Flower Child, Ch. 21, "Dying"
CW: Medical Trauma; Near-Death Experience
I.
Wednesday, July 11th, 7:07AM:
Steven: Hey, lapis, I love you.
Lapis: i love you too steven??
Lapis: is everything okay?
Lapis: steven??
“Garnet?”
She was such a light sleeper these days—so primed to be alert at the slightest provocation of any danger—that within one strained whisper of her name, Garnet’s dual colored eyes wrenched open and immediately centered upon Steven Universe.
She took him in all at once, desperately inhaled him even, like he was the last drag of a dying cigarette. Every detail was painfully stark in the thin light streaming in from the window—the emaciation of his frame and the paper-whiteness of his skin, the shallow way that his throat seemed to haul in every second breath.
All those tubes and wires and lines.
They were violating him; they were saving him. Hurting him. Healing him. He could not live without them; was being infested with machinery really the fucking same as being alive?
A far more mature person than herself would have had the wisdom and capacity to answer truthfully.
Yes, Garnet insisted nonetheless and all the same.
She lied to herself; she did what it took to get through the goddamn day.
Steven was turned on his side as much as his extensive medical apparatus would allow, staring at her from the depths of nearly black eyes. They were cavernous in their sockets—hollowed out and simply ruinous—and they sought something from her.
Dull as they were, as depleted, and as clearly sick, they pleaded.
Garnet leaned forward abruptly—aggravating all of her clenched muscles—and reached through one of the guard rails so she could check Steven’s temperature with the back of her hand, her knuckles skimming his forehead. He was cold to the touch, his circulation increasingly poor, but she flinched involuntarily as though he was one hundred degrees feverish and burning.
“Steven,” she immediately said, moving her hand back, withdrawing. (Coward that she was—that she had never claimed not to be.) “What’s wrong? Are you hurting?”
“No,” came a quiet reply, barely audible.
Garnet desperately wanted to believe him, but he had not been himself in nearly a week now.
He had chronic kidney disease.
The most likely probability was that he was hurting all over.
“You called my name,” she said a little stupidly.
It was impossible to break his gaze, to capably look away. Every second with him nowadays was like a particle of sand, always slipping through her fingers. She wanted to capture every moment, score them into her palms with the lifelines that were already there. She was possessive, inconsolable, terrified out of her fucking mind. (Where had all the time gone? She wondered to herself. She panicked. She looked backwards at all the memories of the fourteen-year old before the sickness, before the consumptive disease—his bright eyes and his beautiful laughter, the habitual smile crooked at the corner of his mouth, his boundless, all-boyish energy. She saw him now, as he was, in the present moment, with his skin stretched taut over the pronounced architecture of his bones. Where had all the time gone? She wanted to cry. Scream. Punch something. Break it. Hard. She wanted to run.Fundamentally, she could not look away.)
A slight jerk of his head—she took this to be a nod.
“I always liked your cookies the best, Garnet,” he rasped quietly. “The chocolate chip ones. You put a lot of brown sugar in them. You would let me lick the spoon.”
Garnet’s throat could have burnt a hole through her skin; tears pricked her eyes that she did not attempt to wipe away.
“You like my cookies, Steven,” she said, emphasizing the present tense, insisting upon it, almost demanding it. “My mum’s special recipe.”
“Yeah.” A sickly smile twisted the boy’s chapped lips. It was not lovely. It was far from joyful to behold. “Pearl always gets so mad because you won’t tell her the secret ingredient. You tease her. You tell her that it’s—”
“—love,” Garnet instinctively finished the sentence for him, and her tears flowed openly now, down her cheeks, down the exposed column of her neck.
Steven’s horrible smile only grew, stretching across his face like dough.
“Steven, no,” she shook her head hoarsely, pleading with him now.
Begging.
She reached through the side rail again and covered his hand with her own, half-crazed with the idea that if she held onto him, if she didn’t let go, she could tether him to this world, keep him close to her.
Keep him safe.
She had always kept him safe.
“I love you, Garnet,” Steven only whispered, his eyes warm, his skin so utterly cold.
“Shh,” she admonished hoarsely, rubbing circles into his hand. “Save your strength.”
It was the kindest way that she could figure out how to say, Don’t talk like this.
I can’t bear to listen.
He nodded weakly to show that he understood, but she imagined that she could see it in his eyes—how sad that he was, perhaps disappointed even. He had expected better of her, and she had failed to meet the crucial mark, let alone surpass it. But even still and all the same, he was placating her, consoling her, being the veritable adult between him when she was nearly forty and he was merely fourteen.
Garnet looked away, harshly wiping her cheek on her shoulder.
She couldn’t really bear that either.
II.
Wednesday, July 11, 8:25 AM:
Steven: i love you peridot
Peridot: NO.
Peridot: Steven, I know what this means.
Peridot: You’re not allowed to give me this “I love you” crap now. I won’t accept it.
Peridot: Steven!!
Pearl hugged herself tightly, for Room 11037 was an uncomfortably crowded place to be. According to the clock on the wall, it was 8:30 on the dot—time for morning rounds—which meant that Dr. Maheswaran and one of her surgical interns had arrived to give their daily update on Steven’s status and care plan. With herself, Garnet, Amethyst, and Greg added to the mix, the tiny space was simply too full, brimming over, suffocating, and that wasn’t even accounting for any of the bulky machines that took up precious oxygen either. The sundry monitors. The dialysis machine. The IV pump with at least nine bags swinging gallows-like from the gleaming pole. And so, Pearl sat primly on the edge of Steven’s bed and hugged herself.
Tried to make herself that much smaller.
Partitioned herself into an invisible box and tucked herself into a corner at the dead center of the room.
It wasn’t an especially hard feat.
She was already eroded—one errant touch more and she would crumble to atoms and dust.
Granted, she supposed that wasn’t particularly unique to anyone who loved Steven. They were all ruined in their own ways, punctured and thoroughly excavated—the pitifully enduring shells of the people they once were, empty, cadaverous, all drained to the lees. If Pearl had dark circles carved beneath her eyes and a certain hauntedness to her slim physique, then they all surely did; if she had barely slept seven hours in two nights, then Garnet, Amethyst, and Greg were her stalwart companions in the trenches, staring at nothing through all hours of the dragging night, waiting for a morning that seemed like it would never come.
Even Dr. Maheswaran, who made it her higher calling to seem put-together, appeared to be something just shy of demolished, the lines beneath her eyes stark, a clipboard clenched between drawn and shivering hands.
They all loved Steven Universe.
They would not survive losing him.
For all this, though, Pearl tried very hard not to look at him—(so small, so deteriorated, so lifeless in that far-too-big hospital bed)—because he was doing an equally marvelous job at not looking at any of them, his dark eyes fixated on some point on the far wall. Garnet had texted the group chat and said that he was having a rough morning, that he’d said some weird things when he had first gotten up.
Like what?
She had initially typed out before stopping herself, suddenly nauseous: unmade, unraveled, undone. She had realized—in that infinitesimal moment—that she didn’t want to know, that she had finally reached the point where she could not take one freaking iota of bad news more. She had cried on him last night, had wept like she was a child and he could offer her some semblance of comfort.
Like he was her savior.
Like he was Rose.
She felt guilty for that even now, sitting next to his blanketed feet. She reached backwards without glancing behind her and placed a hand on his ankle.
