving through the camp. They would find each other later, likely in the Command Hub, and there Garnet would learn about the deaths of the day. But right now, Rose's safety was Garnet's duty.
With the attention Rose pulled as she walked through the camp, it was easy for Garnet to blend into the fringe of the camp. No other gem interrupted her, either seeing her and giving her that odd wide berth some gave her due to her being a fusion, or merely to caught up in the relief that Rose was back, that Rose was alive, that bled through the camp. Garnet eyed the forest carefully, before moving again.
There was a shadow moving deeper in and Garnet didn’t hesitate in moving in, hands out and ready to summon her gauntlets at the slightest of signs of attack.
But when she moved into a clearing, Garnet had to stifle her small noise of shock.
It was Pearl. Pearl who was still upright, and staggering, moving as if drunk, smeared with dirt from head to toe- she'd been dragged at some point through it- and a swelling black eye warping her face. She moved from tree to tree, hand on her gem, frowning and muttering something to herself, hands wild around her.
And she was alive, wholly and utterly alive.
“Pearl.” Garnet breathed, the rest of the tension easing from her, she felt so relieved she felt briefly, entirely sick.
It a whirl, Pearl had spun into position, sword raised in a perfect defensive position. Then she blinked, eyes looking at Garnet unseeing for a moment, before lowered her bade, and sighed - the sort of full body sigh of the exhausted- and half leant half fell against the nearest tree.
“Oh Garnet.” Pearl said, breathing her name like she was likewise as relieved to see her as Garnet was to see her, she had her head tucked down, “I… I didn’t know you were there.. I was just… just…”
She didn’t look like she was crying, Pearl’s face was dry. But as Garnet moved towards her, slow and gentle, it looked like she might have been at some point. There were tear tracks down her face, traced through the grime. There was a wild edge about her too, like something unstable that Garnet had seen a couple of times before Pearl had gone into her gem.
“How badly are you hurt?” Garnet asked, careful.
Because she was here if Pearl needed to go back into her gem to regenerate, it would have been a privilege to carry her first friend, outside of Rose, back to camp. However Pearl just looked down at herself, as if noticing the grim for the first time and then laughed, a high horrible sound.
“Oh, I’m fine, its just wear and tear.” Pearl flicked her hands down at herself, and sure enough Garnet could only see a couple of scratches and ugly yellow-black bruises, the worst being that black eye that warped the right side of Pearl’s face, “I’m fine, really.”
There was still something off about her, something not right. Garnet slid carefully forward through the distance between them until she was a breath in front of Pearl. It was instinct, kicking deep within her that made Garnet reached forward to check Pearl over, pausing only at the last second as Pearl flinched up. Pearl stared at her with wide eyes as Garnet's hands stopped just inches from her gem. Right, Garnet remembered fighting the urge to blush at herself, Garnet had to remember she had to ask.
“May I?” She asked lowly.
Pearl’s eyes flickered across her as if surprised, and Garnet knew some Gems thought this was personal, too intimate, but Pearl didn’t hesitate in giving her an almost shy nod. Garnet took her chin in her hands, and tilted her head down, gently tucking a couple of strands of Pearl’s hair away from her Gem so she could get a good look at it. She tilted Pearl’s head left and right, watching the dappled sunlight reflect of the pearl. Garnet's worry eased seeing it was still utterly flawless.
No cracks, and only the same sort of dulled shade every gem fighting was experiencing but far from a lingering corruption.
Garnet titled Pearl’s head back up, and Pearl let her move her so easily, so trustingly, Garnet felt something soften impossibly more at her. Pearl looked at her expectantly, for the results.
“Your gem is fine.” She said, deliberately putting in an effort to make her words sound softer, Rose had told her once she was too harsh with her words, and she moved her thumb up to the very edges of Pearl’s black eye, “That however…”
Garnet's lips tightened at the way the black eye warped Pearl's delicate face, already so swollen, when at best it could have only been given to her a couple of hours ago.
“Will heal.” Pearl said, dismissively.
Pearl's eyes were to the side, flickering over the trees, her eyebrows frowned, giving Garnet the impression that if Garnet still didn't have Pearl's face in her hands, she'd be back to doing her wobbling pace. There was more to this.
“Pearl.” Garnet said again, patiently waiting for Pearl’s eyes to come back to her, widening a little at the fact that Garnet still held her head in her hands, gems warm against Pearl’s cool face, “What is it.”
Like she'd pulled a switch, Pearl’s expression closed off, and she pulled her hands up to pull Garnet’s hands gently away from her face.
“Its nothing. I’m fine.” Pearl said, and then continued without a pause, “No I am, I’m fine.”
“That’s why you are out here, pacing back and forth, away from everyone else.” Garnet commented drily, “These woods still aren’t safe yet. We post sentries for a reason.”
Pearl tensed and whirled on her, hands clenched.
“I know, I was the one who organised those rosters.” Pearl snapped, sudden and hot.
Garnet waited, and Pearl’s expression immediately wilted, her hand coming up to her gem again, curling around it as if to pull it from her head.
“I’m sorry.” Pearl sighed suddenly, shoulders curling inward and stopping in her tracks, “I’m just… tired of being so weak.”
Weak was not the word Garnet would have used to describe Pearl. Reckless and self-sacrificing might have been closer to the fact, but weak was not. Mostly using strategy and her newly acquired swordsmanship, Garnet had seen Pearl take down Gems ten times her size.
