#odysseus is short and ajax is very tall

[streets-in-paradise]

The most accurate thing in the film is the height difference between Ajax and Odysseus

[facts-i-just-made-up]

Facts about Greek Myths?

There are a great many figures in Greek myth and they can be hard to keep track of, so here is a quick guide to which is which:

Ajax- Warrior who invented detergent.

Antigone- Funeral enthusiast who invented civil disobedience.

Atlas- First winner of the Olympic strong titan competition.

Bellerophon- Plot point in Mission Impossible 2.

Cerberus- 7 headed dog tragically born with only 3 heads.

Charon- Lead rower for Styx.

Cratus- God of strength, but not THAT god of strength.

Cyclops- Inventor of the monocle.

Daedalus- Inventor of the Labyrinth, and thus of David Bowie.

Dionysus- Drank 24/7 but very responsibly never drove.

Eris- Goddess of fighting with each other.

Eros- God of doing something else with each other.

Euronymous- God of Mayhem.

Fates- Least creatively named destiny gods ever.

Hera- Goddess of marriage yet only Zeus's third wife.

Hylia- Goddess of triangles and disjointed timelines.

Icarus- God of disappointing ones father.

Io- Space captain and epic 3D short film, still not on blu-ray.

Jocasta- Originator of Jo Mama jokes, mother of Oedipus.

Leda- Swan enthusiast and feathery-fandom originator.

Medea- Even worse mom than Jocasta.

Medusa- Inventor of reptile-safe shampoo.

Megaclite- LOL her name is "Megaclite." Pronounced like "Clitty."

Narcissus- Basically Trump.

Odysseus- Sailor who refused to ask for directions.

Orpheus- Inventor of impatiently checking the download bar.

Ouranos- Spelling that could've avoided a lot of planet butt jokes.

Pallas- Inventor of weird looking cats.

Persephone- Pomegranate fan, looked like Monica Bellucci.

Prometheus- Stupid fucking movie, especially for using some of H.R. Giger's original designs then putting them up next to a fucking plain white squid. Also let's make the space jockey a tall guy in a suit. How did Scott think that was a good idea? Fuck that shit and double fuck Covenant for somehow doing even fucking worse.

Rhode- Sea nymph yet not technically an island.

Siren- Inverse groupie.

Sisyphus- Limp Biscuit fan who never stopped rolling.

Tantalus- I'll tell you in a minute...

Thanatos- God of dying as easily as snapping your fingers.

Zeus- When the earth was still flat and the clouds made of fire, and mountains stretched up to the sky, sometimes higher- Folks roamed the earth like big rolling kegs. They had two sets of arms, they had two sets of legs. They had two faces peering out of one giant head so they could watch all around them as they talked and they read. And they never knew nothing of love. It was before the origin of love. There were three sexes then: One that looked like two men glued up back to back, called the children of the sun. Similar in shape and girth were the children of the earth. They looked like two girls rolled up in one. The children of the moon were like a fork shoved on a spoon, they were part sun, part earth- Part daughter, part son. Now the gods grew quite scared of our strength and defiance and Thor said, "I'm gonna kill them all with my hammer, like I killed the giants." And Zeus said, "No, you better let me use my lightening like scissors, like I cut the legs off the whales, and dinosaurs into lizards." Then he grabbed up some bolts and he let out a laugh, and said, "I'll split them right down the middle. Gonna cut them right up in half." And then storm clouds gathered above into great balls of fire, and fire shot down from the sky in bolts like shining blades of a knife and it ripped right through the flesh of the children of the sun and the moon and the earth. If you want the rest, see Hedwig and the Angry Inch cuz this is taking way longer to type than I expected.

[babyrdie]

Achilles

Trying to escape the artistic block by creating Homeric character designs. I started with Achilles because I thought maybe he would be an easier choice, but he's a much harder character to draw than I was giving him credit for!

The next one I'm going to try is planned to be Helen, but we'll see… I'll probably have to do a version of her in underwear, because part of drawing these characters is practicing body shapes. I managed to put Achilles in an outfit that still showed enough to make training easier, but Helen…probably in strophic and perizoma. Maybe two drawings of Helen, one with her in her underwear and one with her fully clothed.

(If someone has a very good memory, maybe they will recognize my icon and realize that I already drew it this year and this Achilles doesn't match my other Achilles. Well, the answer is: I had the foolish idea of having different designs for the characters depending on the media I'm doing fanart on. Yes, extra work for no reason, here I am! That other one was a drawing for a ficwriter, so it's different from this one because this Achilles is from The Iliad. It wasn't a redesign, it's just that there are two Achilles.)

And from this part of the post, I start to babble about design choices because it makes it easier for me to remember when I draw him again (I will be using this post as my guide), be warned.

