It was the first snowflake that sent Steven Universe running back towards the station where he knew that he would have the greatest chance. There were four blocks between him and the driveway that grew steeper every day in the absence of meals. Even the key in his pocket was heavier by the day, and even by the second, and by the time that the boy had finally come to the curb he felt as if the metal was digging into his pocket and making a permanent indentation in his skin. Several hours later as he woke up in the frozen lobby of the car wash, he saw that indeed the key had made a mark on his upper thigh, just beneath the edge of his underwear, a silhouette that blemished the child in the shape of the last home he had.
The key had not been given to him, but he had found it when his father left for the last time. He was so tired the previous night for reasons he could not remember, and when Greg Universe spoke what would eventually be the last words that Steven would hear from him, the actual language passed through his brain and made no impression.
Whatever the words were, they were most likely a repetition of the same things that the man had been telling his son since his birth. The stories of Rose Quartz were kept secret in the heart of the once-great traveler. The legends of her kindness and her smile were lost. The murals and ruins had been kept apart from Steven's world.
After the birth of his son and the death of his wife, Greg Universe was inconsolable, but not out of sadness or fatigued mourning. The hole that Rose Quartz had left in him was as close to literal as any impact could be, spanning the first moment of fiery inception to his death years later in a hotel room hundreds of miles away from Beach City. Though he did not know when he left Steven asleep in the back of his van, Greg Universe was developing intolerance to the world. His body started to react violently to memory and to the vestige of love that had been swept out of him when Rose left the world. A smile to his infant's soulful face caused a twisting in his physiology, a pain in his intestines stemming from no sickness known to human doctoral knowledge. Eventually, he had to stop smiling for his own sake; in fact, any expression more consequential than moderate acknowledgement was enough in his final weeks to rupture vessels in his stomach lining and to make his nose bleed a steady stream of thinning, anemic blood. The sickness was perhaps not a sickness indeed, but the vestige of humanity that had been taken and that wore on his still-human body for all of his days. Touch was forgotten. Eye contact was forbidden unless absolutely necessary. The steadfast rules were attributed to comfort, and that was the explanation that Greg gave his son. However, he knew that his body was not long for this earth. In the hotel room where he would pass, Greg Universe could tell that the earth was rejecting him. Footsteps and motion itself tormented parts of his body that he did not know could be pained. He shut the door and stripped off all of his clothing, throwing it away like it was acidic. His bloodied sweat had soaked through the cotton. Breathing became impossible. His skin, his tongue, the feeling that he even had a corporeal form, was starting to punish Greg Universe. Existence was developing immunity to the virus of his self. As his mind had rejected the earth and all of the world outside of his deceased beloved, the world of the living was beginning to reject him. Greg Universe died with no further progress on the quest that had pushed him out into the land to begin with.
Steven discovered this meaning on the second day of his father's disappearance. The first day was spent waiting for him in the bed of the van, rising only to use the restroom and to check the front of the car wash, debating whether to open up the business to any customers, none of whom seemed interested on that day. Upon waking the next morning and knowing that Greg Universe was not going to return, Steven started to search for money, for keys to any locked secrets, and for any food that he could save. It was the end of the summer. He was eleven years old.
There were several empty journals underneath the cash drawer of the car wash. Only one of them had been written in, and its pages were yellowed from the decades prior when Steven realized his father had first written in them. The man had been in high school when he started to catalogue the ramblings and diary entries, doodling in the margins various adolescent obscenities and visions of himself as a rich man with his music and girlfriends. The diary entries reflected the man's lack of discipline, as Steven discovered, with months and even years between entries. Rose's name took up an entire page, scribbled in the cursive of someone who clearly had learned cursive as a child and had then rejected it on the basis that it was a useless subject.
Soon after, Greg's handwriting stayed within the lines, and Steven could read each word clearly in print as he followed his father's eventual life from the boy's birth to the moment of departure. In his words, the man spoke of the illness of life's rejection that had plagued him, the strangeness of the phantom pains and the horror with which he realized his only viable option.
