Chapter Text
Gina had asked to meet Amethyst in a coffee shop. It was early on News Year Eve, just a week since Christmas. Elle had texted Amethyst, apologizing for how she had acted. Amethyst had assured her in return that it was fine. It wasn’t really. Well, it was. It wasn’t that Amethyst minded Elle getting upset, she hated it when Garnet and Pearl acted like she wasn’t allowed to be mad about something. Amethyst just wanted to know why it had happened. Elle hadn’t explained. Amethyst was hoping Gina would.
Amethyst was already there when Gina arrived, sitting at a corner table with a cup of coffee filled with with a horrifying variety of the syrup flavorings and far too much sugar. Gina waved, ordering her own drink before sliding in across from Amethyst.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Are you gonna tell me what Elle was so mad about?”
Gina sighed. She took a sip of her drink, then grabbed a sugar packet off the table and dumped it in. “She texted you, right?”
“Yeah,” Amethyst nodded, “but she didn’t tell me why she was upset in the first place.”
Gina leaned back in her seat. “She… she’s jealous you were adopted.”
Amethyst frowned. “Oh.” She leaned back as well, feeling increasingly awkward. “... Why?”
“Its…” Gina took another sip of her coffee. She ran a hand through her hair. “We were in foster care. And uh, I don’t know if you know this, but foster care sucks,” Gina smiled a little before it faded. “It just sucks. And being adopted would have been great, but no one was going to adopt four girls from a crack house and…”
“I got all the stuff Elle wanted,” Amethyst finished.
Gina nodded. “Pretty much.”
Amethyst nodded slowly. She dumped another sugar packet in her coffee and took a drink. “You lived in a crack house?”
“Not really, I mean, it wasn't like an actual crack house. I’m pretty sure Mom wasn’t making crack-” Gina paused. She thought for a second. “Yeah, she wasn’t making crack. I think. We had this really small apartment, I feel like I would have known if she was.” She paused again. Gina straightened up and waved a hand. “When I was really little things weren’t all that bad? I think my dad was around sometimes back then but I don’t remember him and besides, he was long gone before Mom every met Jayna's dad. Just, I’m the only one who really remembers anything being okay. And by the time I was like, five or six or something, Mom was always high or drunk or I don’t know what. She couldn’t keep a job, we were living of welfare and food stamps and I’m not even sure how we managed to keep the apartment. The group home was better than that. Well, it sucked too. But it sucked differently.”
“... Was she on crack?”
“I don’t know,” Gina shrugged. “Maybe.”
“How…” Amethyst had finished her drink during Gina’s speech and found herself wishing she had more. She didn’t get up to go order a new one. “When did you get put in foster care?”
Gina ran a hand over her face. She started bouncing her leg, only half aware she was doing it. “I was ten. Elle hadn’t started school yet. Jayna and Kaylee and I came home and Mom was passed out on the couch. Which was normal. Elle was playing on the floor with a cigarette lighter. She hadn’t figured out how to turn it on, thank goodness. I took it away from her. I went into the bathroom and the counter was covered with needles and I don’t know what else and..” Gina locked eyes with Amethyst. “And a pregnancy test.”
“That was me…” Amethyst said.
“That was you,” Gina agreed. “So… I tried to wake Mom up. Tried to yell at her,” Gina snorted. “I don’t know how I thought that was going to help. So called the police. I had to steal a quarter out of Mom’s purse an use a payphone outside the building cause we didn’t have a landline and Mom definitely wasn’t paying her cellphone bill.” Gina shrugged. She straightened up, her hands wrapping around her cup. It was getting cold. “CPS showed up and put us in a group home because I refused to let them separate us. Elle doesn’t know that. Maybe a couple of us would have been adopted if I had…”
There was several seconds of silence. Gina drank some of her coffee more for something to do than anything else. It was a stupid thing to regret. It wasn’t a regret, not really. It was just one of those things. One thing you could have done that could have changed so many other things, with no way to know if it would have been better or worse.
“What happened to mom?” Amethyst asked finally.
“She was in a rehab center for a while,” Gina looked relieved to start talking again. “We got to visit her a few times. That’s where that picture we showed you was from. One of the early visits and I guess she had decided to start trying again and got permission to take us to these canyons a couple hours away. But then she gave birth and, I don’t know, legally or something, they couldn’t keep her in rehab anymore. We were supposed to have another visit and then Holly- she ran the group home- just told us Mom had officially signed away all her parental rights. Don’t know where she went. For all we know she could be dead.”
Amethyst gnawed at her lip. A few weeks ago she had never thought about her birth parents. It was weird to know that her birth mom simply hadn’t cared for her at all.
“Did you ever try to find her?”
“I thought about it,” Gina shrugged. “No one else wanted to bother.” She smiled. “We decided to start looking for you instead.”
Amethyst drank the last of her coffee. “I'm happy you did."