"He wasn't a hundred feet tall," Steven said irritably. "Maybe ten or twelve, tops."
For once Hermione was sitting with Ron and Harry, although she occasionally gave Ron a cautious glance.
"I heard you saved the lives of Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall," Ron said enthusiastically. He didn't bother to close his mouth when he was eating.
Hermione looked disgusted, but she didn't bother to correct him. It was an improvement over her previous behavior; she'd have lectured him for sure.
Ron on the other hand...he seemed to do well enough with boys, but he just didn't know how to act around girls. Harry had a touch of that too, but he'd been locked in a cupboard for the last ten years.
Maybe it was because he'd been raised in a family of almost all boys.
"It was just two prefects," Steven said. "People keep making more of it than it was."
Ron grinned. "I heard you woke that Hufflepuff girl prefect with a kiss."
Steven scowled at Ron. "I've got healing spit. I applied it with my hand."
"You saved the entire first year of Hufflepuffs from a troll," Hermione said firmly, with a glance at Ron. "It should have been worth more than ten points."
Steven shrugged. "They probably don't want to encourage people to go troll hunting."
Ron snorted. "Nobody would be that barmy."
"How'd you learn to fight like that?" Harry asked.
"Pearl taught me," Steven said. He stared at his bowl of porridge. "Me and Connie. Connie is a lot better at it than I am...and we mostly learned to fight as a team. It was weird fighting alone."
He felt his mood blacken as it always did when he thought about Connie or his father, or any of this friends from Beach City. It was easier just to focus on the present. If he thought about any of them, or the crystal gems, he tended to feel bleak and empty.
He forced himself to smile.
"At least you'll be getting to play today," He said to Harry, hoping to change the subject.
He glanced back at the Hufflepuff table and forced himself not to wince at the expressions on the faces of his classmates. Hero worship wasn't something that he was used to; it certainly wasn't something he'd ever wanted.
Even the older 'Puffs stared at him when they thought he wasn't looking. They weren't all that good at being sneaky.
Harry smiled and said, "I hope I do well."
"You're our secret weapon," Ron said, more loudly than he probably should have. "There's no way we can lose."
The entire crowd gasped as Harry's broom buckled from under him.
"Somebody's hexed it," Hermione said grimly.
She kept looking at Snape, who was staring up at Harry and muttering. To Steven it looked like he was trying to protect Harry, not hurt him, but he'd never been able to convince Hermione that Snape was a decent person.
She stood up and began making her way along the bleachers.
Steven grimaced; there wasn't time to worry about it. If Harry fell from this height, he could easily be hurt or possibly even die. Steven wasn't all that sure about how fragile normal people were, although he knew they were a lot more than he was.
Now Harry was hanging by one hand.
Steven pushed his way forward, but by the time he reached the front of the crowd, Harry was already falling.
People don't poof. They only got hurt.
He lunged forward, but he was too slow. The world seemed to slow around him, but he just wasn't fast enough.
Somehow Harry had managed to keep hold of the broom as he fell and he was able to pull it out of the dive at the last minute, rolling to a stop in a move that Steven himself would have been pleased to accomplish.
He coughed, and the snitch popped into his hand.
Steven stopped. Harry looked to be all right, but it easily could have happened the other way. He hadn't been fast enough again. Any of the gems would have been able to save Harry easily, but Steven was always too slow.
If he'd been faster, maybe Lapis and Lion would still be...
He shook his head, ignoring the cheering of the crowd around him as he walked off the field.
Hero worship; what a laugh. If only everyone knew.
Away from the Quidditch pitch, the castle was strangely deserted. Everyone was still down celebrating the Gryffindor win. Steven hadn't been in the castle when it was this empty.
He wandered; even when he heard the sounds of the students returning to the lower level, he ignored it.
Sometimes he wondered what he was doing here. Was he just biding his time until the gems woke up? Was Hogwarts just some kind of holding pen for someone who was too inconvenient to deal with otherwise.
Even when the gems woke up, what sort of life would they have?
They'd been the guardians of the earth, spending most of their time fighting corrupted gem monsters and being the caretakers of gem facilities that had deteriorated over the last six thousand years.
They wouldn't even have a temple to live in.
He couldn't see Amethyst or Garnet getting a job. Pearl maybe...she'd be a good teacher. What would they do with their time, now that they had thousands of years with no purpose other than to take care of Steven.
And what would happen when he was gone? Would he live a normal human lifespan or would he live much longer?
What would happen when he finally poofed. Would he be reborn without his human limitations? Or would his mother finally re-emerge?
In his old life he'd rarely let himself wonder about those things. There was always so much to do, people to see and monsters to fight.
In this new world though...he wasn't a wizard, not really.
He'd always been a creature with one foot in each world, neither gem nor human, but it hadn't really mattered that much in Beach City. People had accepted him for who he was, and the gems had loved him.
Here...he didn't know how long it would be before the gems woke up. Would he be an adult by that time?
What sort of role did he see for himself in this new world?
Maybe an auror. He liked helping people, keeping them from getting hurt. He was uneasy about all these memory charms he heard they did on Muggles, but maybe he could just help fight bad wizards.
Or maybe he could work with plants. His mother had loved plants, and he seemed to have a lot of talent in herbology.
Maybe even working as a healer; Professor Snape had expressed an interest in experimenting with his spit, which seemed somewhat more effective than usual wizard methods of healing.
His natural optimism reasserted itself. He'd make a place for the gems. If they didn't wake up for a long time, he would create a home for them.
If they woke earlier, they'd make a home together.
In the distance, he heard someone walking. He scowled. He didn't feel like talking to anyone right now. After his failure on the Quidditch pitch...
There was an open door to his right; he slipped through it.
It looked like an unused classroom, except that in the corner was a magnificent mirror, as high as the ceiling. It stood on two clawed feet.
He closed the door quietly behind him and he slipped forward.
The mirror had an inscription; Erised something...he didn't know any of the words.
Looking at himself in the mirror, he looked pale and drained. But there was something...there were other people in the mirror.
The gems were there!
He was holding hands with Connie, and his dad was behind him with his hand on his shoulder.
His mom was there too, behind his dad, as impossible as it was that they could both exist in the same world at the same time.
And there was Lion! And Lapis and Peridot.
He slowly sank to his knees, his eyes on the mirror before him. He couldn't look away; this was everything he had ever wanted. His family happy and together.
He reached forward wistfully to touch the mirror, hoping that somehow instead of being a mirror it was a portal, like the one he'd come through to find this world.
It was hard and flat and cold, unyielding.
Only a reflection, then, but still everything.
He couldn't look away.