Archive of Our Own ^beta

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For as long as he can remember, all Steven has ever dreamed about is The Garden.  Sometimes, rarely, his dreams are happy. The garden is fresh and green, full of life and neatly trimmed.  Most nights, however, most nights the garden is a horrible place to be. His dreams aren’t nightmares exactly.  There are no monsters, and he isn’t being chased. When Steven is in these dreams, everything is very still. 

It isn’t scary, but it is bad.  The view itself never changes, except for aging.  The plants wither, and the water goes murky and stagnant.  The feeling gets worse as the garden decays.  

Sometimes, Steven wakes up crying.  Some days, he wakes up screaming. The worst, though, are the days when Steven wishes that he didn’t wake up, and that he didn’t have to go back to sleep again later. 

It isn’t until the first time that Steven is old enough to be left to watch himself for a few hours that he learns what the feeling is called.  Lonely .  He can’t stand lonely.  He stays by his dad’s side as often as he can, and when he starts getting too big to stay with him in his van or stick by Greg’s side at work, Steven begs to move in with the Crystal Gems.

“You guys were all he could talk about,” his dad says, but Steven knows that he doesn’t understand.  There has to be someone there when he wakes up.  How else will he shake off the ever permeating feeling of alone ?

Steven wonders what he’s waiting for in his dreams.  Whatever it is, it’s confusing. He thinks it might be a person.  A person he hates and loves and wants back and wants to destroy. It’s such a confusing jumble of feelings, and too many to separate and figure out when he is so young.  He doesn’t think that whoever is being waited on showing up will fix the broken feeling though. It’s all the way down in his bones, even when he’s awake.

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The first time Steven is around when the warp flashes, he barely sleeps a wink.  Every time he drifts off he starts screaming, and Pearl watches him with so much worry in her eyes.  He clings to her skirt and cries any time she tries to leave to do Gem Things.

“You can’t go! You have to come back!”

Pearl pets his hair and sighs as if he’s being unreasonable.

“Of course I’ll be back Steven.  You just wait for me here. Amethyst will stay with you.”

That’s another thing Steven learns that he hates.  Waiting .  

“Stand still and wait for the bus Steven,” Garnet instructs, and suddenly he can’t breathe .  It takes three panic attacks before the gems agree that maybe school isn’t the best for him.

“We can teach him everything he needs to know anyway, huh Stevie?” Amethyst says.  Steven doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t let go of her arm either. 

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The first time Steven has a dream about the garden that doesn’t weigh down on him, it’s one of the faded, long long ago, fresh garden dreams.  He sees it from a whole new angle. It’s moving, faster and faster, and he thinks that maybe he’s running. He can’t focus on why, because all of his attention is on the sounds.  There is a squeak squeak squeak of footsteps on damp grass, and, most importantly, there is laughter.

Steven has never hated waking up more than he does that day.  He refuses to leave bed, no matter how the gems prompt and cajole him.  Pearl checks him for a fever four seperate times before they finally give up and go get Greg.

“What’s wrong schtuball?” he prods with a playful shove, but Steven only glares.

“I want her back ,” he says, sullen as any ten year old can be.  “She was happy, and I want to go back.”

Steven’s dad looks so surprised that for a moment Steven almost forgets his sulk and smiles.

“Who do you want to go back to?” Greg asks, who and not where.   The gems are relieved that he seems to know something they don’t.

“To the girl in The Garden, with the squeaky shoes,” Steven tells him.  There’s a resolve in his eyes that Greg recognises from his own years dreaming about this very beach.  It’s the look that he knows preceded his debut as Mr. Universe. He hopes that Steven’s journey will be easier, but he suspects it won’t.

“He just had a soulmate dream, it’s nothing to worry about,” Greg reassures the gems, but they all remember how poorly Steven has always slept, and they all worry regardless.

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Spinel is a gem.  She doesn’t sleep, and she doesn’t dream, but she’s been alone and still for so long that she gets very very good at playing pretend.  Sometimes, Spinel pretends that she’s really short, and she lives in a big metal box on wheels that purrs like a predatory creature.  There’s a squishy biped twice as tall as her, at least, who also lives in the rumble box. He has funny hair, and plays a stringed instrument like she’s never seen before.