“Stephens,” Dr. Maheswaran said, nodding curtly at her intern, a young woman in scrubs. She was blonde, and her hair was twisted in a rather high ponytail. Pearl thought she vaguely recognized her as being a newer addition to Priyanka's service. “You’re up. Present our case.”
Dr. Stephens swallowed nervously at being addressed by her superior, but she stepped up nonetheless, scrutinizing the clipboard cradled in her arms like it contained the most important test that she would ever take.
“Steven Universe, fourteen-years old. End stage renal disease,” she enunciated in a jarringly professional tone. Out of the corner of her eye, Pearl saw Greg flinch where he stood next to the head of Steven’s bed. Even though they had heard this spiel before—dozens of times, in fact, day-in and day-out—it never got any easier to listen to their child become an assemblage of medical jargon on a chart.
“He was admitted ten days ago after a severe hypotensive collapse. We have since transfused him once, administered dialysis treatments three-to-four times a week, and continued to monitor his vitals.” Dr. Stephens glanced at the screen on the wall above the hospital bed, and everyone looked with her. The topmost number read 124, and the continuous line measuring Steven’s heart was littered with short, sharp peaks. The young intern bit her pale lower lip.
“In the past few days, Steven has displayed indications of atrial fibrillation… or, a-fib as it’s more commonly known as. Um, shortened breath, chest pains, increased fatigue, and a rapid heartbeat. Per our pediatric cardiologist’s recommendation, he has been dosed with intravenous antiarrhythmics and anticoagulants to try and regulate the arrhythmia… however, Steven’s condition has not adequately responded to these interventions and further treatment will be necessary to stabilize him.”
“Jesus fuck,” Pearl heard Amethyst groan from somewhere behind her, followed by a slight thumping sound and a constricted yelp, which she fairly assumed to be Garnet elbowing their youngest roommate.
“Good, Stephens,” Priyanka acknowledged with a sigh. She hadn’t stopped studying the heart monitor, her gaze hooded, lips melded into a perpetual frown. “Now, can you tell me the three common treatments for a-fib when medicines aren’t working?”
Dr. Stephens quickly ticked them off on her fingers.
“Catheter ablation, chemical cardioversion, and electrical cardioversion.”
“And why is catheter ablation immediately off the table?”
“Because it’s a moderately lengthy procedure, and we want to minimize the time that Steven is under anesthesia since he had an adverse reaction to sedatives recently.”
“Excellent,” Dr. Maheswaran said, though she sounded neither proud nor pleased. “How about chemical cardioversion then? Would you recommend itas a potential treatment given Steven’s medical history?”
Though she was listening attentively, taking notes in the meticulous tablet of her mind, Pearl lightly drummed her fingers against her knee in a singular betrayal of her own impatience; she cerebrally understood that the nephrologist had to teach her student, that it was Dr. Stephens’s right as a burgeoning physician to test her mettle in a way that actually mattered…
… but though she disagreed with Amethyst’s crass choice of words, she couldn’t help but think that she’d had a point when she said, Jesus fuck.
Her skin itched to hear Steven’s case laid out so factually.
So brutally.
But then again, she supposed that the facts of Steven’s case were indeed brutal; that was just end stage renal disease.
(Steven was sick.)
(Steven was dy—)
“Uh,” Dr. Stephens hesitated, her brow pinched, clearly trying to discern if this was some kind of trick question. She must have seen something in Priyanka’s severe expression that told her otherwise, though, because she continued somewhat more confidently. “No, Dr. Maheswaran. Steven’s hemodynamic instability does not make him the most suitable candidate for chemical cardioversion. Plus, we already have indicators that it wouldn’t succeed given his resistance to the beta blockers we administered for his a-fib.”
At this unsettling pronouncement, Dr. Maheswaran’s attentive gaze finally moved from the heart monitor to her patient, and something complicatedcrossed her usually stoic face, something horrible and something forbidding. Pearl tightened the grip she had on Steven’s ankle and continued to resist the urge to look at him—lest she find something complicated and horrible and forbidding in his expression too.
“Which leaves us with?”
“Electrical cardioversion,” Dr. Stephens supplied, frowning gently. “Delivering a synchronized defibrillation to Steven’s heart while he is under sedation in order to hopefully return it to a sinus rhythm. It is a non-invasive, quick, and generally effective procedure, which is ideal in a precarious case such as his.
Pearl was, by far, the first to understand—to digest, to realize, to perfectly comprehend—her entire body lurching with unmitigated horror.
“You’re going to shock him?” She all but shrieked, quickly covering her mouth with both of her hands. She hadn’t realized that she could produce such a sound. She finally glanced to her right and saw that Steven was staring at her with wide eyes.
Pitying eyes.
She could not stand it; she looked away.
Dr. Stephens opened her mouth to respond, but Dr. Maheswaran cut across her with a raised hand. Teaching time was over. It was necessary that there weren’t doctors in the room anymore, only humans. Priyanka took a couple of steps forward and curled her fingers around Pearl’s shoulder. When she spoke, though, she looked beyond her—at Garnet, at Amethyst, at Greg.
At their sunken faces.
And the collective brokenness of them.
“We have to get his a-fib under control before he undergoes transplant surgery,” she said, her voice like a dull knife—(not as sharp as it should be.) “And there is a decent chance that this should be soon. Our anonymous donor is a match for Steven’s blood type. We’re finishing tests to ensure that they’re medically and psychologically cleared tomorrow. And if they are, we’ll cardiovert Steven today, let him recover for a few days, and if he remains in a stable condition, operate this weekend, Saturday at earliest.”
It was all impossible to swallow—overwhelming, too much at one time, and frankly, when it came down to it, simply unbelievable.
They’d all been hurt horrifically and far too often in the span of eight months to believe that the only thing standing in the way of Steven getting a kidney was one measly procedure more. His rapidly deteriorating health was one looming factor, and the financial mess they were in was assuredly another. The bills they would have to pay.
The bills, the bills, the bills.
Dr. Maheswaran had fought to ensure that she could do the transplant surgery pro bono, but the surgery itself was just one astronomical expense. There were innumerable others to take its place.
The nephrologist must have seen the skepticism in everyone’s faces because she cleared her throat and tightened her grip on Pearl’s shoulder. “I know it sounds scary—” she began hesitantly. “Terrifying, doc,” Amethyst interjected bluntly. “Like, that whole, uh, cardiovirg—cardioverb—whatever the eff that cardio thing is… is that, y’know, safe for him? I don’t like the idea of him being shocked.”
“Nor sedated,” Garnet added quietly, implicitly reminding them all of the last time that Steven had been put to sleep.
They’d almost lost him.
And Pearl had freaking lost it just knowing that, incapable of making peace with the increasingly likely reality that her child could actually die.
There would be no peace should that ever happen; she would implode upon herself; she would utterly destruct; she’d become something like the silver-haired lady in the blue bathrobe; maybe she’d even be less than that, an irretrievable echo, a barely breathing ghost.
“All procedures come with risks,” Priyanka admitted, her closely cut fingernails digging into the fabric of Pearl’s sweater. It was painful, but Pearl more-or-less understood that the doctor was grounding herself in this motion that she was passing off as kindness. She could certainly understand that.
Even better, she could very well relate.
