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Inside the house, there would be chaos. Steven could already hear the voices calling out to him, trying to get him to talk when he didn’t want to, trying to make him feel things that would make him hurt when he felt them. The most bitter thought he could have parsed was that he deserved to feel this way. Internally, all he wanted was to tear that feeling out.
A lone seagull called over the beach, circling curiously over the van. The ocean breeze rolled up and into the open door, making Steven shiver. He still had his jacket on as he sat in the back of the dismantled vehicle and stared at the closed doors. The tow truck had charged a fair amount, and Greg was calling to finalize the deal with the company over the phone. Out of all the expensive things he had bought over his wealth, one single car repair service couldn’t be that bad. Greg was financially safe.
Physically, Steven felt his gut wrench again. It was just hitting him now how much danger he had put his father in when they crashed. Even though the man was wearing his seatbelt, anything could have happened wrong. The airbags didn’t even go off, and yet Greg had been the first one crawling out of the wreckage. Steven gripped his stomach, pinkness spreading over his hand.
If anything would have happened, could he have used his tears on his own father? Steven hated the thought, and he hated thinking about those possibilities. There was a time where he could do nothing but sit and think about all that could go right, and here he was imagining everything going wrong. What had happened?
The sound of the car door opening up made Steven jump. The pinkness faded, and Steven was left sweating and breathing heavily. Greg sighed as he rifled through the glove compartment, looking for some piece of paperwork, perhaps, one of the many legal human aspects of owning a vehicle.
“The Gems are asking about you,” the man said into the back of the van. “I told them that you needed some space.”
“Thanks, dad.”
Greg closed the passenger’s side door. Steven listen to the footprints on the sand as Greg came around to the back of the van. The boy expected something like this. The doors opened, and Greg clambered into the cushions in the back before he closed the door behind him. The two Universes were silent for a moment.
“They talked about bringing Bismuth over to help with repairs. She’s gonna be here in a little bit, but I’m not sure what she can do. Pearl’s the mechanic, after all. She’s already fixed this old thing up once before.”
Greg tapped his legs for a second in an offbeat rhythm. Steven didn’t say anything. He couldn’t look over at Greg without his stomach bubbling again.
He was disappointed, and he could never tell Greg that. He had expected so much more from the past. Rooting around in the old house had brought up things that Steven never expected, and he didn’t understand how Greg could make peace with it so easily. The house smelled like normalcy. The picture frames were all dusted and oiled to a perfect sheen. The kitchen was alight with the smell of use, something old and rustic and primitive in a very human way. The drawer Steven had opened had slid for him with ease, as if it was meant to be opened then just as it had been so many years ago when it was first set on a furniture display in a store.
It was perfect. Steven could close his eyes and imagine exactly how to get back to that address, on and over the highways, past the truck stops and small tourist traps, through the clearance signs and rows of chain businesses. He could go back there, some day.
“Steven, you’re thinking about the trip,” Greg said.
“I’m thinking about the house.”
Greg opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it, and it made Steven look up. He was tuned into whatever his father said, whether he liked it or not, some instinct from childhood that made him turn and listen. He didn’t know what to feel about it. On the one hand, it was obedient and complacent, but on the other hand, he knew that when he was a boy the things his father said had been important. He was stuck in the middle.
“When we were driving, and you tore off the steering wheel, I thought you were going to hurt yourself, and I was so, so worried,” the man murmured. “I can’t ever stop caring about you, Steven. But —”
“What does that mean!” Steven blurted out.
The man stopped and stared at his boy, as if uncertain of what to say. The words had come up out of Steven, and inside, the teenager knew he should temper what he said, but the speech came up involuntarily.
“Letting me live in a van isn’t caring about me!” Steven shouted. “Taking me away from school and taking me away from other kids isn’t caring about me! Letting three aliens raise me from adolescence onward — dad, what is caring about me if it’s not giving me the things I needed to be NORMAL?!”