Really, Spinel didn’t even know that she was so good at imagining until just recently.  It’s been almost six thousand years, of course, and she supposes she’s had lots of practice, but her most recent games of pretend seem so vivid.

The first time she does it, she’s gazing at the fifth squiggly branch on the oak tree again, when suddenly the tree is all different.  After so long staring, she’s got everything in sight memorized, but then the tree’s leaves are a fiery red and the gold of stars from up close.  When the image fades away, Spinel nearly shouts in distress. Having something new to look at was the most amazing thing to happen to her in a millenia.

She wonders if she’s finally going crazy; if standing still can crack a gem.  It would be against the rules to look down and check, though, so instead she just stares very hard at the tree again.  It takes four rotations for it to happen once more, and she almost ruins her view of it by crying. 

This time there is a peculiar little animal on the branches that have twisted into unfamiliar curves and shapes.  It makes a shrill noise, pattern after pattern, and Spinel realizes that it’s singing.

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Time begins to pass very quickly as she spends more and more time in her special imaginings.  She has wonderful visions of water farther than can be seen by the eye, stretching endlessly into a foreign horizon.  Sometimes, she swears that she can smell things.

The things she smells are nothing like flowers.  She makes up words for the smells she imagines. Bacon, for the hot, salty smell that rests on her tongue like a low note in a duet.  Chocolate is what she calls the sweet rich smell that reminds her of what it felt like to jump, back when moving was still allowed. Her favorite smell doesn’t have a word.

She tries and tries to think of one.  She lists off different flowers and woods in her mind, each of them almost but not quite right.  It’s a lavender and birch sort of smell, she finally decides, but she refuses to think of the word it wants to be called.  Home . 

It’s a silly word.  Homeworld is eons away, and she can’t go back until she finishes her game.

As Spinel drifts into her imagination she sees bipeds- humans - in various shades of beige and brown.  When first she began this strange time passing game they spoke only gibberish, but as the years went by the noises became identifiable as words, and to her lifespan it is only a blink before the words align themselves into a language of their own. 

Not all of the words and things she experiences are nice.  Spinel almost loses her game on the day that she sees something new and horrid crawling down by her feet.  She wants to spring away and find a rock to smash it with, or perhaps launch it over the edge and into endless space.  She can’t do those things, because it’s just imaginary, but real or not Spinel finds it compellingly horrifying. The word rests heavy in her mind.  Tarantula .

The first time Spinel wonders if she should stop playing her pretending game, it’s because she imagines someone she knows.  Pearl, not quite like she remembered, happy and whistling as she works at some menial task, stands as a mirage in Spinel’s own garden.  She thinks that maybe she wants to quit thinking all together, and never have to see anything ever again.

It isn’t fair !  Pearl doesn’t belong in her special game.  Pearl belongs to Pink, and Pink is already playing a game with Spinel, she is .  Pearl should not be so rude as to intrude on this when she already gets to be on the other side of this ( awful ) standing and waiting game.

Spinel watches the stars until she can’t remember the smell of chocolate before she finally gives in and pretends again.  She wishes she hadn’t. She imagines the familiar chime and flash of a warp pad activating, and when the image goes away, the tears spill despite her best efforts. 

If she were luckier, one of the columns would have the decency to tip over and crush her, and then she would be too shattered into little shards to imagine anything.  Everything would be okay then, and she wouldn’t even have cheated, because being crushed doesn’t involve moving from her spot, and Pink can just come find her pieces and be more considerate the next time she asks someone to play such a stupid game. 

After that, she goes a very long time without pretending.  Or perhaps it isn’t very long, and the time just feels stretched because now she isn’t used to going without anything new to see.  Eventually she gives in and goes back to the imagining .  She gets used to the sound and flash of the warp, and learns better than to hope.

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Steven himself does not like warping.  It always leaves him with the acrid taste of guilt in his mouth, as if he’s breaking some law he doesn’t know about.  He tries not to go with the gems when he can help it. He wants to know about his mom’s culture, and Pearl seems to think that it’s really important that he learn, but he can’t stomach the aching wrongness of approaching the warp to go somewhere. 

