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This wasn’t supposed to happen, Garnet thinks, utterly helpless to intervene as— just past the river’s bend— Steven howls in long-bottled agony, outright unraveling before them.
This wasn’t a part of any the futures she saw before.
But then again… the restless flurry of her code begs to ask…
What of his immediate future can she glimpse with any degree of clarity, unburdened by every compounding source of uncertainty his unpredictable actions these past few days have thrown her way?
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
To the unknowing gaze of her third eye, at one moment she was scouring these cascading waterways of possibility for even one path— any path whatsoever— by which she could help him calm down, and the next…
Static.
The only thing she can feel dancing across the cruel winds of the boy’s immediate future is an empty, almost destabilizing static, as if such a soul named Steven Quartz Universe never existed in this world to begin with.
As if such a soul has willfully unmade himself.
There’s no time to warn the others. No time to even process the unimaginable fate she's discovered.
Thus— the very second her form stiffens with dread at her findings, the very second a whole mess of scales and sharpened spikes erupts from his back— she leaps to action, refocusing her shattered attention to the last shifting detail of this scenario she has any iota of control over. Don’t think, don't tarry amidst the hypotheticals, don’t be distracted by the palpable malformation of that gem’s oh-so-familiar melodic frequency, act.
After all, one doesn’t need her future vision to know that Steven’s rapidly expanding form is about to bring the whole house down on top of them.
“Let’s MOVE!” she hollers to her fellow Gems, bolting across the living room and hoisting a petrified Greg clear off the floor like his mass was as negligible as a hologram. “Go, go, go!”
Amethyst and Pearl appear equally as shaken as she is, but they too bottle their terror and grief and fall into practiced formation. Even in the wake of such a terrorizing, unimaginable turn of events, their immediate mission is clear.
Protect the humans. Ferry them to safety. They mustn’t come to any harm.
Pearl whisks a loudly protesting, tear-stricken Connie out the front door. Amethyst slings her whip around a pair of the main room’s structural supports to brace them aloft as Garnet drags Greg away from the yowling, nightmarish beast his son is becoming.
Ultimately, she can’t help it. Once she’s ushered her friend through the doorway to Pearl’s diligent care, she looks back. Clenches her fists tight against her side, woefully helpless to do anything but watch this cursed present take hold. For an isolated moment, she locks eyes with him, with the boy she helped raise. Just for long enough to internalize the full weight of all sixteen years of bottled-up pain encapsulated within his burning pink irises before the inky darkness clouds his sclera entirely.
Just for long enough to hear his broken scream mutilate further and further away from the dulcet tones lapping against the rose tinted shores of her most treasured memories, until it’s all but unrecognizable as anything but a mindless monster’s roar.
Even the faintest song of the diamond at his core… his base-most resonance… corrupts, twisting into a conformation she can’t make head nor tails of. What notes once existed as beautiful harmonizations with that underlying melody have since warped into an unsettling distortion of their intended purpose. It’s discordant cacophony of the highest order, a harrowing sound that will remain etched within the inner core of her gems until the very day all their light is snuffed out in its entirety, at the end of her line.
She trembles, locked in place by her own paralyzing indecision while watching Steven’s scale encrusted form mutate far past the point of familiarity.
“Garnet, what are you doing?! Get outta here, I can’t hold all a’ this much longer!” Amethyst hollers a few steps to the right, grimacing as she strains to keep the creaking supports counterbalanced.
A single tear streams down the center of her face and slopes across to the side of her nose.
“I-I… I’m sorry,” she chokes out at a near inaudible volume, regret stained words meant only for her child's ears.
And then, she spins on her heels… only barely making it outside before Amethyst’s whip snaps, and the floor and main structural beam of the living room behind them collapses under Steven’s weight.