The hair. Guys, the hair. Initially, I designed it to be shoulder length and less voluminous, as that is the standard hair I see being used for Achilles in modern designs here on Tumblr. In other pieces, like Greek amphorae and later paintings by other artists, he also usually doesn't have hair that long. But I got a little stuck on the lion analogy and, although it's a metaphor that has even been used on other heroes, I think this animal fits ridiculously well with this specific character and I wanted to bring that into the design somehow. And that's how I ended up with long and voluminous hair, imitating a mane. Plus, the lion thing also spilled over into the eye design a bit.

The body…well, it's typically what most of us draw Achilles with. He's strong because he's the strongest Achaean in the war, but he's not the big type because his agility is very accentuated by Homer (I mean, one of the guy's epithets is "swift-footed"), so he's that person who has an agile muscular structure. Regarding height, to me, the height order of some of the main Achaeans (from tallest to shortest) is:

Ajax Telamon (something close to 2,0, like 1,98 maybe. The reason is obvious)

Achilles/Patroclus (same height, around 1,90. The body types will probably be different, though. I always imagined Achilles tall and I like to think that Patroclus is the same height as him, so it turns out that for me Patroclus is automatically tall)

Menelaus (a little shorter than Achilles and Patroclus. Something like 1,88. I like to imagine that Helen is also tall, but maybe she doesn't look as tall next to Menelaus because he is taller. Helen might be 1,80. The reason for imagining her so tall is that I imagine her being a figure that you find imposing. Not necessarily because of something she does, but simply in seeing her)

Diomedes (a little less than Menelaus. Something like 1,84)

Agamemnon (almost the same height as Diomedes, like 1,80. We know from Priam that he is tall, but not that tall, and that he is taller than Odysseus, so I think this is good. Anyway, I imagine him being of a wider than Menelaus. I imagine Clytemnestra to be around 1,66) Antilochus (something like 1,79. Which makes me wonder what he looks like next to Achilles and Patroclus.)

Odysseus (around 1,70. I imagine Penelope being short, so the couple next to each other gives the impression that Odysseus is taller than he is. And with "short", I think Penelope must be around 1,59. I also imagine that Circe was taller than him, but I don't have a height in mind yet.)

So:

Ajax (1,98)

Achilles/Patroclus (1,90)

Menelaus (1,88)

Diomedes (1,84)

Agamemnon/Helen (1,80)

Antilochus(1,79)

Odysseus (1,70)

Clitemnestra (1,66)

Penelope (1,59)

Note: everything in meters and centimeters because I honestly have no idea how this other system of feet and inches works.

[mimik-u]

Flower Child (Chapter 4)

Title: Connie

Summary:

Garnet, Pearl, Amethyst, Greg, Yellow, and Blue—they've all lost someone. Lovers and daughters and friends and family, and that's not a wound you easily come back from.

If at all.

But this isn't an 'if at all' kind of story.

It's a story about a sickly, little kid named Steven and his ever-growing surrogate family.

It's a story about the kind of boy who'd extend a flower and a smile to a sad stranger he meets at a cemetery. Human AU.

AO3 Link

It was precisely five in the morning when the Maheswarans’ tan sedan eased out of the driveway and onto the blacktop road. The sun wasn’t set to rise for a couple of hours still, and the fading moon cast an eery, ghoulish glow on the still slumbering world. Everything was stained blue, from her mother’s white lab coat to Connie’s own hands, which she rubbed over her bleary eyes in an attempt to spark some life into them.

She didn’t usually go with her mom to work—being an avid lover of sleep and all—but her dad was on an out-of-state operation for a couple of days, and so she really didn’t have a choice in the matter.

Which she had absolutely hated at first.

Being an avid lover of sleep and all.

But something… no, someone… changed her mind.

Yesterday, she had met Steven Universe, and ever since they had parted, she hadn’t been able to get his goofy smile out of her head.

His loud, round laugh.

And the curious way he drew out her name.

As though it was full of exclamation points.

“Steven’ll be there, right?”

Mom offered a slight grunt in response, which Connie supposed meant yes. (Mom wasn’t really a morning person… or, well, much of a person at all until she’d at least gotten three cups of coffee into her system. She was only on number one as of yet, and the creamy smell of hazelnut wreathed her travel tumbler like perfume.)

“What time?”

“Twelve.” The one word answer was terse and forbidding.

But Connie ducked under the lurid yellow tape and pressed on anyway.

“I didn’t get to ask, but who was that woman with him? The one who had her feet propped up on the bed?”

“Amethyst, one of Steven’s many guardians,” she growled impatiently. “Connie, this isn’t twenty questions.”

The sharp rebuke stung the air between them.

A chill that the car’s heater could not touch.

“Sorry, Mom.” She looked out of the window in a vain attempt to stifle the heat rising in her cheeks, where it settled somewhere behind her eyes. The sickly tinged suburbs were beginning to give way to the long stretch of ancient forest that wound its way from her home to the city. The trees tall and everlasting. Friends and guardians in the daylight. Sinister, grasping things in the darkness. “I’m just excited to have a new friend… that’s all.”