“And relatively safe doesn’t mean entirely,” she went on with the battered air of a woman trying to convince herself that it was her professional duty to be circumspect—relentlessly skeptical and never entirely sure. “...but what I will say is that cardioversion is considered a minor procedure, and the sedative we’ll be using is strong enough that he won’t feel a thing, though light enough to ensure that we can pharmacologically reverse its effects quickly should a complication occur…”
The nephrologist let them sit with this comfort—(if it was a comfort)—for a respectful moment, but there was an undeniable itch in the air, a question that needed to be asked, a silence that exposed its rotted belly and still begged to be scratched. Pearl bit her lower lip and continued to knuckle her bony knee.
She didn’t want to be the one to do it.
Let Garnet, who was their unwavering leader, be brave enough for them all. (It was horrifying, really—how she always had to be the brave one.) Or Greg, perhaps, Steven’s actual father. (Of course, biology had not mattered to any of them in years upon sundry years; they were all his parents, equally and unequivocally. Together, as radically different as the four of them totally were, they were an indivisible unit—good for each other and toone another. A loving family.) Amethyst then, who had a knack for saying the hard stuff aloud. (Even still, this was something hardly appropriate to talk about aloud. He was just a child, and it was terrible. He was just a child, and he was dy—)
Someone, anyone but Pearl, who was an dissolution in progress, all of her fallen pieces on pretty display.
The machines that kept Steven alive whirred on and endlessly on, even when no one was immediately forthcoming: rattling, beeping, hissing, humming.
Pumping, measuring, supplying, sustaining.
“But what if something does go wrong, Dr. M?”
In the end, the voice that finally limped into the fray did not belong to Garnet, Amethyst, Greg, and certainly not to Pearl. It was quiet and dry, like it had wandered for a hundred years in an empty desert—as though it was sick and desperately ill. Pearl slowly looked to her right to see that Steven was looking at Dr. Maheswaran from the depths of sepulchral eyes, both so dull and dusty, even in the milky light drizzling in through the window.
“Aw, Shtu-ball, you don’t have to think like that,” Greg rasped hoarsely and made a jerking movement as though to place a hand on his son’s shoulder but seemed to think better of it. There were too many tubes in the way. “Right, Doc?”
But Priyanka, who had always been honest with Steven—perhaps even more honest than Pearl would have comfortably liked—shook her head, her graying bangs jumping a little with the movement.
“Unfortunately, I can’t guarantee that,” she exhaled. “I’m a doctor, and it’s bad practice to guarantee anything at all.”
She winced even as she said it, though, and Pearl knew that the nephrologist was remembering that just a few days ago, she’d guaranteed Steven a kidney.
“... but, naturally, if a complication does occur, I’ll be right there, Steven, and I’ll do everything in my power to keep you with us. I can promise that, at least.” It was an unsurprisingly fierce statement, full of conviction, replete with love. Priyanka Maheswaran had been with them since the beginning, since Rose, and she wasn’t just Steven’s tenacious doctor—(though she was most certainly that)—wasn’t merely an anonymous lab coat in the overbearing crowd.
She was a part of this.
She was family.
Pearl reached upwards and squeezed Priyanka’s bony hand where it still rested on her shoulder. She was moved to see a certain brightness in the darks of the other woman’s eyes—a tender, unmistakably affectionate regard.
She made the mistake of glancing at Steven again and saw something awful in his face.
Something complicated and something horrible.
Something forbidding—an expression that went where she could not follow.
You promised me, Steven, she wanted to shout at him, wanted to plead with him, wanted to scream. You promised that you’d keep fighting. For me. For all of us.
Of course, she couldn’t say any of this to his face—or, perhaps even more to the damning point, in front of all these people.
It was pathetic and it was cruel.
But Steven smiled sadly at her anyway, as though he already knew and forgave her for it anyway.
III.
Wednesday, July 11th, 6:49PM:
Steven: thanks for reading to me, connie
Steven: and for being my friend.
Connie: Of course, Steven. We’re book buds.
Connie: Mom said that you have to have another procedure done soon. I’m really sorry. Do you want to talk about it?
Connie: I’m here for you if you need me.
Connie: You don’t have to be alone.
Connie: I know it probably feels like that sometimes, but, please, please know that it isn’t true.
Connie: Hello?
Priyanka was supposed to have gotten off an hour ago, arriving home just in time for dinner with her husband and daughter, but inevitably, she leaned in the doorway of Steven’s new room and watched as Dr. Tsunoda’s pediatric cardiology team prepared him for the cardioversion: folding the top of his paisley-studded gown down and strategically covering his exposed chest with leads for the EKG—getting ready to place the adhesive defibrillation pads there too.
Anterior placement, one just below his clavicle and the other right beneath his left breast… but they’d do that after he was fully sedated.
The gel on the pads was cold and uncomfortable.
They were also just plain terrifying to most patients.
This was all supposed to have happened hours ago—at two o’clock, three at latest—but Steven’s morning labs had taken longer than usual because radiology was backed up, And then, getting Steven from Truman Ward to the Pediatric ICU had presented another long and drawn out challenge of its own.
They’d had one hell of a time transporting his equipment—(he was connected to so many machines, and they all had to come with him)—while also keeping him stable. Even briefly disconnecting him from oxygen to switch him over to a portable source proved to be risky; his sats decreased almost instantly, exacerbating his arrhythmia. He complained of chest pain. His entire body was rigid with what could only be hurt.
When they finally got him in Room 10826 on the third floor, he was so exhausted by what should have been a fairly simple maneuver that he immediately fell asleep.
He had been sleeping so much lately.
(He was disintegrating right before her very eyes.)
She had almost called off the cardioversion right then and there, saved it for tomorrow when he was at least a little bit stronger, but Dr. Alice Tsunoda, the head pediatric cardiologist, a lean woman with dark freckles running across the bridge of her nose, had talked her down. Had told her that they needed to get Steven’s heart converted to a normal rhythm now or risk him crashing before he ever reached the operating table.
“There’s a rapidly closing window for operating on him, Priyanka,” Alice had said, as softly as she could manage in a conversation about a critically ill fourteen-year old boy. “We have to try every preventative measure available to keep it from completely closing—even if it’s risky. We’ve only got one shot at this.”
“Horrible metaphor,” Priyanka muttered testily to show that she ultimately agreed, to hide the fact that she was scared.
Alice, always a good sport, only laughed, her freckles scrunching pleasantly.
“Yes, well, that’s why I became a doctor and not a poet.”
And so, they were going to cardiovert him tonight and keep him in the PICU until his transplant surgery.
Should such a thing take place.
(It fucking had to.)
“Dr. Maheswaran?”
Priyanka snapped to attention at the unexpected summons. It was one of Alice’s interns standing next to Steven’s head, about to place a mask over his colorless face. Mask ventilation would provide a higher concentration of oxygen to him during the procedure, which would likely be necessary. Anesthesia often caused a transient drop in oxygen saturation, and any conceivable decrease in his vitals could further stress his heart.
There was a pediatric code team on call.
Just in case.
“Steven is asking for you.”
Priyanka nodded stiffly and peeled herself away from the door, which was the easy part more or less. The hard part was approaching the bed of a depressed and dying child and having to be a consummate professional about it.
A doctor.
She had sat with him after their talk last night, long after he’d fallen asleep again, thinking about how she was in a medical concentration where few of her patients were ever happy, where the qualities of their lives and their prognoses and their futures were something only rarely worth celebrating. Generally speaking, she was realistic about this bleak truth—as she typically was about all matters in her meticulous and well-ordered life—and yet, as she had stared at Steven Universe’s decimated face and the increasingly dangerous number on his heart monitor, she could not help but wish—not for the first time in her career—that she had specialized in a less temperamental organ.
