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Connie bounded up the steps leading up towards Steven’s house, the voicemail she’d gotten from him bouncing around in her head with every step. She wasn’t really worried – it was so normal for Steven to sound breathless and excitable whenever he called her that she’d be worried if he didn’t – but he had somehow managed the feat of sounding excitable even by Steven standards. She couldn’t think of any explanation as to why which wasn’t going to be at least a little bit scary.
Going through the checklist of possible things it could be – they’d found Malachite, they were going to go on a mission to fight a giant gem monster and Steven wanted her help, Steven’s mom had somehow come back, there was a new Dogcopter movie announced and she hadn’t heard about it yet – she knocked on the door.
No answer.
“Steven?” she said, knocking again, but nobody replied. She could hear something from inside - was that music? It was really loud, and had a kind of thump-y electronic beat which didn’t seem like something Steven would be listening to at all. “Um, Amethyst?”
She knocked one last time, feeling a little embarrassed. Maybe she had been too early, or even too late? She’d managed to miss the first bus, and the next one to come had been a little slow, so maybe he’d left without her... it didn’t seem like a very Steven thing to do either, but she supposed whatever the Gems were doing, it was probably more important than whatever Steven had wanted to tell her.
More important than her, she thought, heart sinking.
“Steven, I got your message!” she tried, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Are you OK? You sounded really excited, which, um, I guess isn’t that weird? But I still don’t know what’s going on!”
“Oh!” gasped Steven’s voice, barely audible. The music suddenly turned off and Connie heard another, deeper voice – Amethyst’s – groan in exasperation. “Sorry, Amethyst! We’ll do some more later, OK?”
She heard footsteps, light ones and heavy ones, from the other side of the door. Connie heard Pearl’s voice telling Amethyst to hurry it up, then Amethyst saying a cheerful “later, dude” followed by a hissed “oh, my bad, sorry” - wait, Connie thought, did Amethyst just apologize? What was going on in there? - and Steven’s equally cheerful voice reassuring her it was alright.
“O-OK!” she heard Steven shout at the door, in a slightly higher pitch. Connie heard a cough, and then Steven continued in his normal voice. “Uh... you can come in, I guess?”
That was strange too. If Steven wasn’t so eager to see her that he burst through the door before she was even up the stairs, he’d normally at least answer the door himself. Maybe he was surprising her?
“Should I close my eyes?”
“N-no! It’s fine!”
Making a mental check to make sure she hadn’t forgotten Steven’s birthday, or her own birthday, Connie steeled herself and turned the doorknob. Connie hadn’t heard Garnet’s voice and she had figured that Pearl and Amethyst had left, but it somehow hadn’t struck her that it was going to be just her and Steven until she saw Steven standing in the middle of the room, hands on hips, staring straight ahead at the door, infectious grin slightly strained.
Connie resisted the urge to rub her eyes. She really couldn’t be surprised anymore when Steven changed appearances – she’d seen him as a baby, after all – but, well, she’d gotten so used to Steven’s usual red shirt, blue shorts ensemble that she sometimes forget he even had other clothes. But Steven’s sleeveless blouse covered in blue and pink flowers, and the red skirt cascading to Steven’s ankles, weren’t even the half of what had changed. Steven had also become taller, just a few inches more than her, and he looked older – still recognizably the Steven she knew rather than the strangely too tall, too thin teenager he had tried to be before, but also slightly more muscular, his still chubby face just barely more defined. Her eyes were also drawn to his hair, longer, in ringlets, held back with a pink hairband, and to his face, where someone (or, probably, Steven himself) had applied blush to his cheeks and a light pink gloss to his lips.
Steven must have seen something on her face, because he frowned and started to move his arms towards his chest. But Connie barely had a moment to realize it before, without even thinking, she rushed towards him, grabbing both of his hands in her own and holding them up in front of her.
“Steven!” she almost squealed, twisting around to look this way and that at Steven’s outfit, at his makeup, at his hair. Steven shuffled shyly, his already pink cheeks becoming even pinker. “Wow, you look so cute! Did you do this all yourself? Is this what you wanted to show me?”
Connie paused.