He ends up spending most of his time waiting on one or another of the gems.  They learned early not to all three go at once, and know better now than to leave him alone.  If there is a mission that requires all three of them, they make sure Greg has the day off to spend with Steven.

The time while the others are gone Steven begins to spend drawing.  Awkward and clumsy sketches of the garden when he first wakes up and it’s clear in his memory.  Of course, after a lifetime of staring at the same view, he quickly realizes that he has the image memorized, burned into the back of his eyelids like a tattoo of longing.

He knows intimately the ivy crawling along the columns, the crumbling flowers, the water thick with algae.  Steven knows that view better than he knows the shape of his own nose. So he draws and he draws and he draws, because he’s worried.

He only ever has the same dreams, from the same spot, in the same garden.  Other people, he knows, dream about entire lifetimes of events. Days and days and days of movement and people and things.  Steven thinks that maybe he has his garden dream because she’s waiting for him. He needs, with a sudden fervor his younger years had lacked, to find her.

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“Do all the warps work?” he asks Pearl one day, and she gives a disbelieving laugh.  Steven knows that he has only ever been distrusting of the galaxy warps before, but this is different, this is important , and he wishes Pearl wouldn’t patronize him.

“Oh no,” she says, and attempts to be reassuring in perhaps the worst way possible.  “Hardly any of them are still functional, and none of the ones off world are connected to earth.”

It isn’t the answer he was hoping for.

For a little while, Steven lets that be the end of it, but he can’t seem to stop drawing anyway despite his deflated hope, and it’s when he’s fighting against sleep one moonless night that the inspiration hits him.

Sure, he can’t warp there, but there weren’t always warps.  The gems came from space , they’re aliens , and that means that they had to come to earth somehow.  That means, he realizes, blinking at the stars and suddenly wide awake and full of awe, that means that he can make a spaceship . 

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Steven pulls out his pens and a fresh piece of paper.  He has to map the view perfectly; it would be a waste to go to all the trouble of getting into space just to end up in the wrong galaxy.  He uncaps the first pen. He’s going to get there.

He’s fifteen, and he’s spent two years drawing every aspect of the garden he’s ever seen.  He’s finally got the view of the stars perfect, as close to scale as a human is likely to get without a lifetime of dedication and study.  He doesn’t want to wait a lifetime, doesn’t even want to wait another minute, but the picture is only the first step.

He asks Garnet first, because her knowledge to him often seems infinite.  She doesn’t recognise it, but Steven can tell by the purse of her lips that she’s sorry not to be able to answer his question.  Amethyst has never been off world, but Steven asks her to be sure. She admires his art, supportive of always, but doesn’t recognise the place.  Steven is very quickly running low on resources.  

He had hoped to have an idea of where the place was, or the direction to go at least.  His odds of stumbling upon the garden by accident wandering aimlessly around space are slim at best, he knows.  Pearl warps back in, and Steven feels like his last hope sits at the end of a thread with scissors poised.  

“Pearl!” he shouts, and she almost drops the bubbled gem.  It irritates her, but Steven’s got bigger problems than a reformed gem monster potentially destroying the house.  This is urgent . 

“Really Steven, do you have to-” she starts in a tone of exasperation, but he doesn’t have time for soothing ruffled feathers.  He shoves her onto the couch and hand her the paper.

“There!” he says, pointing to a particular line of stars for emphasis, “That one!  It’s,” here his tongue falters, and a language he doesn’t know outside of dreams falls clumsily from his lips, tongue unused to the shapes of these words.  He repeats it a few times, until he’s sure his star naming is intelligible. For all he knows he’s just listed off the gem equivalent of coordinates. Wouldn’t that be grand, if the address was waiting in his mind the whole time?  Still, he doesn’t stray for long. 

“Do you know where that is?”

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If pearls could pale, this one would.

“Where did you get this picture?  Where did you hear that word ?”