Of course, though, like-attracted-like, and she worked with what she had because that’s all she knew how to do. She had never been one to settle, to avoid an insurmountable challenge just because it was labeled so. She did the dirty work without complaining; she tried to save people’s lives, and sometimes—miraculously enough—even succeeded.
But, by the volatile nature of her profession, she certainly had her fair share of failures, too, which meant that her ultimate calling as a nephrologist, was to keep trying anyway.
It was Sisyphean torture—sure, yes, most definitely—but Priyanka desperately had to hope that in the end, it was also considered noble in the karmic wash.
That was her core ethos, in fact. Even more than wanting to be perfect, she intensely strove to be good.
For that was the harder achievement, she thought—to consistently put good into a world that was as maddeningly entropic as it was endlessly cruel. It was an existential choice to be made again and again, no matter how much it hurt. (It often fucking hurt.) But Priyanka believed in that commitment; she made it her life’s thought project and rigid belief system.
She approached Steven Universe’s bed even though it was hard, because it was also right. She loved this kid; she had deeply cared for his mother. She had promised that same woman that she would look out for him, would keep him safe, and Priyanka Maheswaran was not a person to make such promises—reckless though they assuredly were—lightly.
And so, the nephrologist reached across the guard rail and ran her fingers through Steven’s bed-tousled hair. She often did the same when Connie was sick because her own mother had done so with her. She gently scratched the boy’s scalp. She watched him slowly smile.
She was here for him.
Which was pretty damn hard too.
But even still.
It was good and it was right.
“You have something to tell me, Steven?” Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that Alice was done adjusting the settings on the defibrillator, and the anesthesiologist, Dr. Clements, was flicking the needle he would inject into one of Steven’s various lines. Alice’s intern handed her the oxygen mask.
It was time.
Her heart briefly lurched at the thought, which felt ridiculously hypocritical, even to herself—she’d spent all morning talking Steven’s guardians into the procedure, and now she was the one having doubts.
“Something to ask you,” he clarified, then bit his peeling lower lip. “No, two things.”
His dark brow beetled together.
“Ah, shoot. Maybe three.”
“Go for it, Universe.” What she didn’t add, though—what she assumed was pretty damn obvious—was make it quick. His oxygen sats were already dropping again in the few minutes that he had been without his cannulas. She made him take a few puffs of air from the mask in her hand before she let him proceed and only breathed a little easier herself when she saw that his numbers incrementally improved.
“M-my dad and the Gems,” he coughed weakly when she finally removed the mask. “They don’t have to see this, right?”
“Right,” Priyanka affirmed with a terse nod. She’d sent all four of them to the waiting room half-an-hour ago despite their vehement protests. They wouldn’t want to see this, no matter how minor of a procedure that it actually was.
It wasn’t particularly pretty. Steven’s body would inevitably jerk as the electricity flowed through him. They may even have to cardiovert him twice if the first shock didn’t correct the arrhythmia.
“Good,” Steven sighed softly, briefly closing his eyes in relief. “They’re scared enough of me already.”
Her first impulse was to correct him, to tell him that they weren’t scared of him, exactly—they were scared of his wasting disease and scared of his wasting depression, scared of him dying, or, hell, maybe even more accurately still, scared of being the ones left behind.
(Again.)
But she stopped herself; that was the parent in her talking, attempting to mitigate the critical damage, to shield a child from the unthinkable terrors of this world for just a little while more. The doctor who she was in the four walls of this ICU room knew better, though, which was to say that she knew the truth.
“Yes,” she exhaled tiredly. “It wouldn’t do to scare them even further.”
He smiled again—if only fleetingly—clearly pleased that she agreed, and Priyanka frowned in reflexive response. She didn’t like being his co-conspirator in this particular matter.
“Second question, Universe,” she grunted, reaching down to adjust his central line so that it wasn’t at risk of being entangled in the jungle of colorful leads. Steven flinched a little.
Of course it hurt, but there was nothing she could do to capably avoid that; his entire body was a minefield, most of it already exploded.
“Numero dos,” he croaked, glancing down at her hands as they fidgeted. It was knowledgeable fidgeting, maybe, but it was still fidgeting. She was struggling; she hadn’t slept in what felt like a week.
She was too invested to be untouched; touched, she could not help but shake and tremble.
“Okay, uh, what you said earlier, about doing everything you could to save me i-if something goes wrong… what does that mean? What are extraordinary measures in my case?”
Priyanka stared at him baldly, her insides viciously fermenting where she stood on the cold, hard tiles. This was the last conversation she wanted to have with the fourteen-year old; it was a conversation that she could scarcely have with herself, as objective as she was, as rational and assured.
“How do you even know that phrase?” She grumbled, deflecting, glancing away.
“Um, I watch way too much Under the Knife.”
She was less surprised by the answer than she was the sudden bashfulness in her patient’s voice. She couldn’t help herself then. She looked back at him again and smiled grimly to see that he was flushing a little.
Embarrassed.
“Ugh,” she groaned, shaking her head. “You and my daughter both. That’s a dreadful show, you know—so willfully and woefully inaccurate. Those newborns come out looking like they’re five months old.”
“It’s good entertainment,” he protested, poking his pale lips out in a little pout, and it heartened the doctor to see Steven playing a bit. It felt like it had been so long since she had seen him even crack a semblance of a smile.
Be a kid again.
(He deserved, above everything, the chance to do that and to embody it well.)
“It’s hyperbole,” she huffed in faux-offense, her grin widening simply because his incrementally did. She gently tapped his nose and was gratified when he made a pleasant, little noise at the back of his throat. It wasn’t quite laughter—his body was likely too weak at the moment to produce such an involved sound—but it was close, and that mattered to Priyanka. Every infinitesimal moment that he got to be himself was a miracle.
(It was what his mother had always wanted for him anyway.)
The moment didn’t last long, though. Alice, on the other side of the bed, sympathetically adjusted her wristwatch. They had to get going soon.
Steven’s smile faded.
Her own quickly followed.
“Okay,” she sighed and suddenly felt ancient, like she had lived too long, like she was thousands and thousands of years old. “Extraordinary measures. Are you sure you want to know?”
“I can handle it,” came a dull reply.
She squinted at him closely, felt the stomach inside of her painfully knot. “That’s not what I asked.”
But Steven only shrugged his head a little as though to say, Same difference.
Or maybe, the more accurate translation of such a disquieting gesture was, Who cares?
He sure didn’t.
“I know,” he only said. “Tell me anyway, Dr. M.”
It was an exceptionally hard thing that this child was asking of her—again, she was too invested, attached, overly involved.
But even still, Priyanka knew—without prodding her conscience too sharply—that the truth was often hard.
Maybe even unfailingly so.
But standing by it anyway was good and it was right.
“We… we would try to resuscitate you,” she eventually began in a halting voice, directing a vague nod in Dr. Tsunoda’s direction. The defibrillator that she would use to cardiovert him could easily be adapted to a critical situation. “Return your heart to a sinus rhythm. But if you’re unconscious for too long or having trouble breathing, we’ll intubate you to preserve your airway.”
Steven swallowed at this series of awful proclamations, and even that simple gesture looked painful as his lungs worked hard to drag in the necessary air; his throat visibly convulsed, his entire body.
“Sounds tough,” he rasped, barely audible, the skin around his lips a little blue.
Cyanotic.
