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The first impression Gem has of Grian is how much Pearl loved him.
She hears about him for the first time on a quiet night. She and Pearl are spending it at Gem’s place, settled quietly on Gem’s couch after a nice dinner. Pearl is laying her head in Gem’s lap while Gem runs her fingers through her hair, slowly undoing the tangles that always appear in Pearl's hair.
“Y’know, my brother woulda loved you, I bet,” Pearl says out of nowhere.
Gem pauses her brushing. “I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“Yeah,” Pearl says. “His name’s Grian.”
“You should introduce me sometime,” Gem says. “See if he’s any better at the whole shovel-talk thing than your cousin.”
Pearl snorts. “Jimmy tries,” she says. “Doesn’t mean he succeeds. But, uh, nah. Wish I could. He’s, uh.” She trails off. “He passed away a while ago.”
Oh.
“Oh, Pearl, I’m so sorry,” Gem says. She reaches to hold Pearl’s hand. Pearl squeezes it.
“I mean, it was a while ago,” Pearl says. “Back in high school. He, uh. No one actually knows for sure what happened, to be honest. Just… one day he was there, and the next he wasn’t, and everyone said he wandered off into the woods to…”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Gem reassures her. “I can’t even…”
What would she do, she wonders, if she lost Fwhip? If one day she woke up and he just wasn’t there anymore? Losing Sausage nearly destroyed her, and she’s going to get him back eventually. She doesn’t know if she would be able to get up again if either of them were just… gone forever.
Pearl sniffs. “I want someone to know, at least,” she says. “Someone who wasn’t… y’know. I, uh. Man, this is hard, actually.”
“Take your time,” Gem says.
Pearl is quiet for a long moment.
“I think he was murdered,” she says, nearly a whisper. “I think—no, I know he got wrapped up with a shady crowd, it’s why we got separated in the first place. I think his guardian mighta killed him and hid the body. I—man, I could kill that guy now, but back then—we were eighteen, Gem, he didn’t even make it to his graduation.”
There’s a pit in Gem’s throat. She swallows. “God.”
He was so young.
“I just,” Pearl chokes down a sob. “I. He was so bright, Gem. He was a beacon of a person and he was just—gone one day. He drew people to him like a magnet and he did his best to be kind and he was a prankster and a menace. He—one time,” Pearl shifts, turning to look at Gem’s face. “One time, Grian snuck into the school at night and plastered ominous sticky notes everywhere. I mean everywhere, every wall, every classroom, everywhere. The administration lost their minds trying to figure out what they meant.”
Gem snickers. “Did they catch him?”
“No,” Pearl says. “No, they did not.”
“That’s hysterical,” Gem says. Pearl grins.
“Right? And—oh, it’s even better. Because they took all the notes down, right, and then a few days pass. And then they’re back.”
“Oh my God.” Gem is giggling.
“Went on like that for weeks, Gem. Weeks . Until he got bored, which is when he gave out a—he just left a note in the admin office saying sorry, and it ended, and it was just—left as a mystery. No one ever figured it out. I only know because he told me.”
Pearl is smiling in that way she smiles when she’s had a particularly silly or clever idea; there’s mischief afoot in her eyes, and joy over her face, and Gem thinks, like she always does, that she’s gorgeous for it.
“You really cared about him, huh,” Gem says, like it’s not the most obvious thing in the world from the way Pearl talks about him.
“Yeah,” Pearl says. Her expression gets more somber. “I really miss him, Gem.”
“I wish I could’ve met him,” Gem says, and very pointedly does not think about how she is keeping Pearl in the dark about her own family.
The breakup is messy. Gem thanks her lucky stars that Pearl’s boss was able to handle the assault charge Pearl got over it. Fwhip barely talks to her for a week. She’s miserable .
It takes time, a lot of time, but eventually her and Pearl start to talk again. And then, one day, Pearl very tersely says, “Grian’s back,” and does not elaborate.
Gem’s second impression of Grian is that he is a very traumatized person.
It’s the first time she meets him. Pearl had actually been taking her to meet him when he comes bolting down the hall and running directly into Pearl.
She doesn’t realize who it is at first. He doesn’t exactly look like Pearl, after all, but Pearl clearly recognizes him because she starts talking to him as soon as she sees who it is.
Gem can see something’s wrong right away. He’s too tense, poised to bolt in the other direction. His eyes won’t focus on either of them, zipping back and forth. Panic is written in every bit of his body.
“Is he okay?” She asks anyway.