That last word was punctuated by a fist slamming into the floor of the van, a fist that was once more burning with pink. Greg raised his hand, and Steven brought his own back to the wall of the van, smashing the metal interior with an indentation of his knuckles. The whole van wobbled with the impact. Greg did his best to hold onto the inside of the van until the boy had stopped and was seething quietly. Steven felt his forehead burning, his hands alight. He felt heavier.
“Steven, I want you to tell me what normal is.”
“Wh-what? Normal is...normal is when you’re a kid who grows up in a house, and you have two parents, and they love you and raise you and they give you food and toys and you go to school and you make friends with kids your age, a-and you grow up with a dream job and you go to college and you fall in love and marry someone and you know what you’re doing.”
“All that’s what normal is, huh? Steven, you know you can still have that. I’m willing to send you to college —”
“I can’t go to college. I don’t have a birth certificate. I don’t have a social security number. I don’t even have my GED.”
Over the past few weeks, Steven had been learning from Connie about the whole college application process. There were so many tests, and an essay, and a list of experiences that different schools wanted and needed. Connie talked about different schools on the other side of the world that would give you swords and canes, and where there was strict competition and jobs and so many different paths. The little research that Steven had done had showed him just how inadequate things were. Even looking up the application process was horrendous.
It was almost ironic, or at least disparaging, that Steven had experience saving the Earth from annihilation on more than one occasion, but he didn’t have the experience to go to school on his home planet. Were there schools on other planets? None of them accepted humans, he was sure of it.
“All we have to do is file some paperwork, kiddo,” Greg said. “We can get ourselves up and running in no time.”
“But that won’t take back sixteen years. It won’t raise me. What does it matter now if I go to school? I don’t know how to be in a class. I won’t make friends.”
“Steven, you’re the best at making friends out of anyone I know.”
“That’s when I was a kid.”
Greg was silent for a moment. Steven knew what he was thinking: you’re still a kid . It was some fallacious turnabout, a nonsensical argument, and Greg didn’t pursue it, and Steven was grateful.
The older he got, the less he remembered about growing up in Beach City. Steven didn’t talk to his father or the Gems about it, but everything was fading into feeling, and only the bad moments remained. When he was a child, he could remember the vague sound of the car wash chugging along and rocking him to sleep, but he could so vividly remember the stretching sensation of his skin as it scraped along the sides, turned into a writhing mass of angry cats, taking over his body and his organs. There was only a moment that he could taste his first Cookie Cat, but he remembered the exact sensation of vomiting up all the ice cream he had eaten on the first day he had summoned his shield. Up until that moment, Steven hadn’t even remembered that he had summoned his shield that day. What month had it been? What season? The boy felt sick as he rolled over the moments in his mind.
“When you get older, it’s like learning how to walk all over again,” Greg said quietly. “But you never remember taking your first steps. All that you can think of is how you want to run like the wind. I understand the frustration, Steven. And I can tell you that, well, this...is normal. Feeling angry at me is normal. Feeling...like you want to go away is normal.”
Steven looked up at his father’s trailing mouth. The man looked uncertain, as if he had said something in another language. The words might as well have been a slap in the face.
“You want me to leave?” Steven murmured.
“Isn’t that what you said is normal?” Greg replied. “You don’t stay with your parents forever, do you? You go off, you go to college, you get married, and you, quote, know what you’re doing unquote. I don’t want you to go, Steven! No parent wants their child to go! But that’s what normal is.”
“If I left right now I would have no idea where to go! I’ve never been out of this town for any length of time! We’ve taken vacations driving over state lines, but your parents, they’ve been to Florida Island, and so have you, and Uncle Andy’s flown all over the world, and when we went to Korea it was because of Gem things and you got kidnapped, and — I don’t speak Korean!”
“N-no, you don’t, but I think I get what you’re getting at, Steven. But do you think it’s too late to want things? To have goals? You’re sixteen, Steven. I’m willing to help you with whatever you want to do! That’s my job as your dad!”