This was his eventual quest: to find a cure for his broken heart in another Rose Quartz gemstone, in another alien warrior with whom he had first fallen in love. Only then could this strangeness be adjudicated and the rejection reversed. Steven thought this to be a foolish thought, as he did not know of his father's illness. But his supposition was unknowingly correct, as Greg Universe would not have been cured even with the discovery of another Gem partner. The disease came from within his own heart, a servant of loss and hope in a future that could not come. Reality had come to loathe Greg Universe because he had nothing but contempt for the present, and as an ignorant extension contempt for all who were with him. Each night after Steven's birth, he would indulge in nightmares of his hands crushing the infant's skull, tearing it apart like a dandelion bloom until he dug out a fresh Rose gemstone from the gray tendrils, his wife's life trapped within. Each morning after Steven's birth, he would forget this dream and wake satisfied but deeply disturbed by the lost images of the night before. He did not write any of this down. He did not consider the blatant gem available on Steven's stomach, because it was the boy's own, and he hated the symbol of Rose Quartz so separate from her own life. He could not separate Steven from the idea of death.
In his father's tome, Steven saw the man's sickness as just that: a disease, a malady, a cancerous heartache whose onus sprouted from Steven's existence. The boy wept for his own confusion, one hand holding his stomach and the other crumbling the pages and pages damning his childish ignorance of the pain he caused.
The moment passed with practicality. Although he was a child prone to his emotions and often vexed by the power of his own heart, there was no choice. Greg Universe was no longer his parent and no longer part of his life. The summer was ending and soon the dampness of the northeastern autumn would give way to the bite of winter. Steven stood and took in the solemnity of the car wash, sighing to himself as if there were some silent arbiter who did not wish to be disturbed. There was no cause, and soon Steven worked with the abandon of one who has himself been abandoned, with all the eyes of the world turned away from him.
The van was the obvious shelter from the coming storms, as the metal building was not insulated or protected by much. His father's traveling home was now his own, and he lived and tidied as any homeowner would. Steven's diligence was well-meaning but ultimately unnecessary. Having moved out the extraneous belongings – empty photograph frames, instruments out of tune and warped by the sea air, rusting electronics from a bygone era, vinyl records and a broken record player, clothes that would not fit Steven for ages, fading government records that were practically indecipherable – the van had no breath of life inside. Nobody had lived there; they had merely existed.
The first night alone was not the hardest. Steven was unconsciously overwhelmed by adrenaline over the course of the day of abandonment, so much so that he had not felt the urge to eat, only imbibing from the plastic water cooler in the hallway of the car wash. He slept naked and dreamless, sprawled in exhaustion underneath a flannel quilt with the doors open to the breeze.
So ended the first day, and the last day of the summertime; seasonal transitions faded in a gradient of the sun, the same sun that had baked the beaches at the turn of the century.
Still suffering in the haze of hunger and the lingering September heat, Steven wandered onto the beach. It had been a short number of days since Greg Universe had left, and the boy had subsided on vending machine snacks and the water cooler. The machine's coin slot had been easy to pry open, and the child would sit at its base and savor each salty chip and stale cookie, fearing the day that he would be having breath mints for breakfast.
Stomach pains from his new diet prodded at the boy's intestines as he walked down the shoreline. The tourism trade did not bring many to Beach City; it was a residential town without the same northeast draw as its metropolitan counterparts. Steven was alone, and he did not know whether or not to be grateful for his isolation. He had never interacted with any members of the town for a significant period of time, and they were like wraiths in his peripheral vision, catching his eye as they walked behind restaurants, or as they packed up their cars to drive off into the dense farmland of the city limits.
When Greg Universe came to the town, the relationship between him and Beach City was instant and irreversible. He came to each restaurant as if he had grown up in the doorway, wandering between shops with the casual respect of a man with no home but the earth. However, the birth of Steven removed him from the life of the boardwalk and the old bricks. He walked to the corner store like a ghost, passing through any conversations, any condolences from the men and women who had at one point thought about considering him a friend. Steven grew without that bonding, as if Beach City was not a real town but a wilderness of rubble and yellowing lightbulbs, populated by concerned faces, by the transient tuts and glances, by meaningless questions that belied the genuine worry that Greg Universe was not well. All of those worries were correct and meaningless.