Pearl doesn’t look at her when she answers. “Panic attack. Hey, we’re gonna go back to your office, okay? Back to your office to calm down.”
That doesn’t seem to make it better. But he goes with them and he sits down when Pearl pushes him gently toward the chair and he doesn’t move from there. Gem glances at the other person in the room and wonders if Grian would appreciate it if Gem asked him to step out for a second.
He looks like he’s being held at gunpoint.
“Look at me, okay?” Pearl says gently. “We’re going to breathe together. Remember?”
She’s holding Grian’s hands. Something about that must have upset him, because he flinches violently enough Gem can see it. Pearl pulls her hands away like she’d been burned.
This isn’t working.
“Let me try,” Gem says. Pearl looks at her, lost.
But she gets out of the way.
Gem’s never walked someone through a panic attack before, but if the goal is to get him breathing normally again, she can get there, she’s sure. She sets her hands on his shoulders and meets his eyes.
“Hey,” she says. “You don’t know me. I’m Gem. You’re going to pass out if you don’t breathe. Okay?”
Grian is looking somewhere past her shoulder, but he nods.
Breathing exercises, breathing exercises. Gem still remembers some of those.
“I’m going to count. You’re going to breathe. Ready?” Gem says, and Grian nods again, and she starts counting.
She watches as he comes back to himself, dark eyes focusing on her face, and then on Pearl’s, and then past them both to the floor.
“Feeling better?” Gem asks. He still won’t talk, just nods. Gem will take it. “That’s good.”
“What happened?” Pearl asks, concern filling her voice.
Grian looks past her. “I didn’t mean to break it.”
It’s quiet, resigned, scared. Gem looks back.
There’s a clock on the floor. It’s broken. She frowns.
Gem steps back and lets Pearl do the talking and wonders.
Her third impression is what the fuck?
She has a job with Grian. She’s been put on babysitting duty. They both know it. She tries not to feel too annoyed about it. It’s hard not to feel at least a little annoyed.
Still, she does try to be upbeat. She re-introduces herself, and so does he, and then he moves on almost robotically.
It’s weird, actually. He sits entirely still in the van, hands clasped loosely in his lap. When they get out, he walks quietly beside her, face blank. As they get close, he pulls up his hood.
“You sure you’re ready for this?” Gem asks.
Grian doesn’t even spare her a glance as he says, “Perfectly sure.”
They sneak around the cameras and to the part of the building the office window is at. It’s on the second floor. Gem knows she can get up there, but Grian is new, so—
He’s already backing up, shaking out his hands. Gem watches him.
“What are you—”
He makes a run for it, nearly running up the wall and catching himself on the windowsill. He gets the window open and slips inside.
He’s… good at this. She wasn’t really expecting that, not after the way she actually met him. She sees his face appear in the window.
“Coming?” He asks.
“Yeah,” Gem says, shaking away her doubt. She joins him in the office. He’s already walking toward the filing cabinet. He’s not going to have much luck with it, so she starts looking for a key.
No luck. She looks up at him, saying, “I can’t find the keys for—”
He’s already got the cabinet open. He’s rifling through files, barely paying her any mind.
He’s good at this.
Where did Scar find him? What’d he do in the time between high school and now?
Turns out, he’s looking for paperwork on Azalea Park. That’s a whole mess that Gem has been doing her best to stay out of, mostly because she has no good reason to get involved in land squabbles. Land squabbles do nothing for her.
But Grian cares, because it’s his job, so Gem can at least give him some information on the parties at play. One of them is Doc, which is another big reason she’s stayed as far away from the entire mess as she could.
Grian stares at the documents for a long, long minute, flipping through them.
“…Huh,” he says, frowning. “I don’t… I don’t think he actually wants it.”
“Sorry?” Gem’s voice jumps. “It’s a super contentious area and he has it, why wouldn’t he—”
“Yeah, exactly, it’s contentious,” Grian says, and then he just… starts explaining. Like it’s common knowledge. He looks up from the files at her at the end.
“What?” He says.
“And you got all that from where?” Gem asks.
“…The papers? Common sense?”
He’s quick, stealthy. He’s smart. He’s clever. Does Scar know? Is Scar aware of what he has? He’s lucky Dogwarts didn’t get to him first, frankly. He’s ideal for this sort of work.
She debates leaving Grian’s deductions out of her report back to Scar entirely and just watching how it plays out. She ultimately decides against it, because she wants to see what Scar will do with the information even more, but…
Yeah, no. What the fuck.