“Your job?!” Steven screamed. “Your job was to make me a human being, but you took me away from all the things that could have helped me be human. And I’m sick of being a GEM!”
Every window in the van shattered. Steven slowly opened his eyes to the sound of the glass tinkling down from the inside. Greg had his hands over his ears and his own eyes squeezed shut to prevent the glass from raining down. The sound of the ocean came clearly through the windshield. The wind blew in through the now-open windows and caused a cool hush to fall over the inside of the van.
He was doing it again. Steven didn’t have to look to know how pink he was. He was glowing, and loud, and he hated every second of it. He stared at the man in the corner as he uncurled, looking at Steven with some mix of emotions that made the boy feel instant shame. Greg was no longer trying to smile or keep himself calmed down. The fear was written on his face — but a fear of what? A fear of his own son? No, Steven thought, and his gut turned again. It was a fear of what Steven was going to do to himself.
“I need you to listen to the sound of my voice,” Greg said softly.
For the first time that day, Steven actively stopped. He listened to the beat of his heart thumping in his chest, and he remembered his father teaching him about different tempos in the parking lot, as Steven whirled with bare feet on the asphalt and Greg hooked up his electric guitar to a portable amp. The beat slowed.
“Steven, I am sorry, I am sorry for everything. That does not change the fact that you are hurting,” the man continued. “That does not change what either one of us have done. But I need you to listen when I tell you that I love you. Do you hear me, Steven? I love you.”
He meant it like he meant it the first time that he had held his son, and Steven didn’t remember that, he couldn’t have remembered that. But Greg was crying softly now, a single tear sliding down each of his cheeks. Steven let his color fade. It ebbed away gently, as slowly as the tide, until Steven was sitting there in shame with his eyes welling up. Greg’s smile was as genuine as it had ever been. It was always like that, even in the moments where he had no reason to smile. Steven knew there was truth behind it.
“D-dad, I’m sorry… I keep wrecking the van,” Steven said with a sniffle.
“Come over here, kiddo.”
Steven crawled over the cushions. Glass crunched underneath him as he made his way over to where Greg was seated. There was a degree of pride in the man’s smile, but it was all warmth, and the man put one hand around Steven’s shoulder as the boy cuddled up. Greg Universe was not the world’s largest man, but he was big enough for Steven to feel like he was a kid again when he cuddled up. There was a lot of growing to do.
And he hated that feeling. There was always work to do, something in the future, degrees of uncertainty and calamity and something always going wrong. Their happily ever after would never come, and Steven realized that it didn’t come for adults either. The boy screwed his eyes shut as the tears started to come down. Being an adult meant constantly moving from one day to the next, unaware of things to come.
But he had to hold on to certainties. Steven was certain that he would wake up tomorrow and feel like he didn’t get enough sleep. He was certain that the first thing each Gem would say to him would be his own name, punctuated by their trademark cadence, with Pearl being the most worried of all. Of all the things to come, he knew that Connie would want to call and that she would be aghast to hear about the van, and she would be worried about his father and about his body, considering all the things that had happened before.
At the same time, none of those things were certain. The universe couldn’t even be certain that the sun would rise tomorrow. Steven wished that he could have a degree of stability, and he wished even more that he could go back to when he was a child. He wanted to grow up and he wanted to feel imaginative, uncertain, unknown and unknowing. The name Steven Universe meant that he could learn and that there were things he could do to help people. Now, the name was just a name.
The two were quiet for a moment. Greg sighed with the weight of so many things to say, and Steven knew he wanted to talk so badly. But he waited. He always waited for his boy. That was another certainty.
“I still can’t believe you named yourself after a song,” he said at last.
“It meant a lot to me. Music, music meant a lot to me. I know you grew up with me loving and showing you all of these. That was selfish of me, but you grew up learning and loving as well. You still love music, right?”
“Of course I do. Everyone loves music, dad.”
“Not my parents. Not my dad,” Greg sighed. “Steven, I want you to hear me when I say that I didn’t have much growing up.”
