Certain Plan

[Namira]

((Garnet continued from It All Went Wrong))

The walk wasn't cleansing, nor did it allow Garnet the clarity of purpose she'd struggled again and again to reach.

She still felt lighter than before. The crumbling weight of failure falling away from her shoulders. She had failed, and failed repeatedly. Her successes didn't mean a whole lot, meagre things that had more in common with saying 'I got some good hits in though, right?' than actual wins. She'd spent so much time, will, and energy on chasing those goals and she'd invested almost as much into tearing herself up over what she could have and should have done, but hadn't. That'd been the story of her entire time in this horrible place. Try, fail. Grab a new goal, try, fail. Reinvent, try, fail. She couldn't win, because she was grasping for things that she couldn't do, or wasn't capable of, or just hadn't thought of. Garnet hadn't known what Marco would do. Or Erika would do. And yeah, while she'd been faced up against Erika, Garnet had tried to go within herself and pull out the conviction to do something about her and she hadn't found it.

Garnet hadn't found it, and she'd spent this long treating that like an immutable lapse of morals. Acting like the fact she couldn't bring herself to kill a friend for the sake of others made her the lowest kind of dirt, the greatest screw up to up a screw. But wasn't all of this more complicated than that? Garnet's job wasn't as chief justiciar of this fucked-up situation, whatever she'd tried to self-appoint herself.

This wasn't moving past what had happened, or forgiving the others what they'd done. This wasn't plunging headlong into who-gives-a-fuck or a terminal spiral. She'd almost reached the bottom of that once, tasted the metal, decided it wasn't for her. This wasn't forfeiting what was left of her time, or pretending that she was okay, or throwing up her hands and saying that this was it, she was finished and done, and what happened, happened.

This was cutting herself some fucking slack.


Garnet wasn't okay, but she was better.


((Garnet continued in More Than Truth))