The gems only ever speak English around him, and Steven knows that he’s almost found her.  The girl of his dreams, the girl waiting for him. He rushes up to his room and pulls out a shoebox full of garden pictures, all his most recent ones featuring more than just the stars.

“I need to go there,” he tells Pearl firmly, and she flips through page after page before freezing on one with a distinctive piece of shadow in view.

“It can’t be,” Pearl says, clearly horrified, but Steven does not care because Pearl knows this place, knows the garden, and that means she can get him there. 

He can practically smell dried leaves and stagnant water, and if he weren’t so used to it the smell might upset him.  Instead, his mind is ringing, one thought clear and beautiful and reachable. Almost.

It isn’t that easy, of course.

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When he asks about a spaceship Pearl is too elated to be torn.  It’s the first genuine interest he’s shown in Homeworld or Gem history since the first time he saw the warp flash.  Perhaps it’s selfish of her, but Pearl can’t help but take advantage of the opportunity while she has it. His attention is on her every word, and his interest in tech has, to turn a phrase, skyrocketed.

She lectures him on the ins and outs of what not to do, and shows him how connecting crystals send signals more efficiently than wires.  He asks if it would be easier if they had more access to gem tech, and she learns that he’s been making friends with corrupted.

They get a few fresh crystals and an unbroken navigation guide out of it, but Pearl begins to wonder if maybe she hasn’t been stressing responsibility enough to Steven.  She’s spent so much time away, trying to preserve what little is left of her culture on earth and stop the monsters that she’s at least partially responsible for. Should she have been doing more to be there for him?

Well, she’s doing something now, and she’s going to take him past the stars and to the planet she thought she would never see again.  She spare much consideration on the garden or his real reasons. She’s too caught up in her own dreams to worry with his.

Both of their dreams crash and burn more literally than she would like, and she is more shaken up by her failure than anything else.  Steven doesn’t judge her for that of course. He’s sad, but he doesn’t blame her, and Pearl knows that really he should. She does what she can to make it up to him.

‘

“Here,” she mumbles quietly at the edge of his room, presenting him with a mirror that she hopes will be a balm to the ache of her mistakes.  “You can ask it to show you- Well, anything really.” She can tell he isn’t interested, wants to ask why he would want the mirror, and she speaks with haste before he can reject her overture. 

“You can ask it to show you what a Spinel looks like.  It won’t be your- well, her, but I thought it might be better than nothing.”  The nothing I’ve given you, she doesn’t say, but feels the weight of it. She retreats when she sees him cradle the mirror like she’d once cradled him.

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The mirror with the broken gem has come into contact with eleven different spinels over the course of it’s sentience, and after the dozenth time cycling through them it starts to get sassy.

“Come on you stupid mirror, just show me the spinels!” he shouts, and the mirror shouts back.

“You stupid- show me- show me- show me,” his own voice taunts back at him.  Steven gets a little embarrassed.

“Okay,” he agrees, “Maybe I have asked that enough.”

“Asked that enough,” the mirror responds, and Steven snorts and takes his new copycat friend around town, aiming it this way and that as he narrates a running dialogue on everything the mirrors reflection catches.

Two days of this and the mirror manages, in its own way, to question why he was asking about the spinels to begin with.  Steven explains, as best he can, soulmates. He speaks of the dreams, and the garden, and, above all, the longing.

The mirror seems to understand longing the most.  The gem inside longs to be free, and Steven promises he’ll help.  She’s already done so much for him, after all, dragging him through his lowest days, when hopelessness threatened to overwhelm him.

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He waits until the others are gone, investigating some satellite message that’s taken over the television signal for the sixth time in as many days.  Usually Steven would want to be involved, but he went the first few times, and as much as he loves seeing Sardonyx, this is more important.

He takes the mirror down to the beach and frees the gem inside.  His exposure to gems is minimal; he’d never felt the need to ask her about more than the spinels.  A spinel was what the shadow in the garden had implied his connection to, and the spinels were all he had cared to gaze at.  Pearl, with her ever present love of her home and history, would probably be disappointed when she learned he had destroyed the mirror before learning anything else.