There wasn’t enough oxygen in his blood.
“You can handle it, Universe,” Priyanka said firmly and tried to convince herself of the very same.
And then, unwilling to talk about it any further, more than aware that time was not on their side, she went to try and finally secure the mask over his face, but Steven weakly shook his head when she got too close.
Not yet.
“Steven,” she grimaced, glancing at his heart monitor. His heart rate was still far too high despite all of the medicine they had been pumping into him. His blood pressure wasn’t especially stable either. “We really have to start now.”
“I know, I know,” he half-coughed, with his head still partially cocked away, “but I have one more question…”
“Shoot,” she obliged immediately—anything to get this over with.
In hindsight, she should have been far more judicious, expecting the worst, and more than that, prepared for it.
But all truth being told, there was no preparing for the visceral horror of a child asking:
“W-would you… do it, Dr. M? I mean… could you l-let me go if you had to?”
Time abruptly fell apart for Priyanka Maheswaran in that pediatric intensive care unit, which was to say that maybe the world around her had violently inhaled and held its cloistered breath. Or maybe the people around her had turned to salt and crystallized into stone. Regardless, something stopped. Something monumentally broke in the aftermath of such a question.
Maybe, in the end, it was only her.
“Not without a fight,” she only barely choked out, moving her hand without even being aware, placing it over Steven’s where it rested next to his side. It was a pale and limp thing, speckled with far too many bruises than should be allowed. His veins were livid beneath his skin. “Not if I can help it.”
But, of course, that was the thing, wasn’t it?
It really wasn’t up to her in the end.
She wasn’t a miracle worker.
She wasn’t a savior.
She wasn’t a god.
She was just a doctor, and sometimes a doctor could be all of those things—(metaphorically speaking, of course, in theory, in the abstract)—but most of the time, on a day-to-day basis, they were usually just human.
“I’m really tired, Dr. M,” Steven mumbled, gently closing his eyes, and Priyanka immediately understood that he wasn’t saying it to be hurtful; he wasn’t even really giving up.
It was just a fact.
His fatigue.
A common symptom of the dying.
“I know,” she whispered and bent down to press a light kiss against his clammy forehead, uncaring that her colleagues were watching. Screw them. This was a child, and he was tired.
He was dying.
His breath rattled as she leaned over him; his heart monitor horribly whirred.
When she straightened up again, though, there was no more time. No more questions. No more delays. Priyanka finally lowered the oxygenated mask over his face, just as she had done last night when she all but told him that he was depressed and it fucking mattered in the end; it was possibly fatal. She adjusted the straps around his ears with trembling fingers and fastidiously checked the tube for kinks she already knew weren’t there.
When she was reluctantly satisfied that there wasn’t any more fidgeting that she could do and that his vitals were marginally coming up again, she finally stepped back and gave Alice a curt nod, swiping at her burning eyes as inconspicuously as possible with the side of her thumb.
She wasn’t ready—not even remotely close—but she had to pretend to be.
“Push seventy of propofol,” Dr. Tsunoda said, and the anesthesiologist silently complied, injecting the sedative into Steven’s line. The effect was nearly immediate; Steven began to close his darkly hooded eyes, staring at Priyanka all the while, until the very last moment.
His breath clouded the oxygen mask in short, misty bursts; his heartbeat incrementally slowed as he went under… deeper and deeper still.
She met his dark gaze, refused to let it go, even as the medical team began to swarm all around her—Alice getting ready to place the defibrillator pads on his chest, her intern re-checking his leads, Dr. Clements adjusting his oxygen levels. It was only when his eyes completely closed that Priyanka thought to move towards the door again, to give her coworkers some more room… to afford herself the increasingly rare opportunity to breathe…
… and that was precisely when Steven Universe’s heart decided to fail.
He seized on the bed, his entire body catastrophically thrashing before just as violently going limp as his heart rate skyrocketed, the monitor on the wall displaying a green rollercoaster of vicious summits, its continual beeping now a shrill and clangorous alarm.
It was clearly too much for the machine to handle all at once because suddenly, without waiting, without warning, instead of a number, the screen raised a gigantic question mark, and the mountainous lines began to flatten.
“No!” Priyanka snarled and leapt forward to start doing manual chest compressions. Her torso slammed hard against the guard rail, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t even feel it. “No, no, no, no! Steven, stay with me!”
“V-fib!” Dr. Tsunoda spat it out like a curse. “Calling the code”—she pressed a button above Steven’s bed—“we need a crash cart! Clements, recline him. Priyanka, keep doing chest compressions!”
She could only dimly hear the call for the pediatric code blue blaring over the intercom. Steven’s eyes fluttered beneath their closed lids.
“He’s too unstable,” Dr. Clements—somehow, an even blunter doctor than Priyanka—growled after he adjusted the bed. He was now holding both sides of Steven’s head to keep him steady. “He’s not going to make it like this.”
“Shut up!” Priyanka and Alice yelled at the exact same time.
The code team barreled into the room with the crash cart. Alice’s intern lowered the guard rail nearest Priyanka before trading out Steven’s oxygen mask with an ambu bag for manual ventilation.
“Alice, take over CPR!” Priyanka barked and straightened up into the air; the cardiologist obediently bent down and placed her hands over the quickly bruising imprints where her own layered palms had just been.
A nurse handed Priyanka defibrillator paddles.
“Push one of epi!” Alice commanded. Steven’s body had stopped moving altogether, only jerking in response to compressions; the heart monitor was letting out a high, continuous whine.
“Charging to 100,” she heard herself shout.
Come on, Steven.
Not now.
Please.
“Clear!”
IV.
Somehow, without even opening his eyes, Steven Universe knew that he was on a beach. It was a matter of sensation, which trickled in slowly, like the quiet pitter-patter of rain, or more accurately still, like medicine swirling down, down, down the length of an intravenous drip. Mere seconds ago—it had just been him and the boundless darkness: vast, uncanny, frighteningly absolute.
But now, touch and sound gave him a context, something familiar to anchor himself to in the everything and nothingness of it all. He could hear the waves as they brushed against the shoreline—all shyness, a series of tentative, sifting sounds. Apparently, possessing a body still—one that seemed to be stretched across a vaguely scratchy surface—he could feel the salty breeze all around him, softly skimming his exposed skin: humid but not too warm, persistent but never punishing. It kissed his cheek; it pulled a Dad on him and fondly ruffled his hair.
A seagull cried somewhere above him.
Funny.
It kinda sounded like Dr. Maheswaran begging for him to hold on.
When Steven finally unclosed his eyes and slowly gathered himself into something of a sitting position, he immediately understood that it was not just any beach.
It was clearly his beach.
The pale dunes stretching in every which direction were unmistakable, his childhood playground of some fourteen years—a jungle gym of broken driftwood, an endless sandbox of shining gold. When he craned his neck to look behind him—just to be safe and even more than that, sure—he was relieved to recognize the familiar, if somewhat hazy, silhouette of Beach City in the distance: the Boardwalk and all its little shops, the Big Donut, the arcade, the various attractions of Funland rearing upwards into an astonishingly brilliant, infinitely expansive sky.
It was dazzling even—that astonishingly brilliant, infinitely expansive sky—vast and pink and resplendent with honey-colored clouds that dripped languorously into the sea.
In all of his very few years, Steven had never seen a sunset so radiant nor as radically perplexing—radiant because it was like an eternal blush, warm and shimmering, but perplexing because despite the fact that he intuitively understood it to be a sunset, as far as he could tell, there was no visible sun.