“How can you say that? We went to your house! I saw pictures, and the yearbook, and the trophies, and —”
“Where was my guitar?”
Steven paused. It was true, there was no musical paraphernalia in the accumulation of Greg’s belongings. It seemed strange to think about, considering the iconography of Greg as Steven knew him, the images of “Guitar Dad” and the path Greg had walked for as long as the boy had been alive. The boy listened as Greg sighed deeply.
“I was forced into wrestling because my dad didn’t want to raise a wimp,” the man said. “He hated my interest in the arts. Whenever we listened to music, it was old classical or military on the radio. Every junior concert that I had in elementary school, he would pull me aside and said that I should be ashamed. To sing!”
“What? How can anyone…” Steven mumbled.
It didn’t make any sense. Either Greg was exaggerating or lying. But no, the man’s mouth was taut and his grip was shaky around his son’s shoulders. The man stared at the far wall of the van, still marked with the indentation of Steven’s fist.
“They thought I was undisciplined. Steven, I can’t...ever express how much I felt trapped in that house. I saw other kids excited to go home at the end of the day, and I felt numb, because to me going home was just part of the slog, one more checkmark on the schedule. Everything was about the schedule, about keeping in line.
“Whenever I said I wanted to do something or try something new, it got taken away from me. Man, Steven, I remember being in the first or second grade, and that’s the last time I got to talk about music. A friend of mine started to take violin lessons, and I wanted to try to. Do you know what my parents said? They said that I couldn’t be friends with that person anymore. The house went silent for weeks. No radio. No television. And I didn’t understand why. It took me years to get over that.”
“Dad, why would they punish you for just — that doesn’t make any sense!” Steven said. “You didn’t even — didn’t they provide for you?”
Greg let out a long sigh and a smile. Steven stared at his father in disbelief. If all the things he was saying were true, there was no reason to smile at all.
“Parents are supposed to give you a house and a stable place, you’re right,” Greg said. “But they need to let you grow. And every time I tried to grow, Steven, I felt like they just nipped it in the bud. I understand why now, but it’s not easy to think about. I don’t like thinking about my parents."
“Why, then? Why did they act like that?” Steven said quietly.
It took a moment for Greg to collect his thoughts. He patted the boy on the shoulder and looked away, trying to hide the tears welling up in his eyes. Steven wiped the dried salt from his own face as his old man took a shuddering, pained breath.
“Buddy, I was an accident,” he said at last. “They never wanted a child. And that’s okay. Not every family wants to have kids.”
“They had you anyway, so they must have wanted —”
“My mother told me outright, Steven. She told me,” Greg said suddenly, his voice growing cold. “She told me that I was her punishment.”
Steven felt like he had been slapped in the face. That was impossible. There were punishments to be handed down from parent to child, and he knew that well. Being the son of Pink Diamond, of Rose Quartz, was a punishment in itself with ramifications that nobody else had dealt with in history. Being Greg’s son meant a punishment of isolation, of instability, being the son of a reckless man. But to call a child that was unthinkable in Steven’s eyes.
“And they made me feel like that every day, and they reminded me of that through their words, their actions, their ignorance. Everything I did I had to do for them. My life was a burden. My choices were their choices. I wasn’t a son to them, not like how you know a son is. I know this is a lot, Steven, but please understand that it took me years of feeling guilty before I understood that I had nothing to be guilty for.”
“Of course you had nothing to be guilty for!” Steven said.
“It’s not so obvious, Steven. If I have anything to be proud of, it’s that you know right from wrong. You know when you’re feeling, when you need to stand up and make the right choice, even if it hurts. When you have kids, I can only hope that I swayed you in the right direction, and I can’t control that.”
Steven hadn’t thought about having kids. He shifted uncomfortably next to his father. Of course he imagined starting a family, but that was something that adults did, something that humans did when they were Greg’s age. You had to love each other to have kids. As Steven listened to Greg, the complications started to wear on him. You had to love each other to have kids, but you didn’t have to love the kids you had.