“Wait, you’re not shapeshifting, are you?” she said, looking him straight in the eyes. “You know what happened last time...”
“No, no!” Steven said, his face breaking into a smile. “It’s really me! Really, really me!”
“Really, really you?” she repeated slowly. “But you look so...”
Connie’s heart skipped a beat when she noticed tears welling up in the corner of Steven’s eyes. Oh no, she thought, was it something I said?
“Yeah!” Steven agreed, momentarily horrifying Connie before she remembered that Steven couldn’t actually read minds. But then she looked at the tears on his cheeks and the smile on his face, which had turned back into one of his trademark ear-splitting grins, and the clothes he was wearing, and what Amethyst had said before, and the way his body had changed... the way it had changed in ways she hadn’t even put her finger on when she’d first saw him... and she realized he wasn’t crying because he was upset. Steven was crying because they were happy.
“Oh my gosh, Steven,” she gasped, everything finally clicking into place, and she threw her arms around Steven’s neck and pulled her friend into a hug. “Oh my gosh, I’m so happy for you!”
Slowly, she felt Steven’s arms wrap around her back, and then Steven squeezed her tightly. She half-expected a bear hug, but instead, she heard the sound of sniffling, the snort of someone trying to prevent their nose from running, and she understood Steven had started to cry even harder.
“Steven, it’s OK, don’t cry,” she said automatically, trying to keep her heart from racing. She patted Steven’s shoulder and Steven just hugged her even more tightly. She winced, the breath nearly knocked out of her lungs. “Why... why don’t we sit down so you can tell me all about it?”
Steven didn’t say anything, but they loosened their grip, and she broke out of the hug and took a step back. She looked at her friend’s face – their eyes were already red and puffy, their makeup was running, and there was a line of snot ruining their cute lip gloss, but Steven was still smiling. She laid a hand against their tear-stained cheek and smiled back.
“Is that OK?” she said.
“Yeah,” said Steven. “That sounds nice.”
Fortunately, there had already been one stool in the middle of the room with a very old-fashioned purple stereo and a dozen old cassette tapes on it – definitely Amethyst’s – so Connie only had to drag out one stool for them both to sit down. She’d also gotten Steven a towel to wipe their face and boxed juices for them both out of the refrigerator – just because Steven actually looked their age didn’t mean they couldn’t still enjoy a good boxed grape juice.
“So, um,” said Connie, kicking her feet. “Are you alright?”
Steven took a sip of juice and nodded.
“Yeah,” said Steven. “Thanks, Connie.”
Connie bit her lip so she didn’t reflexively say “you’re welcome” - it was normally a good habit, but she didn’t want Steven to feel pressured to say anything and it didn’t really feel appropriate.
“Um,” Steven continued, staring intently at their straw and wiggling it back and forth, before realizing what they were doing and squeezing their eyes shut in concentration. “I don’t really... know what to say.”
“Don’t worry, that’s OK,” said Connie, not really knowing what to say either. She hoped this wasn’t too awkward for them... she’d just never really had a conversation like this before. “You don’t have to tell me anything at all! If you don’t want to, I mean.”
“But I do want to!” said Steven, clenching their fists against their chest. “You’re my best friend, Connie! And... and... this means so much to me. That’s why I called you!”
Connie felt herself blush. Was she the first person Steven had told about this, besides the gems? Of course her and Steven were close, but that was a lot of trust for Steven to put in her – and a whole different kind of trust than all those times they’d fought together, even a different kind of trust than being Stevonnie. She could tell Steven had been trying to be their usual confident, bouncy self when she’d walked in, but she couldn’t imagine how hard this must have been for them – even scary. Maybe even scarier than they’d thought it’d be at first.
“O-oh,” she said. “But, Steven, you know I would never make...”
Suddenly realizing what she’d said, she stopped herself and looked up at her friend, who had gone back to playing with their straw. She realized she’d been thinking of them as, and calling them, Steven the entire time – it was the only thing she’d ever known them as, but she hadn’t asked what they wanted to be or even if they’d made any decisions for themselves yet.
“Are you... OK with being called Steven?” she ventured. “What do you want me to call you?”