It was all atmosphere and cirrus steaks, even though some unknown light source clearly cast an ethereal glow over everything—the water, his skin, the oversized hospital gown that he suddenly realized that he was still wearing…
Steven pinched the thin fabric disinterestedly and perhaps even a little disappointingly; it was nothing especially new, and besides, it pretty much confirmed his growing suspicion.
This could only be another dream.
Of course, there were other clear giveaways—he was sitting on an orange beach towel instead of a hospital bed for one thing, and he was neither surrounded, nor mercilessly invaded, by a collection of wires, leads, and tubes for another.
But, really, what tipped him off most—even beyond the lack of those visible signs of his deterioration—was that for the first time in months upon dragging months, Steven actually felt good.
Heck, he felt even better than good.
He felt nothing.
No sadness, no pain, no aching, unlivable guilt.
He couldn't even register the tortured beating of his heart anymore, let alone hear it on some tinny monitor that was always looming just above his head.
For there was a certain stillness in his chest.
Quite possibly, there was peace.
Another seagull cried in the distance, wheeling over the incarnadine sea in slow and lovely spirals.
It no longer sounded like Dr. Maheswaran.
Steven knew that such a change should probably disconcert him—after all, the last memory he had was of the nephrologist placing a mask over his face, insisting that she’d fight for him, refusing to let him go…
Maybe something had gone wrong in the procedure.
Maybe this really was it—he was dying… he was dead… he was gone… but despite the enormity of those reflections, and the tragedy inherent within them, he could not bring himself to be particularly invested.
The sky was beautiful.
The breeze was pleasant.
Steven felt no pain.
He felt absolutely nothing at all.
Dr. M will be fine, he assured himself.
Gosh… maybe I finally am too.
After a while—(seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, he didn’t really know)—he decided to see if he could go home, to his house on the beach. It’d been a while since he’d last been there. When he was laying in that hospital bed, day after day after petty, creeping day, he’d been all but convinced that he would never see it again.
He tenderly negotiated himself to his feet and distantly marveled at the fact that he had full use of all of his limbs once more—for they were no longer encumbered by malaise nor machine. And when he saw that these same limbs were quite perfectly smooth and unbruised—carefully appraising himself in the ruddy glow of that not-quite-sun—he laughed loudly.
The sound echoed all around him, reverberating through the air like the high pealing of a bell.
No one answered back.
The waves whispered, sure. Seagulls cried, of course. His gown swished playfully around his knees. But for all this, he seemed to be entirely alone here…
… but, of course, he had been alone on this journey for a very long time now.
Steven frowned a little at the unwanted reminder but began to walk nonetheless, keeping close to the shoreline because he liked the sensation of the wet sand squelching between his toes. When he occasionally looked over his shoulder, he was fleetingly disconcerted to see that he wasn’t leaving any footprints behind—that the sand was just as untouched as it had been when he first began—but the odd feeling was immediately eradicated when his house finally came into view.
Just as he had left it.
Salt-weathered, sun-beaten, more than a little faded around the edges, in desperate need of a new coat of paint, but even still and all the same, it was home.
And he needed to get there.
Surely, his entire family was waiting for him—Garnet and Dad and Amethyst and Pearl.
They would pull him into the warm tangle of their arms; they would never him go.
Steven picked up his pace and began to run, even as the sand desperately sucked at his heels, even as the waves suddenly protested his leave, raging now, all but roaring. The wind raced him and maybe buffeted him. The seagulls squawked and inexplicably cried, “Charge to 200! Clear!”
“Don’t do this to me, Steven! Dammit. Please.”
But what the sand and the sea and the salted breeze and the seagulls who sounded like devastated nephrologists did not fundamentally understand was that he was home, and he was finally safe again. Everything would be okay now, so long as he went inside.
The monsters couldn’t get him there.
His insidious disease.
Upon nearing the house, Steven suddenly felt like he could float, and so he did, taking the last few steps leading up to the stairs at an impossible, leaping bound, gravity joyfully bending to his will even as the air pushed against him in one, last primordial plea—
—but the very moment that his foot hit that bottommost stair, something strange happened.
Something sickening even.
And therefore utterly unbearable.
Steven's entire body violently lurched with an inescapable, all-consuming conviction that he shouldn’t be here.
Not yet.
It was far too soon.
Horror howled through him, flooded his heretofore numb and possibly nonexistent nervous system with everything else godawful and odious in the world too—nausea, pain, guilt, and to contradict it all, to condemn him where he swayed and stood, intense and intoxicating longing.
This last emotion, above all the unpleasant others, bifurcated him, quartered him, neatly cleaved him in two, because, yes, while it was too soon to be here—(not yet, not yet, I can’t leave them behind, not yet)—there was a not entirely inconsequential part of him that wanted to be here anyway, that had long dreamed of nothing more than to clamber into his own bed and fall asleep holding his favorite teddy bear.
He teetered on that precipice of a creaking step as the horror inside of him somewhat abated at the comforting thought. The phantom vice around his ribcage expanded too—if only incrementally—and afforded the tightness within his chest some space, precious breathing room, a brief window through which he could rationally assess the scattered options he had left.
Leave.
Run.
Fight.
Stay.
It would be frighteningly easy to commit to the last of these actions most of all, for he was almost home anyway, and he was inexplicably convinced that his family was probably waiting for him just inside the door.
There would be a bed, at the very least, somewhere to lay his sleepy head.
Miraculously enough, he might even get to rest.
“But they still need you, Steven,” an echo of an almost familiar voice insisted. It was a warm voice, a profoundly loving one. It feared for him. It cared and endlessly cared.
But at the exact same time, it was a remarkably distant entity.
So utterly remote.
It always has been, he thought bitterly and could not even begin to explain why.
Nor could Steven exactly tell where the voice was coming from—for there was no one else but him standing on that faded step—but for a split second, when he looked up through the haze of clouded hurt, he thought he saw a silhouette moving behind the screen door: big and cozy, something out of a painting or a distant, happy dream. Though when he tried to crane his head for a better look—only vaguely beginning to suspect who the shadow was supposed to be—the specter was gone, and so was the house. He was back on the orange towel again, lying supine, the rolling sands all around him, the sky rosy above his head.
The waves slumped in quiet relief against the shore.
“... am I dead?” He asked softly. He wondered if saying it aloud would finally make it real. But as soon as he asked the question, laughter filled the silence just next to him and in front of him and behind him and all around him. It was laughter without a body—laughter without context, direction, container, or form.
And it was vaguely recognizable to him in the same way that the silhouette in the window had just been about to solidify into a shape that actually meant something.
Steven blinked once, and suddenly, for the first time in a very long while, he was no longer alone. A young woman was sitting next to him on the beach towel, knobbly knees pulled up to her chest, slender arms encircling her knees. She was beautiful in the way that birds were often beautiful—light and graceful, vivid with arresting color. She had feathery pink hair and rich, brown eyes. Tan freckles tumbled playfully across the bridge of her rather sharp nose.
She wore a cropped black hoodie and matching shorts; her questionably tied converses were as red as the unchanging sky.
She was not the silhouette from the beach house, but she was the silhouette from his most recent dreams.
She was lean and tall and perpetually twenty-one years old.
She was clearly—beyond a shadow of a question and a reasonable doubt—the girl they had once called Pink Diamond.
The heiress who had died outside of a dirty bar not too many years ago.