“No you are not.” Garnet told her bluntly, “You are one of the best fighters on this side of the war.”
The flattery seemed to wash right off Pearl, like Garnet has misinterpreted what Pearl had meant. Pearl didn’t blush or fluster as she once did, but something about her grew graver and softer at the same time. Pearl offered her a weak smile, fluttering at the edges, and moved over and reached for Garnet like she’d never done before, hand resting softly on Garnet’s forearm like she was bracing herself.
“Its not the battles, its the…” Pearl shut her eyes, shaking, suddenly derailing, “I can’t do this, I’m not strong enough, I’m not, and I’m going to-“
She was crying, shivering and twitching, holding her mouth shut with a hand as if shamed the words had ever tried come out. Garnet wrapped her arms around Pearl without a thought, pulling her tight to her tightly and Pearl all but dropped in her arms, stifled sobs broken into Garnet’s shoulder.
“I… I’ve run the figures…” Pearl sobbed into Garnet, “We won this battle but we can’t win the war, there is no way we can win. We are all going to…”
Lose. Die.
Garnet felt her stomach drop, she’d been thinking the same thoughts recently, been scouring the future when she was brave enough, and every road lead to the same place. Destruction. Failure. Loss. Ruby and Sapphire had spilt when they’d seen it, but they came together again in acceptance of it, to live and die together, and it wore Garnet down in every battle, donned like a metal cloak over her shoulders.
But Garnet had hoped she had been the only one harbouring that thought, she hadn’t burdened Rose with it, not when every future of that conversation hadn’t changed the outcome and only made Rose sadder. Garnet had never even thought that Pearl would figure it out. In hindsight that had been foolish of her. Garnet had not taken to account how much Pearl had stepped forward, how much she’d taken over the war strategies after Jade had fallen. Pearl knew every gem in their ranks, heard every intelligence about the enemy, and she was clever.
Of course she’d figured it out. Garnet rubbed Pearl’s back as she cried, holding her tightly through her shivers.
“I know.” Garnet confided low and careful.
Pearl’s pulled back enough to look up at her, hopelessness reflected in every inch of her face. She knew the value of Garnet’s words when it came to the future, and had never taken a single thing Garnet had said lightly.
It twisted in her chest, Garnet couldn’t help herself, indulged in herself in touching Pearl’s face again, feeling someone close to her, easing the fear reverberating inside of her. But she held more in her than fear.
“We will hold out as long as we can.” Garnet told her, firm, “Stay at each others backs, and when we go, we go together.”
Pearl’s lip trembled, but in Garnet’s arms she came round, expression slowly transforming into something stronger, eyes brighter, more dedicated.
“Yes, true to the end.” She said, catching on Garnet’s idea with zeal.
Garnet held her a moment longer, looking into her eyes, not wanting Pearl to gloss over this with her dramatics, because she hadn’t understood what Garnet had said. Pearl often got the idea of a phrase, but not the detail.
“That means you have to retain your form in battle, look after yourself until the end.” Garnet told her, “then together…”
It hit home for Pearl then, Garnet saw her face flush through stunned awe, shifting into something more sombre, more serious. Garnet had meant dying beside her, personally, not their army, and Pearl had just got that. Garnet intended to die next to friends, and there was no other gem but Pearl and Rose that Garnet would have preferred to die beside.
Slowly Pearl looked down, free hand reaching to take Garnet’s other hand in hers, lacing their fingers together slowly. A gesture Garnet had seen Rose do once to Pearl, and one that brought the lightest of blue blushes across Pearl’s face as she looked down at their hands for a long moment.
Pearl held her hand as tightly as Garnet held hers.
“I understand.” Pearl told her, softly, finally looking up. She smiled, the smallest saddest smile Garnet had ever seen Pearl give, “Together.”
It was warmth in her soul, a balm against the fear quaking inside of her and Garnet moved forward to lightly kiss Pearl’s gem. It was an instinct and Garnet was never going to fight that, not when she had so few days left, she brushed her lips across the smooth surface of Pearl’s gem, feeling it warm and alive under her lips, and watched the flush grow stronger on Pearl’s face.
Pearl watched her, eyes hot, and Garnet didn’t get the chance to pull entirely back, before Pearl was up on her toes, hand moving from Garnet’s arm to her jaw, brushing against her face in the lightest of caresses for a moment. Then with Pearl’s eyes roving nervously across her face, Pearl leant in, ghosting a shivering kiss on Garnet’s lips.
She moved back a bare inch after gifting the kiss to Garnet, eyes wide like she couldn’t believe she’d just done that.
“I…” Pearl started, clearly starting to rethink it.
Garnet didn’t let her, twisting an arm around Pearl’s waist and keeping her close, her entire body singing with a feeling Garnet knew only through Sapphire and Ruby, and rubbed a thumb over Pearl’s hip.
“There’s no one I rather be with till the end.” Garnet told her, seriously.
Pearl cupped Garnet’s face, looking at her like she was a wonder.
“Nor I.” Pearl breathed.
They moved together, and met in the middle, trading kisses, hands and arms clutching and holding the other, pushing their fear to the back of their minds, living in the moment before all else.
Unless something happened that Garnet couldn’t foresee, something Pearl didn’t predict, they were going to go into battle and die together. But it was more than alright, Garnet thought, with Pearl’s hands in her hair, and Garnet’s arms tight around her, it would be a honour.