Her friend looked up at her and squinted, slightly slack-jawed, as if the question hadn’t even crossed their mind before. Then something seemed to click in their head and they grinned.
“Steven’s fine!” Steven said. “It’s the name Mom picked for me and... I like it! Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I can’t be a Steven.”
“That’s true,” Connie said, smiling back. Absently, she brushed her hair from her forehead, looking towards the floor. “So then... you’re a girl.”
Connie didn’t think it was a relief, exactly, to know that... she would have supported Steven no matter what she said she was. But it was a relief to her that she had been able to say it to her at all.
“Mm-hmm,” said Steven. Connie looked up at her. She had looked like like she was on the edge of bursting into tears when Connie had first walked in, even before she actually had burst into tears, but she seemed more relaxed now – she had started to bounce in her seat and kick her feet, looking for all the world like a bigger, taller version of the Steven that Connie had known for so long.
“I thought I might just be, you know, like, a boy who liked dresses and make-up?” Steven continued. The smile didn’t leave her face, but she leaned back on her stool, looking deep in thought. “Or, you know, like Stevonnie. And those things were fun... so I guess that would have been OK.”
Connie nodded, thinking back to all the times the two of them had become Stevonnie.
“To be honest, fusing was really weird at first...” she admitted, quickly glancing at Steven to see if she’d offended her. “Don’t get me wrong, it was fun! But that’s because you were so happy, Steven.... I couldn’t help but be happy too.”
“Yeah...” sighed Steven, her blush deepening. “I know it sounds weird, but I even thought about asking you if, maybe, one day, you’d want to be fused all the time, like Garnet? But I don’t think your Mom or Dad would have liked that idea.”
“Definitely not,” replied Connie, laughing. She thought about how they’d react if she ever had to explain this to them, not to mention how she’d do it, but shoved that thought aside – this was Steven’s time. She’d worry about standing up for her friend later.
She also shoved aside the tiny, tiny part of her that had thought “but I would have liked it.”
“Well, anyway,” Steven continued, taking another sip of her juice. Connie shook her head, trying to stay focused. “I spent a lot of time thinking about it – about why I liked being Stevonnie, and how fun Beach-a-Palooza was, and why it was so hard for me to... grow up, I guess. And I realized it was because I didn’t really know who... who I was.”
Connie waited for her to continue, but Steven had gone quiet, rubbing one of her bare feet against the legs of the stool. Her body looked scrunched up, like she was trying to stuff herself into a ball, so Connie opened her mouth to try to say something reassuring. Steven, though, spoke first.
“soiwentintomymom’sroom?”
“What?” said Connie, before her brain mentally translated. “Oh! Oh.”
“I know, I know!” said Steven, throwing her hands up in front of herself and spilling a line of juice across the floor. “It was a really, really, really bad idea! But I just had to know, I guess.”
“So... what happened?”
Steven didn’t answer, momentarily occupied with looking over at the grape juice she had just spilled. With a hup, she hopped off the stool and crouched down in front of the little purple puddles, wiping at them with the towel Connie had given her earlier.
“Well, I didn’t know what to say or how to say it,” Steven admitted. It was harder for Connie to hear her with her back turned, but Connie listened closely, leaning forward with her arms against her knees to try to hear her friend better. “So I just said... ‘I wish I knew what I really am.’”
Connie swallowed. She couldn’t think of any way that could have ended well, with everything she’d seen from and heard about Steven’s mom’s room. Could it even understand a question like that? Maybe it’d just make another Steven, like some kind of “just be yourself” thing... she couldn’t imagine that would have helped Steven very much, if she didn’t know what yourself meant.
“And it just made me, which wasn’t very helpful,” said Steven (Connie was starting to wonder if reading minds really was a gem power she didn’t know about) as she dabbed at the juice on the floor. “So I asked it again, and it started making another me, and another, and another, and another...”
“Hundreds of Stevens?” gasped Connie.
“Well, it wasn’t the first time...” Steven muttered, without explaining further. Connie decided not to press. “But yeah, I guess so. See, the weird thing is, all the Stevens were different. I could tell all those mes were me, but... some of them were big and some of them were small, or they had beards, or they were really skinny, or they had...”
