Work Text:
Original tumblr post can be found here
Lucky for Garnet, the thick padded blanket that covered the floor softened most of the blow as she dove forward, face first, stiff as a board. She was going to teach Steven the finer points of being relaxed even if it killed her, and literally falling asleep seemed to be the logical first step. As she snored dramatically, muffled by the wadded fabric, she could hear Pearl speak quietly. “That’s… pretty convincing.”
‘Of course it is,’ she thought to herself. ‘Because I’m ALWAYS relaxed.’
“Not gonna lie… that does look pretty comfy,” Steven mumbled after a rather loud yawn. “Maybe I sssssssshff – maybe I sshfhould just for-get ah…about Lap… Lapis ’n… ’n go backt’sl…sleepffth…”
“That’s a good idea, Steven,” Pearl encouraged, noting that his words were slurring together in his state of fatigue. “You’ll want to be fresh when we continue the search tomorrow.”
“Yeh… y-YEAH! Oh-o… okaaaayyy… bluuuh,” he was fading fast. Approximately three seconds later, the upper loft was filled with audible snores from the young human boy.
Upon eventually making sure that he was completely asleep and not in fact dead, Pearl sighed contentedly and relaxed into a recumbent sitting position, using the thick, cubic television behind her to help prop herself up. She was certain that Amethyst must’ve been made aware of her previous dream-turned-nightmare… somehow. Perhaps she knew something Pearl didn’t – that thought in and of itself was beyond frustrating to her. After having almost been made to explain it to Steven, she was rather determined not to have to go back to sleep, no matter what it took. Garnet’s original statement shortly after she’d entered the house just moments before had proven to be correct. This was a weird party.
“Meh. G’night, Pearl,” Amethyst was curled up in the corner of the bedspread, decidedly content with the prospect of continuing her nap now that Garnet had joined their little pow-wow. She then began snoring in a loud and totally insincere manner, but her noises eventually slowed to a much steadier, quiet type of useless breathing after about an hour or so. It felt strange to Pearl, to be towering over the sleeping forms of her fellow Gems as she sat awake, all by her lonesome.
“Well. Perhaps I’ll just rest my eyes for… for just a moment…” she folded her arms as her lids fluttered closed, suddenly finding them to be insufferably heavy for no real reason. She let out a breathy sigh, and in an instant, the world around her went black.
The impact of Pearl suddenly toppling over and landing hard against the wooden flooring jolted her out of her sleep, and with a boorish grunt she forced her eyes open to survey her surroundings. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been out – the sky was blending into a delicate mixture of mauve and magenta where it had previously been pitch-black – and she gingerly rubbed the side of her head where she’d been struck, grumpy about having been forced awake by the laws of gravity. She must have been sleepier than she had previously anticipated.
A low rumble caused her to prick up her ears, and to her great surprise, she found herself staring across the room, directly into Garnet’s visor. The dark-skinned Gem seemed to be fully awake now, propping her head upright using the palm of her left hand to look at her.
At first, Pearl wondered if she’d been laughing at Pearl’s unusual antics, but Garnet quickly raised an index finger to her lips before gesturing to the mop of silvery-white hair between them. In the center of the blanket, Steven and Amethyst had somehow ended up piled on top of each other, his soft pink face buried deep into her luscious locks. Pearl clapped a hand over her mouth as an undignified snort threatened to escape; thankfully she was able to silence most of it before she woke up the entire household. It was rare to see moments as adorable as these, so in the end she was rather thankful that she’d been allowed to indulge.
Garnet then made a rather unexpected gesture with her free hand – she tapped the floor twice, as if to say ‘come here.’
Pearl immediately quirked her head to the side, wondering what on Earth Garnet could possibly want with her, especially at this hour. Still, it was an order, so she didn’t have time to think twice. She sprung up and stepped over her fellow Gems gracefully, then came to a halt at the edge of the blanket, staring at Garnet expectantly. When she pointed down once more, Pearl found the floor in an instant, sitting in an elegant cross-legged position and grinning brightly. Garnet rolled her eyes behind her visor, then patted the space directly ahead of her once more. ‘Come here.’
Pearl blinked once, then twice more. She slowly got to knees, then extended herself forward, laying down in a direct parallel line to her companion, facing her, barely a few inches apart, catching her clueless reflection in the inscrutable visor all the while.
“Di… did I do something wrong?” she inquired in a low tone, and Garnet gave a quick shake of her head.
“No. I just thought you could use some company.”
“O-Oh,” Pearl flicked her eyes to the side, then up to where Steven’s Star Battlers poster had been plastered to the wall. She wasn’t sure where to look, arcing her gaze all across the ceiling in a voluntarily slow manner. She had never really been this close to Garnet for such an extended period of time before, and she could feel the other Gem’s gaze boring into her steadily, patiently waiting for her to finish. Eventually, she completed her inspection, having been forced to perform a quick sweep of Garnet’s physical form in order for her gaze to have traveled in a perfect circle. She certainly was easy on the eyes, especially in the filtered moonlight – ‘wait, where did that come from?’ – and when she finally caught her reflection in Garnet’s visor once more, she was keenly aware of how brilliantly blue her face seemed to look in its reflection.