It didn’t matter.  He didn’t need to know anything else, and even if he did it wouldn’t have been fair to ask her.  Not once he knew that she was trapped answering questions like some puppet for all eternity. No.  Not eternity. Just until he could do something, until tonight, until now.

The lines of her build and shape of her features were unfamiliar.  He didn’t ask her who she was, didn’t want to ask her anything and make her feel like she had to answer ever again.

“Hi,” he greets, a little awkward seeing her before him in person.  Her eyes are oddly blank. “Nice to finally meet you, I guess.”

“Thank you for helping me Steven,” she tells him, and though her eyes are strange and white he can still see the emotion in them.  He can still feel that her gratefulness is genuine.

“I shouldn’t have had to,” he tells her firmly.  “What they did to you was wrong. You never should have been in there.”  If possible, her demeanor gentles more.

“Still,” she says, “if there’s ever anything I can do for you, you can always ask.  I owe you more than I can express.”

“You don’t owe me anything!” he insists.

“Well then I’ll help you because we’re friends,” she decides, and Steven has no argument for that.

“You don’t know how to get to homeworld, do you?  Or even just like space in general?”

“I don’t know where any ships are,” she tells him mournfully, “and my powers won’t work right with my gem like this.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, because she’s hurting, and he’s always been soft and kind at his core.  “If I could I would fix that, too.”

“I know you would, Steven.  That’s what makes you so great.”

“I’m not all that great really.  I’m just me.”

“Well I like you plenty.”

“Where are you going to go now?” he asks her, worried as ever and willing to help or offer her a space if she wants it.

“I’m not sure,” she muses.  “Wherever I want. Anywhere.  Everywhere. I think I’m gonna enjoy being free.”

“You know where to find me,” he reminds.  “If you get lonely you can always come visit.”

“Maybe I will,” she agrees amiably, and steps onto the water as if it were solid.  The waves swell gently and carry her away into the distance. Steven watches her until the blue of her outline is indiscernible from the blue of the ocean.  He doesn’t know her name, but he knows that she’s his friend. It’s nice, but it doesn’t ease the loneliness he feels in his bones, the one that originates from her .  Still, just because he’s out of ideas doesn’t mean that he’s in the business of giving up.  Not when someone needs his help. 

Somewhere out there, after all, is a Spinel waiting to be found.

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Connie Mahashwaren’s soulmate isn’t something she thinks about a lot.  For all she knows it could be platonic, and even if it weren’t, she is much too sensible to let something like romance dictate her life and choices.  She’s never asked her parents if they’re soulmates. She knows that most kids assume their parents are, but Connie can’t imagine something as arbitrary as dreaming affecting any of her mother’s choices.

She thinks that her dad loves her mom enough that they might be.  He loves her enough that even if they weren’t it wouldn’t matter.

Soulmates are some far off future thing, anyway.  No amount of dream diaries filled up with vaguely recalled details will give her the companionship the concept implies now.  For all the moving she’s done the friends she’s made are few. She’s glad to be back in beach city. She’s not sure if a returned glow bracelet in a crowd and some (monitored) exchanged emails count as grounds for a friendship, but it’s the closest she’s come.

She knocks on his door, her Mother reassured by the fact that Steven is apparently not allowed to be at home without a guardian present due to some form of deep seated fear of total isolation.  Her mother had called it “fascinating” in that not quite kind way of hers, and lamented not getting a double doctorate. She had admittedly also likely been softened by the friendly “Hi Dr. Connie’s Mom” included in each of his emails.

Steven looks as exhausted as always, his sleep troubled as ever, but there’s a light to his eyes that he only gets when he’s achieved something.

“So, how’s the search going?” she asks.

“Really well,” he assures, but his smile seems forced.  “I’ve got a name.”

“How’d you get a name, I thought the dreams didn’t change?”

He looks like a deer caught in the headlights, eyes wide like he didn’t think what he said through.

“Pearl used to know her,” he hedges and Connie’s own eyes widen.

“Wouldn’t that make her like way older than you?” she asks.  “Do you think it’s platonic? What if she isn’t interested in someone as young as you?  What are you going to do, Steven?”