Steven paused, hissing out the next word quietly as if afraid someone would come in the room and tell her off just for saying it.
“...breasts... or they were hairy all over, or they had really, really short hair, or they had really, really long hair... I think some of them didn’t even have gems! But that’s not all!”
Steven continued to dab at the juice. Connie suspected she wasn’t really paying attention to what she was doing at this point.
“They all had different clothes!” Steven continued, throwing her arms into the air and splashing juice from the wet towel to another section of the floor. Connie winced as Steven, having thrown herself off balance, fell backwards, flopping onto her back. She didn’t even seem to notice outside of that she was now looking up at Connie, the look in her eyes the look of someone seemingly a million miles away. “Skirts, dresses, blouses, overalls, tanktops, tee-shirts, sweaters, hoodies, bows, hats, everything I could think of, and put together all the ways I could think of too.”
Steven sighed, closed her eyes, and smiled.
“It was amazing.”
“Yeah,” Connie agreed. “That does sound cool.”
“But,” Steven went on, “it didn’t really answer my question, you know? It just made me feel more confused.”
“So you asked them which one was you,” said Connie, before realizing she had even spoken.
“Mmm-mmm,” Steven replied, shaking her head. She stood up, climbed to her feet, brushed off her skirt, and adjusted her hairband, then turned back to Connie, her expression serious, one arm raised against her chest. “That’s not it at all. What I realized is... they were all me. Boys, girls, gems, human, and everything in-between. You know?”
Connie didn’t. She couldn’t understand how that would have helped either – how Steven would have come from something like that to what was in front of her right now. Resting her chin against her hand, she tried to think about it... what if it’d been her in Steven’s mom’s room? What if she’d asked that question?
Well, she didn’t have that problem, did she? She knew what kind of person she was and she was proud of it, right? Proud enough to stand up to her mom, to do what she wanted instead of what her mom wanted for her: not just being a good, well-behaved little girl, but living a dangerous life helping Steven, protecting Steven...
Ah, she thought, eyes widening. Steven.
She thought back to how she’d been before she’d met Steven – the small, shy, bookish, dark-skinned girl in huge glasses who didn’t think anyone would ever be able to find interesting about her. The one with no friends, the one who thought she’d die at the bottom of the ocean without so much as a first kiss. She hadn’t known who she was either – it was only because of Steven that she’d found someone who liked her for what she was, that she’d found what she’d liked about herself, that she’d found out who she was.
“I think so,” said Connie, nodding. She had to stop herself from snorting when she realized something – it was funny, but she doubted Steven would understand why. “So it was telling you to just be yourself, right?”
“Yeah,” replied Steven, grinning. “There’s some things about me I can’t change, like being a Gem... but, for the rest of me, I just had to pick the ‘me’ I liked the best! And, well, here she is!”
For emphasis, Steven spun in place, her skirt billowing out around her. Connie started giggling, and Steven started laughing too, that uh-huh-huh laugh she always did, and Connie started laughing with her until Steven came to a wobbly stop, clutching her forehead, her hairband slipping down to rest on her hand.
“There’s... there’s,” Connie stammered, wiping a tear from her eye and taking a deep breath, trying as best she could to be serious again. “There’s just one thing I’m wondering... do you mind if I ask you something, Steven?”
“Not at all!”
“I just want to know... how’d you pick? What about all those other Stevens you saw?”
“They’re here too,” Steven replied, shoving her hairband back part of the way and pressing her other hand against her chest. “And, if I ever want to be one of those Stevens instead, I can be.”
“OK,” said Connie, nodding. She hopped up from her stool, making Steven jump, but she quickly closed the distance to do what she had wanted to do – fix Steven’s slightly off-center hairband, brush back hairs that had become stray from her spinning, smooth out her skirt. “And, if you ever want to be one of those Stevens, I’ll be here for them too.”
Steven smiled at her, her face even redder than it had been all day.
“Thanks, Connie,” she said softly. Connie grinned and gave Steven’s shoulder the world’s least cool fistbump, which made her giggle.
“What are friends for, right, Steven?”
“Yeah!”