Now, walking along the beach, Steven wondered in his heart about what they thought of him. The populace did not regard him with concern as far as he knew. He was an animal in a cage of his father's arms. They might not have known that Greg Universe was even gone; he had taken what little savings he scraped together and bought an olive sedan, functional enough to get him out of the town, leaving his stenciled van behind. The only part of the van he had taken was the gas he had siphoned into the sedan's tank while Steven slept inside.
Steven questioned why he was even here on the beach. He was no fisherman, and had it not been for the sea wind salting his cheeks he knew he would smell the stickiness of fried foods from the boardwalk. But his feet had compelled him here, sandals sinking into the sun-soaked pebbles, absorbing their warmth graciously.
Compelling urges forced each leg in front of the other, a steady padding of the boy's body pacing over the sands. A metallic interruption startled Steven, and the texture of the ground itself made him look down. Beneath his feet, a chain-link fence had fallen, a decade of the ocean rusting its once-impressive twists and squares. It seemed to stretch for several feet, and had at one point blocked off a section of the beach. The sign of warning was too chipped to read, leaving only furrows in the wood and the occasional splash of red paint.
Steven continued despite his stomach urging him in the opposite direction. Burning curiosity enveloped him as it always had. His life was filled with unnatural questions and few answers, a curse of living that had sat uncomfortably underneath his tongue. The child saw, for example, the strange rounded outcroppings on the cliff. Approaching further, the outcroppings turned into the shape of fingers, an outstretched hand, connected to the figure of an eight-armed giantess. The statue was the size of the entire hill itself, smooth shale shaped with the expertise of ancients, covered in lichen and razor grass. The lighthouse blinked above her head, two stoic faces melded into one with lips like a sloping plateau, surrounded by intricate curls draped down to the statue's shoulders. Upon seeing the enormity of the ageless edifice, Steven collapsed into the sand on his knees, in both pain and deference.
He could not go any closer. The energy of this place spoke to him in a manner impossible for him to process. Steven clutched at his stomach, but his fingers found their way around the gemstone embedded in his flesh. In the moment, he prayed for the strength to tear it out and throw it back towards the woman before him, the stoic and expressionless monster that seemed to channel all of her calm questioning into his belly. The stone ached, ached like nothing in Steven's body had ever ached before. It was as if raw flesh were being assaulted by the power of the stone and the dawn of ages, each generation's lives and deaths pressing upon his inhumanity. The boy could not handle the immense pressure of the statue and ground his teeth in bitter confusion. Why had his feet taken him here? What had drawn him? Abandoned and entombed, the temple was a monument to lost causes. Bitterness seeped between Steven's teeth, dribble falling from his lips and making sandy spheres on the beach beneath him.
Although not obvious from the years of disrepair, the abandonment of the temple was more recent than some of the other developments that it had undergone since its inception. Following the war that preceded human civilization, the Crystal Gems and their refuge sat apart from the changing world, merely observing and wandering, finding a meaning of home in a world apart. The events of Rose Quartz and Greg Universe had been catastrophically ended, and though efforts were made by the Crystal Gems to mend fences with the man, he shut all three of them out of his life; they reminded him of the woman he was attempting to find again, and none of their wildly variable personalities were enough to make him forget and to recapture that lost spark of love. Greg Universe turned his fear of the Crystal Gems into a hatred, and then he turned the hatred into a forgetful ambivalence, one with which the postmortem journey could exist.