He didn’t want to imagine it. It hurt to think about a world in which children weren’t loved. Listening to his father started to make him feel light-headed, but he forced himself to lean into the man. Greg shushed him softly and stretched out on the floor of the van, settling in comfortably as Steven needed.
Those little touches were enough for Steven to know that something was wrong, and he understood just enough to feel Greg’s place in the universe. The opposite of Greg’s existence was absolute freedom. Steven had already expressed how much he needed something else, but he hadn’t understood it when he was a child. He was still processing it now. What did Greg think, when he was a boy growing up? At what age did he understand that he was unloved, that he deserved to feel better? Steven wanted to ask. A bump bubbled up in his throat. He couldn’t have been unloved, no child could be unloved. But the way that it was expressed was clearly wrong. Steven couldn’t imagine a childhood without music.
“When does it stop hurting?” Steven mumbled. “When do you understand...anything?”
“You never stop learning. I’m learning about you, Steven. I-I know there’s a lot I need to work on, and I wished I had known. I wish I hadn’t been poor. I wish I had known that you weren’t happy. But I raised you to be…”
Ignorant? Unaware? The biting questions came up and vanished again with Steven’s anger. He took them all and forced himself to exhale them.
“I raised you to be what I thought was free. And I’m sorry. I should have treated you like… I shouldn’t have rejected everything. The only reason I can give is that I didn’t have any good memories, Steven, I had nothing to go off of. A house was a prison. School was a prison. I didn’t know how to make those good, so…”
“You said you had kids who went home and loved their families, though!” Steven said. “Why didn’t you listen to them?”
“I need you to hear me, Steven: I am not them.”
Greg’s tone of voice was suddenly firm. Steven was used to the serious conversation, and he knew he had been serious himself earlier, but the man almost seemed angry. No, he could never be angry at Steven, not since the boy had taken his first breath, not ever. Steven suddenly realized that this was intentional, and his heart beat in shame, though he would never let those words come out.
“I lived miserably, and I couldn’t understand what it meant to live in another home,” Greg said. “My brain, like your brain, adjusted to all the junk that happened to me, and I had to unlearn being unwanted. I couldn’t imagine myself in a better place unless I was free. I talked to Dr. Maheswaran, Steven.”
“W-what?”
“When you fell asleep that night, I called up Connie’s mom, and she explained everything to me. She talked about brains, and how we react, and the chemical side of things, and she was super mad that I hadn’t brought you to a doctor and I understand that and I’m sorry, but — it helped me understand, too. I hadn’t thought about the opposite side of my childhood, and how it would, well, impact you.”
That explained it. It didn’t excuse sixteen year of adversity, but it explained Greg’s feelings. Steven knew that Greg hadn’t undergone all the things that his son had, and he wanted to tell his father about all those feelings, the culmination of physical force, the Gem missions and chronic danger that surrounded him. But just like he had felt too much freedom, he knew that there was too much obedience. It was why Pink had left the Diamonds. It was why Greg had left home. But Greg hadn’t hurt anyone. He hadn’t even hurt his parents. Steven felt a punch in his gut. Greg had wanted freedom so badly he had sacrificed all the things that Steven had been wanting over all these years. It was only now that Steven considered how bad things must have been.
But the letters told him that already. Steven felt the crumpling paper in his pocket. He hadn’t meant to take any, but he took one, had shoved it into the inside pocket of his jacket before they walked out the front door. It amazed him, but it made sense now. It was sickening to think of how distant the Demayo parents were from their son. They had been ‘furious,’ as Greg had said, but the disobedience could only come from a place of pressure.
Steven looked inside himself for a moment, and he realized how much he had been wanted over the years. In a criminal sense, he had been sought after as the embodiment of Rose Quartz, but as a Diamond he had been wanted to complete the mourning process of his Gem family. Here on Earth, he had been lauded as a hero, a champion, someone with a magical destiny. Greg had wanted a child, and he had loved Steven, and that was undeniable. How that love was shown still hurt Steven, but it was something, and the boy knew he could never hold that over Greg’s head. The love was there.