He had seen her photo in a news article precisely once. She had been posing with some of her friends and wearing that exact same outfit, down to the minute details: midriff visible, a choker around her neck, diamond earrings glinting then in the flash of a camera, and now in the effervescence of this world's coral glow. In a hospital room, the girl’s own mother had said that she had very much liked to laugh.
“Nahhhhh, not yet,” Pink Diamond grinned in reply to his question, scratching the side of her nose. “Trust me. You’d know if you were.”
A pause.
Steven swallowed and tried to get perspective.
He failed magnificently.
He was talking to a ghost.
“Um, not to be rude,” he returned sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck as he sat up again, “but talking to a dead person seems like a very dead person thing for me to do.”
He felt strangely calm at the imminent prospect of his own death—consoled even, now that Pink was here. At least he wouldn’t have to do this alone; there was someone else here who got it, who had also died at a very young age.
“Well, I mean, don’t get me wrong,” the young woman shook her head, dragging out most of her consonants, playfully lilting them, “you’re pretty freakin’ close. They’re trying to revive you and everything, and it’s hard—your body is so hurt—but not yet, Steven. It’s not your time.”
“How do you know?” He squinted at her, trying hard not to be overly skeptical. He hadn’t yet decided if he was actually talking to the Pink Diamond, or, well, his imagination of what he thought this girl must have been: her vivacity, her joy, her doomed and lovely youth.
He supposed it didn’t really matter, though—not here anyway.
In this dream.
This nightmare.
This heaven.
This candy-colored hell.
“You tried to go home, right?” She jerked her head in the direction of the beach house. Steven couldn’t see it from where they sat anymore, swallowed as it was in the pink haze of this world. He distantly wondered if the silhouette in the door was still there, perhaps palming the netted screen.
“But it didn’t work?” She pressed, her dark brow curving low over her eyes. “You couldn’t go in?”
Steven nodded once and suddenly felt an echo of what he did when he first landed upon that bottom stair—pain, horror, fear, and ugly longing—all plucking a dusty chord inside his hollow, unmoving chest.
He understood now.
“Oh,” he only said.
There was nothing more to be said.
He had almost gone home.
“Yeah,” Pink smiled sadly before she reached over the side of the beach towel to gather some sand into her palm. He watched silently as she cupped the small pile in both of her slender hands before squeezing and gently blowing upon it. When she unclasped her fingers, a beautiful hibiscus flower with pink petals and golden leaves bloomed in the space where all those silky grains had been. It was slightly luminescent, tinged in unnatural light.
His own personal star.
“What’s that for?” Steven asked, his voice only a little more than a hoarse whisper. He could not help but think of Pink Diamond’s mother and the time that he had once extended a flower to her in a cemetery, where she was grieving the very girl who sat in front of him.
Mere inches (and possibly resolutions) away from her lonely, embedded grave.
“To cheer you up, I think,” Pink replied, her eyes faintly glistening in the blush-colored light, and he could tell that she was thinking of Blue Diamond too. She reached over and carefully arranged the flower, which had abruptly stopped glimmering, in his windswept hair. Her cool knuckles feathered his forehead.
“Thanks,” he smiled and rubbed at his own burning eyes. “Yeah, I’m definitely cheered.”
But, of course, he supposed that wasn’t especially convincing with him wiping away tears and all. Pink indelicately snorted into her hand before pitching backwards on the beach towel, her arms slightly extended on either side of her.
Angel-like, though not especially holy.
“Don’t mention it, kid,” she sighed fondly.
They were both silent for a long while after this, listening to the waves drift against the golden shore, watching peach-colored clouds glide across that eternal, unconflicted sky. If they were there for five minutes or five thousand years, Steven still didn’t know. Time didn’t really matter here.
Sometimes, though, he could hear his own heart again, pathetically thumping in his chest.
He was at once comforted by the familiar sound and scared of it too. It meant that he was still alive, and that revelation alone engendered so many complicated feelings in a place that didn’t seem particularly complicated at all.
Somewhere out there, in this vast expanse of beauty and nothingness, the seagulls began to call his name once more.
“Get the intubation kit out,” one cawed. “Eight—no, seven—millimeters.”
“Did it hurt?” Steven asked, the question rising to his lips as naturally as the gentle eddying of the wind. He didn’t feel particularly ashamed to talk about dying here, even if he was scared of the idea.
Dying was what this place was clearly about after all.
However, he didn’t expect for a tortured expression to suddenly raze Pink’s delicate features, a seizure of anger and sadness and raw, inconsolable grief. She suddenly looked less human than she did otherworldly.
Elf-like, perhaps.
Not like anyone he had ever known.
“S-sorry,” he said hastily, his cheeks warming. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
“No, no, you’re good.” She flashed another brief smile at him, but it was a tight gesture—clearly strained, stretching across her creamy features like taffy that had been spread too thin. “It’s just hard to talk about, I guess… I can be a little emotionally constipated sometimes—I get that from my mom.”
“Oh.”
Steven chewed on this. After a few seconds of idly playing with his hands, he couldn’t help himself, grinning a little impishly.
“Um, which one?”
For a brief moment, he thought that he’d gone too far, overstepped some thin, invisible boundary yet again as Pink’s eyes bulged, her brow nearly pitching into her cotton candy hairline. But, then abruptly, without discrimination, much less warning, she began to laugh—quite sincerely this time, clutching her slightly exposed stomach. It was infectious laughter, pealing and melodic, vaulting carelessly towards the infinite sky, and before Steven knew it, he was right in the thick of it, joining in, laughing too.
It was loud and inappropriate and just a little bit mean, but they were also both kids, and what had happened to them was awful.
So they laughed.
They very nearly cried.
“Ah, shit,” Pink gasped after a few seconds (minutes, hours, days, weeks, eternities) of this, swiping at the corner of her eye with her billowing sleeve. “I miss them.”
“They miss you too,” Steven returned immediately and reached down to place a hand on the girl’s shoulder. Impressions from his life were distant here, all faint echoes in his head that didn’t really feel like they belonged to him at all, but even still, he could recall the excruciating dimensions of Blue and Yellow Diamond’s grief, what it had clearly done to them, how it had nearly decimated them both.
Even if Pink Diamond was just another dream in a long line of many, that consumptive grief was still real.
She had been so powerfully loved and then so horribly lost.
Her mothers would never be the same again.
“So much,” he added, his throat suddenly thick as he considered, for the first time since he had woken up on the beach, that should he die, he’d be condemning each and every one of his guardians to the same fate.
Garnet and Dad and Amethyst and Pearl…
He didn’t want them to hurt, but he knew that such a wish was childish of him, so ignorant and willfully naïve.
If he died today, that would destroy them, plain and simple as that.
They would never be the same again.
How could he possibly do that to them? How could he even dare?
(He was tired, that was the only answer.)
(It was justification and unimpeachable excuse.)
“It did hurt,” Pink suddenly admitted, screwing her eyes up against a clearly painful memory. Her entire body tensed with her, the visible knobs of her spine a taut and curving bow.
Steven quickly withdrew his hand from her shoulder as though burned.
He didn’t know how to comfort her, or, more accurately still, he was painfully aware that there were no comforting words to be had.
She had died far too young.
All attempts at comfort were futile—wind and drifting confetti.
