Chapter Text
It’s been a whole four months since Connie’s college graduation when they finally find the time to see each other again—she hugs him when he greets her, but there’s something stiff and unusual about the gesture during. Steven chalks it up to stress.
He offers to take her to a restaurant, hoping to take her mind off of whatever job applications she must be drowning in the midst of, and she agrees, but he spends the evening trying to get her to talk and feeling like he’s making a fool of himself in the process. He doesn’t understand anything about political science or sociology, and every half-remembered, half-formed thought that makes it past his lips only seems to make her increasingly exasperated, tired of explaining herself over and over again.
Confused by something she’s said about one of her job prospects and embarrassed with himself for not being able to remember how it’s related to her studies, Steven pushes his food around on his plate until Connie finally sighs and rests her head against her fingertips, elbows supported on the table.
“Listen,” she says.
There’s something in her tone that leaves him unsettled, anxiety twisting in his gut as he tries to push it aside and focus on what’s actually happening, instead of whatever fantasy worst-case scenario his brain is inventing on the fly.
She hesitates, though, sighing long and low through her nose instead of continuing. Then, quietly, she seems to switch tracks, deciding against whatever she was going to say: “I’m not actually that hungry. I’d rather just go home.”
“Okay,” Steven says, almost too quickly. Eager to please, to escape the strange, oppressive atmosphere of sitting alone together in this dimly-lit restaurant. He’d hoped it would be romantic, but it’s just suffocating.
It’s raining by the time they get back to the house Connie’s renting. She hesitates in the doorway after unlocking the door, looking back at Steven, slightly damp, before averting her gaze and leading the way inside.
He hasn’t been here before. She’d been staying in a dorm while she was attending college—her roommate had thought Steven was strange. Strange in the bad way. He’d avoided visiting her at the dorm itself as much as possible.
Now, here, they are completely and utterly alone.
He gravitates towards her, taking her hands and smiling gently when she meets his eyes with a hint of surprise (and perhaps—but no, surely he’s just anxiously imagining it—trepidation).
“Sorry the restaurant was a bust,” Steven apologizes, at the same time Connie starts to say: “Sorry, this is really awkward.”
Steven squeezes her hands, an involuntary little twinge. “What is?”
Connie pulls her hands away. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to ask you something. Not just today, but— for months. Since graduation. Every time I think I’m getting close to asking, I look at you, and the words just… don’t come.”
Steven can feel himself dissociating, just a bit. He mentally counts to four on an inhale, holds it, and lets it out again as slowly and silently as he can. He smiles. “You can talk to me about anything,” he says.
Connie gives him a look he’s not sure how to decipher and crosses her arms before glancing away, almost guiltily.
“Do you know where you’re going next?” she asks.
“Yeah!” Steven answers, opening his arms excitedly, “You graduated! You’re gonna get a job, and like, buy your own house and everything, right?”
Connie’s facial muscles twitch. A wince, or a grimace.
“I didn’t want to settle somewhere before you got a job, you know? If you end up having to move, I’d just have to pack up everything all over again, so I…” Steven laughs, the sound a little choked in his nervousness. “I just… I want to be wherever you are.”
“Steven,” Connie sighs. She walks over to the couch in the living room and sits down. She doesn’t look at him.
“I want to be with you,” Steven reiterates, more softly. When Connie doesn’t respond, he inches closer, sitting next to her. He reaches over, puts a hand on her closer arm. “Is that okay?”
When she does finally look at him, it’s with soft, pleading eyes. He leans in, reaching out with his free hand to cup her cheek, kissing her on the lips—and something in the pit of his stomach drops.
Something is wrong.
Connie’s not kissing him back.
He parts his lips, kissing more insistently, more desperately, hands grasping at her as he does. He wants to hold her. He wants to climb inside the steady comfort of being with her, longs to touch her in a way that makes his skin feel electric just to think about. He’s long since buried the feeling of wanting to live together as Stevonnie with her: she’s made it abundantly clear that she wants both of them to be their own people, independent of one another. But they can still be together. He wants to be as close to her as he can physically be, without the interference of his stupid inherited magical bullshit. Fusion outwore its welcome, at some point. Connie’s wide-eyed wonder in response to all the aspects of his gem heritage has become as dull and jaded as his own, he thinks.
He just wants to be human.
He wants to be human with her.
“Connie, please,” he begs, and he’s not even sure what exactly he’s begging for until she shoves him away, hard, and he realizes his body’s been responding to his desperate thoughts of togetherness quite without his permission.
He bites his lip, shame burning white-hot across his skin as her eyes fall to his lap before returning to his face.
“Steven,” she says evenly, “I think you should go.”
“Wait,” Steven interjects, “Wait, I’m sorry. I can— we don’t have to do anything, please, Connie.”
“Ever?” Connie presses.
It takes Steven a moment to catch up. “Huh?”
“We don’t have to do anything, ever? You’re never going to want that bad enough to just—” She slaps her hands down onto her knees. “You just tried to force me to kiss you.”
“No,” Steven says, horrified. “No, I just—”
“I love you, Steven,” she says. It makes something funny happen in his chest, a tightness that feels like a spring coiled tight enough to snap at any moment. His breath is coming in short. He’s crying, he realizes, two degrees off from the start of a total meltdown.
“Connie—”
“You’re my best friend, you know? That’s what makes this so hard.”
“Don’t,” he hiccups. “We can talk about this.”
“No,” Connie sighs. “Steven. I’m always going to love you. I had a lot of fun, you know? But I’m not…” She looks staunchly away, gripping her knees with both hands. “I’m not ever going to be what you need. You’ve been clinging to this, to us, for so long, I don’t… I don’t know if you know how to be independent anymore. This whole thing was a mistake. When we left Beach City, that should have been it. We should have left us behind, too.”