“I’m so, so sorry.”
The boy looked up to his father, and the pain in the man’s voice was crushing. Greg’s lip trembled as he let go of Steven’s shoulder and put both his hands on his outstretched legs. The man shook his head, heavy with realization.
“Dr. Maheswaran wanted to yell at me, and she had every reason to,” he said, his voice trembling. “I didn’t know how much you were hurting. I would have done something if I knew. I would have done my best, and I didn’t. I only know as much as I was taught, and Steven, jeez, I am not a smart man. I should have been better. I should have…”
Greg buried his face in his hands. Steven stared at the wall he had punched as the man sobbed. Each heaving breath left Steven lightheaded. The boy tried not to cry. His face screwed up and his mouth dried up. The tears refused to come. He hated this feeling, where he was ready to accept the downpour and nothing happened.
It felt right to do it now. The boy unzipped his jacket, then reached inside to where the crumpled up envelope was stashed. He took it out and stared at the paper, at the address of the grandparents he never knew he had. They weren’t family anymore. Steven wondered why they had kept all of Greg’s letters despite never opening them, but he also wondered if it mattered why. There were so many “why”s that Steven didn’t understand already.
“I’m sorry,” Greg repeated, and then he saw the letter.
The man reached over and took it out of Steven’s hand, his mouth opening in shock as he sniffed and contained himself. He almost began to laugh, a gentle cough rising out of his throat.
“I know exactly which one this is,” he said. “I can feel it — it’s still inside —”
Greg tore open the envelope that had been sealed for an unknown amount of time. As soon as he took out the contents, Steven could pinpoint the date exactly. The boy gasped.
Inside the envelope was a small polaroid picture of Greg and Steven, taken when Steven was still wearing his baby onesie, asleep in Greg’s arms. Vidalia must have taken it, as it was on a couch in her home. Steven could read the worry on Greg’s face, see the time that had been taken away from him. The man was smiling in the picture. His confidence was waning, but he was still smiling.
“This is the first letter I had written since I met your mom. She told me about how she never looked back, but I had to look back, from time to time. There was always a chance. There’s always a chance, Steven.”
A chance for what? But Steven didn’t have to read the letter to know what Greg meant. The two of them stared at the picture, and only then did Steven start to feel himself cry. This was the only copy of that picture that Greg had, and he had sent it with a letter to his parents.
The contents of the letter were still inside the envelope, a time capsule from over a decade ago. Times had changed so much, and nobody could have predicted the events to come. Steven wondered if the Demayos knew what Gems were, if they had been privy to the events of Steven’s life vicariously. Maybe they had felt the earthquakes from the Cluster’s awakening. Maybe they had been on the beach of Florida island when Lapis Lazuli made the tide go out into a spiral. Maybe they had seen the red sky as ships and meteors streaked overhead.
But they had no idea Steven was alive, and Steven kept his mouth closed. They would never know that he was alive.
“Dad, I… I don’t think I’ll ever understand what you went through as a kid,” he said. “But I’m sorry I got mad at you and crashed the van.”
“It’s okay, Schtu-ball. I’m just happy you’re safe.”
That was all Greg had thought about. But it hadn’t been guaranteed. Greg hadn’t known that Steven would face all the things he faced as a Gem. Nobody could have known that. Steven remembered when Pearl wanted to take Steven into space, and Greg said no. There had been limits, and Steven understood what Greg had to go through. There were limits he set when Steven was younger, and Steven pushed, and he pushed, and he broke through maybe when he shouldn’t have. But it was all part of breaking away from humanity.
Steven leaned against his father quietly and looked at the baby picture as Greg silently unfolded his old letter and read it in his head. He wished he could have been more prepared for his own desires. Steven reached into his shirt and touched the bump of his gemstone. He shuddered at the thought that, had he been raised in the Demayo household, they would have torn it out without a second thought.