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Lars has never been really good with words. He usually trips on the way and makes a mess. Which is why he ends up using his hands most of the time.
His hands are not perfect, though. Their fingers are too long, the skin is calloused and crippled with scars. Most of them are small, but others are loud. His hands are an entire book filled with long chapters, and complicated words. They act, talk, and create a whole story.
It’s essentially why he tries to hide his hands and instead use words like normal people do. At which he fails miserably.
Sadie has always liked holding his hands, for some reason. Hers are soft but not delicate. She’s certainly not delicate – not that Lars is complaining. Sadie likes his hands just the way they are, filled with accidental cuts from cooking, and wounds he doesn’t like to talk about. Lars doesn’t really understand why she loves them and doesn’t want to change them.
Lars starts to understand (maybe) before he dies.
But death is where things become so clear, despite the irony behind it.
His hands are pink now; truly unlike any other.
Lars kind of misses that humanity. His hands aren’t warm anymore, but nobody else seems to mind that. Sadie holds his hands like they’re still the same. Lars stops hiding them in his pockets, and exposes them in baking more often, letting his family and friends in.
He tries to find the humanity in baking, because it is essentially human. Gems could do it too, obviously, but it’s the way Lars expresses himself through taste and appearance.
Touch, too, is something very human. Something he has also been very embarrassed of. However, since coming back from Homeworld, he’s been touching his loved ones a lot more. Whether or not it’s because of his months-long deprivation, he’s not uncomfortable with it anymore.
Specifically, he finds himself hugging Steven more than the kid does himself. Steven is perhaps the most openly affectionate person he knows; he hugs and touches everyone he meets. Lars used to find it annoying, but he’s caught squeezing the boy a lot lately. Which Sadie obviously teases him about.
But Steven begins seeking his touch in the bad days, too. Lars doesn’t shut him down for it – he’s been very insistent on Steven coming to him for help, after the two got kidnapped. At the very least the kid is following his advice, since he knows Steven struggles with getting out of a savior role.
Steven melts and gives in when Lars gives his shoulders a steady squeeze, or when he hugs him when Steven doesn’t have the strength. Lars’ hands are not anywhere near soft, so maybe, he observes, that’s the kind of comfort Steven needs. Flawed, rough, but firm. Stable.
Steven’s hands, unlike his, are round and fluffy like marshmallows. However, with too much knowledge and terror inside. They’re not scarred but Lars can still sense the tenseness, the fear, regret, and grief. The older boy tries not to silence them, but to hear and embrace those feelings.
Ultimately, that’s what Lars has needed this whole time as well. Not to be fixed, but to be heard, to embrace everything there is to himself – even the things he tried the most to hide from the world.
Lars tries then, to be there for Steven.
As he is right now in the middle of the night, in his big and wooden attic-slash-bedroom. His pink hand is currently holding Steven’s, the younger boy stargazing through the skyscrapers on the ceiling. Lars stares at Steven the entire time, a little unnerved by the kid’s dead silence.
He’s never seen Steven so reserved. The boy has raged, grieved, burned. Lars has always been there to catch him. So, when Steven doesn’t react at all, Lars is… scared, to say the least.
Either way, Lars makes no comments, knowing he just needs to reassure his presence.
Steven is small on his bed, truly not taking up much space, but he retreats like he is. He doesn’t look like a fourteen-year-old – technically a teenager. Lars didn’t believe him when Steven first told him, which is continuously more painful every time Lars looks at him and sees the child in this famous half-gem rebel hero.
Ultimately, Steven pulls Lars’ hand to… look at it. He analyzes it very closely, that Lars almost feels embarrassed. Steven isn’t shocked at the number of aged scars in his own seemingly untouched fingers.
“… I think you’re going to hate me for this,” Steven prefaces, “but I wish I could scar like you.” He eventually releases Lars’ hand and adds, “I wish I could scar like normal people.”
Lars frowns.
He might not like where this is going.
“It’s so crazy because, I’ve been through so much, but no one has any idea,” Steven vents and looks up at his own light-skinned hand with something akin to disappointment. “I wish I didn’t need to prove it to them. That people could just see it.”
The older teen doesn’t dare say a word.
Especially because he fears what comes next.
“I’ve actually tried to show it before. But it didn’t work.” Steven shrugs and smiles, to mask the brokenness in his whisper. “Because that’s how I was born, and I can’t change that.”
What could he say?
…
Nothing.
There’s nothing to be said. Nothing to correct.
There’s no right or wrong; it’s Steven’s perspective, a very tragic one at that.
Lars can only do one thing.
“You don’t need to prove it to me.”
Steven ponders for a moment, and finally looks back, as if trying so hard not to have hope for Lars’ words.
“I believe in you, Steven. I believe in your pain.”
The half-gem shakes his head, his lips trembling against his will.
“I…” he sobs, “I-I just wish they could see how hurt I am.” Steven almost sounds afraid of his reaction.
Lars only sighs quietly, not annoyed but sympathetic. “I know.”
He pulls Steven to his chest, cradling him in his arms. Lars’ scarred hands rub Steven’s sobbing back. Lars only does so and nothing else, because he knows that touches say so much more, and much clearly, than words do.
Lars can’t warm him like other people can, but he can stay and embrace the pain that doesn’t show.