Garnet tried the hardest to find herself in Greg's good graces. Amethyst had given up to anger and isolated herself in her room, destroying thousands of years of relics and putting them back together, annihilating the past with her bare and battered hands. Pearl had not bothered to try, avoiding Greg Universe and silently thanking whatever higher powers had given her reason to finally and truly hate him. But Pearl never could; it was not in her heart to hate from jealousy, and with Rose gone, there was no reason for the jealousy to continue. Emptiness became her, and she watched Amethyst destroy her belongings before she would silently repair them to be broken once more in the next fit of rage. Garnet came back to the car wash at the moments where she knew Greg would have to confront her. Though she saw a future where he broke down and loved once again, the path grew fainter by the years as the human's disease progressed. His relationship with the world was short-lived and filled with aches that Garnet knew were not of this earth. She would stand, then, and listen to the sounds of Steven laughing or humming or sighing or crying, wondering what sort of child he was, trying to see the path of his life. As Greg Universe became more and more detached from the world, so did Garnet lose her sight with the Universe family. Father and son became branching paths leading into hundreds of thousands of tributaries, none of which made their way to the paths of the Crystal Gems again. In the temple, surrounded by destruction, Garnet wept to herself, each neatly packaged thought becoming grayer and more distant by the second. Finally, she brought herself into Amethyst's room and declared to Amethyst and Pearl that there was no reason to stay in this temple. On the first day of the summer when Steven would turn eight years old, the Crystal Gems became nomads, warping to other parts of the planet and vowing to never return to the strange town where they had witnessed human life like no other and left behind a boy with no future.
Now, on the beach in front of the abandoned temple, Steven had only the strength to pull himself up from the ground and run as fast as his feet could take him towards the car wash. His sandals fell off as he ran, and his bare feet pounded on the concrete and the asphalt of Beach City's streets. He did not remember coming back to the floor of the van, or passing out, or the dreamlessness that encompassed him. Muted mists covered the early morning as he awoke, unsure of his own sanity and horribly dehydrated. Steven hobbled inside the car wash, drank a cup of warm water, used the restroom, and spent the hour afterwards plucking beggar-ticks and burrs from where they had pricked his soft soles.
He had not been told about his mother. Resting in hunger, Steven thought about Rose Quartz and the few images he had been allowed to see over the years. Her face was soft and round, like his was, with the same dark and starry eyes like the oil that covered the ocean at night. Curls of unkempt hair twisted around his fingers as he thought of the pink cascades of his mother, and the immensity of her figure. Greg Universe spoke about her like she was a historical figure, like she was a political bewigged statue made of plaster instead of a sentient being. The man's face would harden like ash-wood the longer he spoke, until his lips became firm and unforgiving, and he would not say a word to Steven until the next day.
A strand of hair caught on Steven's fingernail where it had been chewed down to the nub, and he stopped stroking his scalp to consider what he should be doing next. Food preparation was his most dire need, but before he tackled that beast, he decided to take a bath with the hose and tub of the car wash; there was no such amenity included in the building's rest area.
Morning brought sunshine and hunger. Steven hated the thought, but he considered somehow stealing food from the unguarded places of the boardwalk. The first problem of the plan was moral, but in such a time, that obstacle had no place obscuring his needs, and it remained a vestigial probe digging into the base of his skull. The second problem was the population of the town and the languid ease with which it conducted its business. There were simply not enough people to be a distraction for a boy like himself, at least not in the daytime where there would be plentiful meals. Trash bins and dumpsters were possibilities, although Steven shuddered at the thought. It was the most moral option, in a strict childish logic, the kind of logic that could get him killed – although he was unaware of the extent of those ramifications, as those who use childish logic often are. Nevertheless, Steven decided to try, or at least to observe until he could find a viable option.
Behind the fry shop the child found buckets of potato peels. Having gone through the day worrying himself to the deepest hunger, he pulled out a rind and chewed, gagging on the earthen taste of raw potato and the dust of its skin. A rotten eye desecrating his tongue finally made him spit out the rest of the peel, but not before half of a length had already settled in his stomach like a tapeworm. In his head, he imagined it to be growing there, unwinding in his stomach and growing roots from the eyes, poking through his soft tissue and wrapping its tendrils around his gemstone. He abandoned the back of the fry shop with grit in his teeth and a trail of earthen disgust in his footsteps. He did not have shoes.
Walking from store to store revealed no secret to him. His heart and stomach sank upon rounding each corner and vying for the attention of whatever patron saint could bless him with a meal. The pale plaster and enticing stripes of the boardwalk did not give up their magic to any who walked past, but were sirens of the coins stuffed into slot machines and arcade games, the thin covering of handmade ice cream and sticky pizza, tourists with deep pockets and deeper bellies. Steven felt like he was going to vomit from hunger, having never gone a night without a true meal in his life. The contradictory reaction balanced out what little lucidity he had left, once more propelling his feet without the courtesy of voluntary motion to guide them both along.