“The whole dying thing… but once I got to this part of the whole she-bang, it was less about what had happened to me and more about the injustice of it all. Like, I was twenty-one freaking years old! I hadn’t done anything! I hadn’t lived! I’d been stuck under my parents’ stuffy noses all my life, and the one night I tried to do something about it, gahhhhh—!”
Without finishing her explosive thought, Pink briefly threw her hands up in the air, kicking up a cloud of sand when they came back down on either side of her with a dull thud. When she opened her eyes again, they were dark and distant, nearly black in the shadows cast by the perpetually setting sky. Steven recognized the expression—or, rather, the haunting lack of one.
His own eyes were just the same these days.
Just as broken and irretrievably lost.
“So I went home, right?” She eventually continued, sniffing once, her distracted gaze drawn to the side. For the first time since he had arrived on this beach, Steven noticed a bucket and shovel—electric blue and burnished yellow—close by, half-buried in the glittering sand. “It was different from your beach, of course. The sprawling city and its kaleidoscope of lights. The ridiculous skyscraper my family lives in. The long elevator ride to the very top… it didn’t really occur to me until it was too late that there was no option to go back down.”
The vivid image delicately ribboned across Steven’s mind’s eye even as Pink spoke the words. He had ridden in that same elevator with Amethyst before and marveled at the excess of buttons. So many floors. And why did an elevator need a ceiling mirror in it? His gut had whooshed as the box smoothly ascended into the heavens—to the extravagant penthouse suite of Blue and Yellow Diamond.
“I dunno… I guess I just expected the doors to open up to my mothers and all their stupid scolding, but there was just”—she struggled to find the right word, absently clawing the sand beneath her fingertips—“God, I guess there was just the beyond, and that was that. I was dead. It was over. Which was fine and all—I’m good now—but it also hurt. I wasn’t ready. I was twenty-one.”
“Just a kid,” Steven confirmed, his voice ragged with hurt. He felt the injustice of only being fourteen all too deeply. There would be no first kiss, first job, first day of high school. He would never get the opportunity to explore the world and all of the incredible, awful, beautiful, and ugly things that it had to offer. He wouldn’t even know how to drive.
He’d die in a hospital, less himself than he had ever been, as weak as his body was, as dependent on medicines and machines as it had gradually become.
The coffin would be horribly small because his lifetime had been…
… but at the same time, he was so, so tired.
And there was no pain on this beach.
There was home.
“Only ‘cause my moms never let me grow up,” Pink sighed, though she didn’t sound particularly resentful. (But, of course, he supposed that when you died, there was no real cause to be resentful anymore.)
Apparently bored with playing with the sand, she began to carelessly trace constellations on the freckles scattered just above her knees. Diamonds mostly—over and over and over again.
“They beat themselves up everyday for that, you know.”
"Yeah," Steven nodded gently. "I know."
He’d seen their personal ruins up close, the gaping maws they had gradually become in the visceral absence of Pink, in the violent confrontation of so much untenable grief. Steven had wanted to help them both—Blue, especially, who he had found in a cemetery of all places on that golden summer day.
He had once pitied her destructive inertia; only now, at the probable end of everything, did he fully understand it.
He had even learned to live it.
“I think about that a lot actually,” she mumbled, the words less sound than susurrus, “how maybe… if we’d had a chance… we could have actually worked things out. Seen each other for what we all were, gotten used to that, done better.”
“Not looked away,” he added, frowning.
It was pretty darn awful, he thought to himself, how much of life’s conflicts—at least those that happened between people who loved each other—came down to that in the end.
Not paying attention, looking away.
“That’s just what folks do,” Pink shrugged, as though she had already accepted the horrible fact.
“They shouldn’t, though,” he groused petulantly. He knew he was being childish.
Fair enough, he allowed himself—if only this once.
He was a child.
“But they do,” Pink smiled tiredly, and with that, finally pulled herself up from the towel. Her hair was slightly flattened in the back. The pale light settled upon the peak of her head like a crown.
“You’ll do it, too, one day,” she continued without waiting for his response, resting her chin on her knees. “There’ll be something awful, something you won’t know how to look in the eye, and that’s the best that you’ll be able to do. Look away. Deny it. Pretend the problem doesn’t exist at all. You’ll probably hurt someone’s feelings, and that’s perfectly okay. Even the best people occasionally do.”
Steven didn’t know how to feel about that—that hurting people was all but a certainty. He’d spent all of his life trying to be good, trying to be kind, trying to be pleasant in a world that wasn’t ever entirely any of these things—especially not all at once. This had been particularly true in the last eight months of his life, as his body increasingly rebelled against him and became dependent on so many uncomfortable interventions to even survive, let alone properly function. He didn't have full control of his bladder anymore, sure, but he could control his ability to be decent to others; that was the one thing his disease couldn't entirely take away from him.
So confronting the pointlessness of his goal utterly shocked him, pricked him right where it hurt like a small, paring knife.
He winced—things weren’t supposed to hurt here.
“It’s not pointless,” Pink rolled her dark eyes, apparently reading his thoughts. “Being good in a shitty world is never pointless, Steven.
“What is it then?” He immediately challenged, and his bitterness was less anger than it was fear, and that same fear was specifically desperation, wild and ugly and brutally uncontrolled.
He needed something to hold on to in this increasingly insubstantial aether.
Anything.
“It’s life-saving,” she shrugged simply, and Steven understood, just from the way that she ever so slightly exhaled, that it was up to him to determine if such a revelation was sufficient enough.
If she had an opinion, she wasn’t going to easily proffer it. He had to sit with the utter pointlessness of life and decide that being good and being alive were worth it anyway and all the same.
“Just… don’t go home if you don’t have to,” she only said, scrubbing the underside of her nose.
“And if I don’t have a choice?” But something in him already knew, even as the words recklessly tumbled from his mouth, that such an approximation wasn’t exactly right. He didn’t have the choice of whether to leave or stay, sure—his body was pretty messed up after all—but he did have the choice to fight.
To want to leave.
To try and run.
“Well then,” the girl laughed again, and it was a horrible sound. It was broken. “I guess you and me can just play together forever, huh?"
Even though she studiously cocked her head to the side, Steven stared at Pink Diamond then—directly, without flinching, never once feeling the urge to look away. He stared at her lineless face and her bright, elven eyes, at how her entire face seemed to be shaped for a smile.
Even when she was sad.
And he suddenly realized that she had been sad ever since she'd gotten here.
It had to be super lonely, he thought—being a twenty-one year old ghost.
“Hey," he mumbled, reaching upwards and plucking the hibiscus from his curls. With another awkward movement, he reached up and placed it in hers—right next to her ear.
It clashed rather horribly with her hair. "That wouldn’t be such a bad way to spend forever."
He smiled crookedly as Pink Diamond's eyes slowly widened, clearly caught in the simple act of surprise. There was dawning tenderness in her expression, and there was clearly gratefulness; somehow, even though they had just met, and she was potentially just a figure of his hyperactive imagination, there was very possibly love.
Her lips slightly parted, a perfect 'o' of exquisite speechlessness, clearly poised to say something, trying to produce the words, but before they ever arrived, a seagull landed between them, flapping its gray-tipped wings.
“Sinus brady," it exhaled, its voice thin with relief. "We’ve got him, Priyanka."
"We've got him."
Pink abruptly closed her mouth again and suddenly looked determined.
“Wake up, Steven." She gently shoved him as the world around them—the radiant sky, the golden beach, its blissful shore—began to fall to pieces, fluttering into nothingness. Such meaningless void. “Wake up.”