Connie blushed too, belatedly noticing they were nearly close enough to bump foreheads – she’d figure after literally fusing into one person with her, something like this wouldn’t phase her, but she’d heard Steven’s dad once say the brain was mysterious like that – and stepped back, looking around the otherwise empty house.
“So, um... what were you doing before I came over?” she tried, clapping her hands together. She knew it wasn’t a very good attempt to change the subject, but Steven brightened up, turning towards the purple stereo on the floor.
“Oh, you mean with Amethyst? We were just dancing... you want to try?”
“I’d love to,” Connie replied instantly, grinning, and Steven grinned back and trotted over to the stereo, crouching down to pop open the tape deck.
“Amethyst makes her own tapes but her music’s kind of... loud. But I’ve got some other stuff we can listen to, if you want... ooh!” Steven held up a white cassette, waving it around in the air. “How about Teenz Bop 8: 1987’s Greatest Hits?”
“That’s OK,” Connie replied, laughing. “Play whatever you want, Steven.”
Nodding excitedly, Steven set the stereo on one of the stools and set to work. There was a click, a loud whirr of ancient analog gears trying desperately to turn, and then a teenage boy singing a frankly awful cover of Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) started playing. Which Connie, of course, immediately recognized, because her music tastes were nothing if not old-fashioned.
Steven didn’t hesitate, taking a few steps back and swinging her hips roughly in time with the beats, and Connie didn’t even try not to giggle.
“Come on, Connie!” said Steven, spinning around to face her.
“Should I sing too?” Connie replied, her bad attempt at sarcasm ruined by her own smile.
Steven’s grin threatened to expand past the edge of her face. “Absolutely! Since when I have ever not wanted to hear you sing?”
“Well, OK,” said Connie, closing her eyes and throwing her head back dramatically. She started walking closer to where Steven had been, swinging her arms back and forth, and opened her eyes again to find Steven had closed the distance between them. She was biting her lip, eyes shut in concentration, wiggling her whole body and, in Connie’s humble opinion, it was the cutest thing she had ever seen.
“Yeah, I wanna dance with somebody,” Connie sang, remembering what Steven had asked. “With somebody who loves me.”
“Wow, Connie, you sound great!” Steven said, momentarily stopping, before going back to shaking her hips in a way that suggested she was trying to make up for stopping.
“Thanks!” Connie replied, holding her arms in front of herself and swinging them in circles, before continuing. “...with somebody, oh, I wanna feel the heat with somebody...”
Steven started to sing too, loudly. She had the voice of a practiced singer, as Connie knew, but she wasn’t really trying to stay on key – she was singing from her gut, trying to be heard over the music and Connie’s own voice.
“I’ve been in love and lost my senses,” they both sang, Connie closing her eyes and focusing entirely on the music. Almost unconsciously, she stepped forward, closer to Steven. “Spinning through the town...”
With the music’s cue, Connie started to spin around, taking another step back... and she collided roughly, backfirst, into Steven. She felt herself fall, but Steven’s arms caught her before she could hit the floor, and Connie looked up from where her head rested against Steven’s chest into Steven’s shocked, blushing face, at her big arms wrapped around her midsection.
Connie didn’t even have time to blush herself, much less move – time seemed to stop, the room was filled with a pink glow that started from under Steven’s blouse, and then they were a single teenager in a blue and pink floral crop-top and denim shorts, leaning backwards against thin air.
“Oh no,” said Stevonnie, fruitlessly waving their arms to try to regain their balance. With a heavy crash, they fell backwards into the stool, which rolled on it’s axis before tumbling to the floor with them, the stereo crashing into the pile of cassettes and ejecting Teenz Bop across the room.
Stevonnie laid sprawled on the floor, but they didn’t think much of their embarrassment or their seriously aching back. Instead, they started to laugh, harder and harder, rolling to their side and wrapping their arms around their own midsection, over their gem.
“I love you,” Stevonnie sputtered, laughing all the while, tears of joy at the corners of their eyes. Then their laughter jarred to a halt, their eyes widening as one of the two people making them up realized what the other had said.
After a moment, Stevonnie smiled softly. “Me too.”