The benches welcomed his soreness and soothed the muscles of Steven's legs for as long as he could will himself to stay still. Hopelessness was not a feeling with which Steven was acquainted, and he had little understanding of how to describe it to himself. The primary reaction was disbelief, of course, although the boy could just as well have disbelieved all of the events that had preceded his arrival to the boardwalk.
His father's abandonment had not surprised him, and that fact in itself made Steven grip the wood underneath him with a strange ferocity that splintered the planks but did not break the soft skin of his palms. Whatever memories had come to him when he read his father's journal were simple and malleable, as digestible as the food that was tantalizingly out of Steven's reach. He remembered a hug, a smile, simple motions that reinforced the unreality of Greg Universe's subtle cruelty. Steven did not remember those moments out of ignorance, perhaps, or simply from the fact that his soul was blind to the truth of a man who claimed to love him. Steven did not remember the many, many nights where he had woken up alone, where he had stayed awake and afraid until Greg Universe returned from a night of searching for the lost Rose Quartz, following a desperate portent from a falsified dream. Steven did not remember waking in the back of the van as Greg Universe drove from city to city, distinctly ignoring the questions that Steven tried to ask, as if the man's own soul was blind as well to that cruelty he was inflicting in search of a love that could not exist on this planet again. And once more, Steven's sleep was interrupted in a past he did not recall, mere days before his father left, where the man had pulled up his son's shirt and had stared at the naked stomach before him, at the gemstone rising and falling with Steven's curious breaths. One shaking hand cupped the stone as the other disappeared where the child could not see, and Steven stared at the pained expression on his father's face. The sound of strained breath and hidden fabric filled the space of the van before Greg Universe finally made a sound Steven had never heard. The man stared at his son with an animal hatred that was dampened only by the darkness before he left the vehicle's bed and went to wash his hands of his abhorrence.
Steven did not remember these things at all. Reason was pushed into the back of his brain as the force of pity put the memories aside, never to resurface, never to be understood. All the pain of a life undeserving of pain, all the confusion of a child in an uncompromising world – the abrasion was devolved for Steven's sake. Chemical or magical, there was nothing in his head which allowed the nature of a diseased man to upset the balance of his growth. Circumstance forced the pain of abandonment, but that was as far as the universe seemed to allow. As he sat, Steven found himself grateful for a reason he could not place.
He was joined shortly after by a stranger. Her presence upset him for a reason that he could not place, but Steven recognized after that he had not been around children his age before. She seemed to be the same age, anyway, though he did not ask and would not ask for several meetings thereafter. The girl wore sensible jeans and non-slip shoes, with an ironed white blouse which had clearly been picked out for her by someone who cared more about her appearance than she did. She had dark skin and black hair that reached down almost to her waist, twisted in clean waves that shimmered in the sun. Upon her lap rested a freshly bound novel and a plastic container with her lunch – chicken, spinach, and other garden vegetables wrapped in unleavened bread. Her name was Connie Maheswaran.
The stranger staring at her food would have made her uncomfortable if he hadn't appeared so strangely helpless. For all the strengths in his body and the clear independence in his presence, she understood within a moment that Steven would not harm her for as long as the Earth existed. Thusly, she offered him one of the two wraps from her lunch. With equal measures of caution and confusion, Steven accepted; when their hands touched, he noticed the clear and slender motions of her fingers, trained to be both strong and delicate for reasons he couldn't quite imagine.
"I'm Connie," she said, picking up her own wrap before she took too much pity upon this odd, quiet boy. She asked him his name in return as they began to eat. Through circumstance, the rest of the boardwalk was quiet for the remainder of their conversation, leaving a peaceful channel for the children interrupted only by words, waves, and the sound of Steven suppressing a cough as he voraciously satisfied his gnawing hunger.
"Steven," he swallowed. "Universe."