“Er,” she paused, completely at a loss for what to say. “Did you… have any luck in your search?”
“Nope,” Garnet shrugged as she popped the ‘p’ carelessly, and Pearl’s face fell. Now, she really had no idea where to take it from here. Had things always been so… awkward between them? All business and no pleasure?
As if she were sensing exactly what was on Pearl’s mind, Garnet made her move. “Thanks for offering to come with me, before,” her thumb curled around the end of Pearl’s chin, her index finger cupping the underside, and in that moment the slender Gem would swear that she saw her entire life flash before her eyes in a matter of seconds. “It means a lot to know you’d put yourself at risk for us. For the team.”
“A-Ah! I-I-I – uh th-that is – I… i-it’s no-no…” Pearl stammered violently, sincerely unable to form a coherent sentence at this point. Her voice promptly died in her throat as her head bowed forward, at the direction of Garnet’s fingers, and she felt a pair of soft, warm lips pressed directly into the center of her gem. A bolt of heat surged through Pearl and her first instinct was to push away, gasping loudly at this sudden intimate contact.
“G-Garnet…!”
A trace of a smile played at the corner of her lips, her expression unreadable otherwise. “Sorry. I must’ve misunderstood.”
Pearl devolved into a series of incoherent noises, trying to do her best to keep her tone as low as possible to avoid waking her fellow Gems. “No, it’s not…! I … I just – Steven and Amethyst are right there!” she finally hissed, a note of panic evident in her voice.
“Then I’ll be brief.” The low British lilt sent a tingle up Pearl’s spine, promptly replaced by the morbidly intense heat that surged through her as she felt Garnet’s lips brush against her gem once again.
‘Gah, what on Earth is she doing…! Doesn’t she know that – oh!’ Pearl arched her back as she felt a particularly powerful buzz ripple through her, and Garnet’s free arm looped itself loosely over her torso, deliberately pulling her closer. The milky gem was rapidly heating under Garnet’s methodical ministrations, glowing dimly in the darkened room, allowing its owner to be lost in a haze of indescribable sensations she hadn’t felt in – it must have been decades since the last time she did this. Eons, possibly even millennia. Of course Garnet must know what she was doing; she was a love fusion after all. She knew better than anyone exactly how sensitive and… oh how wonderfully pleasurable – an array of sensations could be provided by their stones under conditions such as these.
“Haaa… hnngah…!” Pearl’s vision quickly swam out of focus when Garnet’s tongue swiped across the oval, bringing her closer to the brink of orgasm. Garnet partially regretted the fact that she’d chosen to do this out in the open, but it was too late to turn back now; the repressed mewls coming from the slender Gem squirming in her arms were just too delicious not to enjoy. Next time, she would have to do this behind closed doors, in order to get the full effect.
“G-Garnet,” came the urgent whisper, “Garnet I’m go-going to-t-to –!”
“Mm, let it happen,” Garnet murmured between kisses. Under that direction, Pearl promptly clapped her hands over her mouth, trying as best as she could to stifle a rather high-pitched squeal that tore through her throat, trembling intensely as she let it all go.
After allowing her partner to lay there for about ten minutes, paralyzed but still quivering as she eventually came down, Garnet eventually pulled away, carefully brushing her thumb along the perfectly-imperfect pearl to help get rid of the evidence. She sincerely hoped there wouldn’t be a wet spot on the comforter that she’d have to explain to the other Gems, and she made a mental note to herself to throw the blanket in the washing machine the minute Steven made them wake up for breakfast.
Pearl looked up at long last, her blue eyes shimmering brightly from – wait, were those tears? For a devastatingly brief moment, Garnet feared the worst. Pearl sniffled quietly and blinked, allowing two fat tears to roll down her cheekbones. “Thank you,” she murmured thickly, then blinked a few more times, suddenly feeling rather foolish for the way she was acting. “… Sorry.”
“What for?”
“Just… sorry,” Pearl sat up and brushed her hands over her face to try and wipe away the moisture. She sniffled once more as her gaze then traveled over to Steven and Amethyst, mercifully still asleep despite all the racket. His face had been fully enveloped by her wild mane, likely a subconscious effort to help block out the rising sun, and Amethyst continued to snore peacefully.
Garnet was sincerely puzzled by her partner’s reaction. Had she truly misread Pearl’s intentions after all this time? It was plain to her, that Pearl had developed an inexplicable affinity to the tallest Gem after… after Steven was born. With the blessing of her third eye, it hadn’t exactly occurred to her that she could be wrong. But despite the tears streaming down her face, Pearl was actually smiling. Heck, she was practically grinning, as her gaze swiveled all around the beach house, allowing a flurry of thoughts to overtake her. She was probably plotting Steven’s breakfast, or the best way to dispose of that accursed bedsheet before it was too late… but the most probable outcome was that she was coming to the conclusion that she’d really needed this. She would vehemently deny it if anyone asked – especially in light of the nonsensical fancy she’d dreamt up earlier – but perhaps there was a future on the horizon that she hadn’t really considered until now. She was beginning to suspect that she could stand to follow one of Garnet’s earlier lines, delivered unto her in the heat of the moment. The tides of change were indeed rising.
FIN