It’s like the ground is opening up. He feels like he’s falling. He feels like he’s fourteen, spiraling through the deepest reaches of space utterly alone.
“Steven?” Connie prods gently. She puts a hand on his shoulder, which trembles under her touch. “I’ll always be your friend, Steven. I just don’t think any of this has been healthy, you know? Maybe… maybe we just need some time apart. Like, actually apart, not… you know. Like we’ve been doing.”
His breath hitches. His hands find his hair, gripping as he doubles over, panic settling in bone-deep as something deep within him pulses with an energy he’s done his best these past few years to lull into hibernation. Breathe, he commands himself.
In, two, three—
Hold, two, three—
Out, two, three—
Breathe.
Just breathe.
“Steven.” Connie’s voice feels so impossibly far away, a whisper in the rising storm that’s crashing in his ears. “…maybe it doesn’t feel like it right now,” she says, “but it’s gonna be okay. Okay?”
He jerks away from her, stumbling to his feet and lurching towards the front door. She calls after him, but he throws it open, almost off its hinges completely, tripping down the porch step in his haste to get away, landing face-first in the rain-slick grass. Head spinning, heart pounding, senses buzzing in what he can fully identify now as a full-blown panic attack, he clambers to his feet and takes off running.
He runs until he simply can’t. Legs like lead weights, muscles burning with every labored breath, he collapses onto his hands and knees and fights the urge to scream. He can’t lose control again, not here, not now, not after all these years of carefully holding it all together. He hunches in on himself, elbows on the ground so his hands can fist tightly in his hair, pulling, trying desperately to ground himself somehow.
That’s when Lion finds him.
Rumbling softly as he approaches, Lion sits next to Steven, close enough to touch, and instantly Steven abandons his desperate hair-pulling to bury his face in Lion’s mane instead, arms thrown around his companion. He sobs like he hasn’t done since that day in Beach City when he lost himself completely, making a fool of himself in front of the whole town.
Lion’s tail twitches restlessly behind them from time to time, but otherwise he sits perfectly still, stoically letting Steven cry on him even while the rain steadily pours down on the both of them, soaking them to the bone.
“…Lion,” Steven utters miserably after what feels like an eternity, voice cracking. “I wanna go home.”
Lion braces himself, letting Steven climb aboard. Then, like they’ve done so many times before, he roars, opening a portal back to whatever shitty dive motel Steven’s been staying at most recently, and jumps through.
Except, when they come out the other side, there’s not a parking lot in sight.
“The beach?” Steven murmurs questioningly, glancing around at the seemingly endless strip of sand. He climbs off of Lion, one hand lingering on Lion’s mane as he takes an exploratory step. The sights and sounds of this beach are so intimately familiar to him, he can tell from the angle of the rocks around him where he is even before he turns the corner that leads to the beach house where he’d spent most of his adolescence.
“Lion… This isn’t what I wanted,” Steven admits, gripping at the fabric of his shirt over his chest as his heart constricts therein. He glances back, pleading with his eyes for Lion to take him away from here, but Lion yawns, stretching, and lies down on the sand. “Fine,” Steven huffs, irritable. “It’s fine. No big deal. Not like I didn’t ever want to come back here, or anything.”
Lion’s ear twitches, but he’s closed his eyes. He’s not about to budge.
Steven crosses his arms petulantly, watching the waves break for a long stretch of seconds before he looks down at his feet in the sand. He wiggles his toes in his shoes, the dissonance of being on the beach without sand getting in his sandals and between his toes so strange that it feels distinctly unreal.
He sighs, shoulders drooping, and starts walking down the beach, towards his old house. He’s exhausted, and if Lion’s not going to be taking him home any time soon, he might as well go inside.
He knocks on the door when he gets there, but no one answers. He tries the doorknob to discover that the door’s not locked, and lets himself in.
“Dad?” he calls, glancing around the main room. “Garnet? Amethyst? Pearl? Anybody home?”
There’s no sound but the calls of gulls overhead, the soft crashing of waves on the beach. The white noise he’d grown so accustomed to hearing at some point in his childhood that he’d never realized just how all-encompassing it actually was, even from within the house.
“…Dad?” he calls again, headed for the stairs up to what had once been his bedroom.
He hesitates at the top of the stairs, eyes going a little wide as he takes in the sight that greets him. It’s not messy or anything, but it’s certainly… lived in. There are posters on the walls, nick-knacks on the shelves, CDs on just about every other available surface. There’s a large stereo he can’t remember ever having seen before taking up a good bit of real-estate against one of the walls.
Steven wraps his arms around himself, feeling distinctly out of place as he wanders deeper into the room. It’s the same feeling as wearing closed-toed shoes on the sand.
He’s not sure what he expected, really. He’d been the one to strip the room bare before he’d left, handing it over to his father to live in. Of course Dad had made himself at home. It wasn’t like the gems would preserve it for him the way he’d left it on the off chance he ever came back, especially after how definitively he had tried to express that he might never do so.
His knees hit the edge of the mattress, and Steven hesitates there a moment before crawling onto the bed.
He lies on his back, at first, staring at the ceiling for a long stretch of seconds before turning onto his side. He draws his knees up closer to his chest. He listens to the sound of the ocean, waves crashing endlessly against the beach, and gradually the bone-deep exhaustion in him grips him in such a way that it’s easy to think he’s just closing his tired eyes for a moment. Just one moment, until Lion is ready to go, and then they’ll go home, back to some shitty land-locked motel in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the country.
…
Perhaps it’s little wonder that he simply falls asleep.