He sighs and leads her to the couch.

“I’m going to tell you the truth about my family.  You, might want to sit down for this.”

Connie sits delicately, respectfully attentive.  If Steven is sharing family secrets, that means they must be friends.  Even if they can’t discuss whatever he’s about to say over their emails, even if she has to leave again in three weeks, even if she doesn’t see him again for another three years this is still the best thing that’s ever happened to her.  She has an actual, in real life, trusts her with secrets friend.  

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Steven’s dad walks into the house with two bags of takeout.

“Hey bud, is Amethyst in her room?  Oh, your friend’s here. Hi Lonnie-”

“Connie,” Steven corrects, so that thankfully she doesn’t have to.

“Connie, right.  It’s good to finally meet you.  Steven talks about you a lot.”

“Dad, I was just about to tell her about the gems.”

“Oh,  Oh! I’ll uh, be right outside if you need me.  Are you sure? What am I saying, of course you’re sure.  Okay, well then. Um. Enjoy the food.”

He leaves one of the bags on a counter and awkwardly rushes out.

“The gems?  That’s what you call your aunts, right?  Because your mother’s family is thematically named.”

“Kind of,” he says.  “Not exactly.”

“Steven, I don’t understand what you’re telling me.”

“I'm an alien!” he bursts out.  “Well, half. Pearl and Amethyst and Garnet are all aliens, and so was my mom.”

“Oh, well, I’m sure they had good reason, and borders are purely conceptual anyway.  Wait, are you a citizen? Do you need help getting citizenship? Not that I’m offering to marry you or anything!  Well, I’m not saying I wouldn’t, if you needed me to. I just thought that you’re soulmate- But you said she knew your mom’s family-”

“Connie!” he bursts into her monologue before it can somehow get even more embarrassing.

“Connie, that’s… Not what I meant.  I know your mom is really wary of magic stuff, is why I didn’t tell you over email, and of course at the parade I had just met you, but-”

He cuts himself off this time and lifts the hem of his shirt to expose a gemstone the size of a baseball set where his belly button might be, except that he didn’t have one.

“Woah,” she says, wide eyed, and suddenly Amethyst’s purple hue made a lot more sense.

“What did you say your mom’s name was?”

“Rose Quartz,” he says, as she pokes curiously before he swats at her gently with a giggle.

“That tickles!”

“Sorry,” she apologizes.  “It’s really clear for a quartz.”

“Yeah,” he agrees bashfully, “pretty big too.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she agrees.  “So your family is from outer space?”

“Well, not originally.  They had a planet.”

“Oh, duh! Of course, how stupid of me, I mean why would they just be from space, talk about a dumb-”

“Connie,” he reminds with a grin.

“Right,” she says.  “Okay, tell me everything .”

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Magic .  Connie’s best friend has magic .  He can summon a bubble, and make a shield, and his family has magic weapons to fight monsters and he can even kind of almost fly .

“That’s not all of it,” he confides.  “My mom could do other stuff, too. Gems can usually shapeshift, and mom had healing tears-”

“This is so cool !” she finally fails at containing herself.  “Steven, I can’t believe your life is so amazing!”

He gives an awkward chuckle.  “Yeah, it’s pretty amazing,” he parrots back, but his tone is tired, and she’s reminded what a terrible friend she’s being.

“Oh!  That’s right, you were going to tell me about your soulmate!  So is she an alien too? Does she have gem powers? Is she on another planet ?”

It doesn’t occur to her that that’s a problem as well as something fantastical until his shoulders slump and he pokes awkwardly at what’s left of their meal.

“Yeah.  Her name’s Spinel.  She’s stuck somewhere in space waiting for someone to come get her.  I think she needs my help.”

Connie thinks of her dream journals at home, and has a new appreciation for how normal her dreams always were.  Even if her soulmate is a thousand miles away, that’s still on earth.

“I’m going to help you,” she assures him seriously, a hand on his shoulder in comfort.  “However I can, Steven. We’re gonna figure this out.”

She does end up helping a lot.  Mostly because while she’s distracted with this new problem she grabs the wrong drink.