He had not thought of it as an odd name, and neither did Connie. She asked him where he lived, and he told her and pointed in the vague direction of the car wash. Connie lived with her parents in the recently finished stretch of modern houses away from the coast. They had moved for some reason her parents were vague about. Her father was in a security firm and her mother was a family practitioner and surgeon. The other details about her life were at once trivial, unknown, and easily uncovered with simple observations. She took small bites of her food and chewed carefully before swallowing without a sound. Adolescent muscle tone showed each sport she was forced to partake in and exactly where they had strengthened her. Connie's clothes fit perfectly and yet remained out of place, as if she was treated like a mannequin before being displayed to a public who did not think twice about her appearance. And yet, she was also happy, satisfied with a life of energetic pleasures and contrived structure, a human life. Steven did not tell her about his problems for the moment; her kindness was enough.
After they had both finished, Connie picked up her book and her plastic container, now empty, saying that her parents were going to pick her up soon. Steven nodded and shook the wooden splinters from his palms. For the first time that he could consciously remember that day, he smiled as he mentioned that it was nice to meet her. Perhaps, he added, it would be possible for them to see each other again on the boardwalk.
Connie adjusted her glasses and smiled. "Only if you promise to bring shoes. Aren't you worried about getting your feet hurt?"
The food from the afternoon with Connie sustained Steven until the nighttime as he lay in the back of the van. Darkness and the coolness of the evening caressed his eyelids, but his body refused to cooperate and let him sleep. Some other insomnia propelled him into a moment of questioning. He still had not figured out how he was going to survive the winter months, and after then there was no chance he could sustain himself for much longer. Steven was a child, and he had nobody left in this world to take care of him. His father was not coming back.
But perhaps there was hope after all, even in the face of hunger. The encompassing hunger of the world was solemn and as smothering as the night, but there was light all around that permeated his fears. Steven could feel the stars even when there was no light in his eyes, that power, power from hundreds of thousands of miles away that struck his heart with the pinpricks of determination. What life was worth living, though? The question dismissed itself as quickly as it had arrived, and Steven stood in the van with his fists clenched as he brought them up to his face and smelled the sweat and the paint chips and the breadcrumbs on his fingertips. What life was worth living indeed. But somehow, Steven felt the urge to live, that inescapable push to continue on a path of uncertainty, shrouded not by darkness but by nothingness, by all the shapes and colors that the world had no names for and would never label until they revealed themselves as the key to the end of the world. The path of his life would be paved with the bodies of creatures unknown by mankind, the handprints he would leave in the dirt every time he collapsed to his knees, just as he had in front of the temple, beset by the horrors of his own past. They tormented him and tortured him, but there were answers. There were always answers.
Aren't you worried? she had asked.
He was not worried. Steven Universe lifted his shirt and put both hands on his belly, sighing as he rested in the warmth of his gemstone and respected the hunger that rumbled underneath his fingers. It was the humanity inside him, and the magic amalgamation of his body was not enough to take that away. Tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, he would find Connie again and show her the quartz in his flesh. He did not know what she was going to say, or even how he was going to start the conversation. But as far as the boy could tell, she was the only one in the world who could care about him for reasons he would not understand for many days. It was a presumptuous, stupid feeling, and it made Steven smile to the night as he imagined a new conversation where he could tell her everything. In the winter, long after he had found a way to survive, shortly after a death he would never know, Steven would tell her everything. He knew so little, but he would say it all.
On that day of the first snowflake falling, Steven Universe curled up and touched the place on his thigh where the key had marked him. He arranged the van's blankets and pillows, wishing that he had no longer run out of gas. But he remembered, and he remembered her words, and he waited until, hours later, there was a knock on the back door of the van. Connie had never been one to sneak out, but tonight was the one exception, the first of many that she would undergo in the years to come until Steven and her parents finally met and she had the chance to introduce her only friend. The two children spread a blanket over themselves as Connie brought out the book that she had bought a month earlier, now dog-eared and flexible. She cleared her throat as Steven clicked on the flashlight, holding it steady. Connie started on the first chapter, and by the second chapter's ending Steven was gently snoring against the back wall of the van. With all the dexterity she had, Connie tucked the blankets around his body and closed the door. The hunger in Steven's head was replaced with fantasies of angels and monsters, young women with swords and flying machines, futuristic cities made of obsidian and glistening so brightly under two unforgiving suns.