It was a lie, and they both knew it.

She was excited to have a friend at all.

The kids at school didn’t like that Connie’s hand seemed to be permanently stuck in the air during class.

Or the way she lugged thick books around the playground.

Or how her glasses seemed to make her appear all the more erudite.

Which was, like, not her fault, but kids were cruel, and she just happened to fall on the easy end of their predatory food chain.

Priyanka Maheswaran let out a sigh that seemed to deflate all of her prickly, caffeine deprived edges; her grip on the wheel relaxed a fraction of an inch.

“And you have the right to be, sweetheart,” she relented wearily, a billion years old and yet only forty-two at the same time. “Go on. Ask your questions. I know you’re curious.”

The corner of her lined mouth quirked upwards. “I won’t bite anymore.”

Coming from this woman, whose whole manner of being was like the scalpel she used during surgery—sharp, methodical, ruthless—an invitation to talk more was about as rare as an I love you. Connie blinked once before she smiled.

“Thanks, Mom!”

“Ask your questions, Connie” came the short reply, which Connie translated to be a solid you’re welcome.

“I… I have tons of little questions,” she began uncertainly, chewing on her lip, “but I think they’d all be answered if I just asked you one big question.” And she expanded her fingers in her lap as if to realize the breadth of the thoughts swarming through her head like bees. She’d gone to bed thinking about Steven, and she’d woken up excited for the opportunity to see him again.

Eyes still searching the empty road for obstacles that hadn’t yet materialized, Mom jerked her head as if to say, Go ahead and ask it then.

So Connie took a deep breath and did just that: “How did he… how did he get like this?”

Even as the words left her mouth, she knew that they didn’t cover half the sentiment she was trying to convey in them. She was asking how he had ended up in the dialysis center, yes, and yet, she wasn’t asking just that. What she was really trying to get at—in so many words—was how this kid, this specific kid, found himself on the other end of a diagnosis that no decent person would wish on his worst enemy.

Steven Universe was the type of kid you’d meet on a playground after you’d fallen down from the monkey bars and needed a hand to get back up again.

Not the type of kid you’d expect to find in a hospital swarming with tubes and wires.

He was loud and he was playful and he was good, and those weren’t things that were supposed to be shackled to a machine three times a week.

So maybe what Connie was trying to do was piece together the correlation in it all.

Him.

The disease.

His unwavering smile.

The machine.

He was a contradiction, an oxymoron, a particularly hard equation she wished to solve.

If only her mother would give her the unknown variables.

Mom sighed, and the shadows underscoring her eyes seemed to solidify into harsh lines.

“Loaded question,” she said heavily, “but I can work with it.”

But before she began to work with it, per say, Priyanka raised her tumbler to her lips and took a long, reverent drag of coffee. Connie could see the cords in her throat pulling the sweet substance down, down, down.

She had been reading Homer lately—the Iliad this time, rife with glorious, bloodstained battles that were only palliated by the quieter intimacies of a fireside, a prayer, an embrace—so maybe it was no wonder that the image of a libation bearer came to mind.

A devout hero—an Odysseus, an Achilles, an Ajax—drinking the second sip of wine after he had poured the first to the gods in an invocation for strength.

For the courage to press on.

Priyanka set her cup down.

Squared her eyes on the road that unspooled through the dark like a ribbon—silky, its ends disappearing into the deep blue.

And began.

“It all started with Rose Quartz, Steven’s late mother, and she was the most infuriating woman I’ve ever had the privilege to know…”

◆

“I was just a resident at the time, shadowing Dr. Howard—you know, that old geezer colleague of mine who thinks your name is Cindy.”

Connie chuckled at the wry reminder. “Yeah, I just stopped correcting him after awhile.”

“Prudent choice.” Priyanka briefly returned the smile. “But anyways, I was just a resident, and I’d been helping Howard with some of his cases when Rose Quartz showed up for her monthly checkup and—in spite of everything that was wrong with her body—told us she was pregnant. I can remember it like it was just yesterday, Connie, how her hand tenderly tucked itself against the natural curve of her belly, as though she could already see a baby bump forming.”

Mom’s steady gaze on the road finally broke.

Drifted to the roof of the car for an infinitesimal second.

Distracted by a long passed memory.

“I’d been familiar, if not intimate with her case for a long time by then… and I was disgusted.”

“Alright, Steven—you know the drill. Hop up onto the scale,” Mom instructed without looking at him, scribbling something on her clipboard. Connie, standing just next to her mother, leaned up on her tiptoes to see if she could glean something from the chicken scratch symbols, and she thought she could make out the word pale.

Which—Connie glanced at Steven now, who had dutifully stepped onto the gray block—was an observable feature in him she concluded with no little unease. Even against the ultra white of the hospital gown, his complexion seemed to be ashy in comparison, and every bruise he had was inclined to look darker because of it.

The monitor flickered and produced a number.

118.4 pounds.

Mom wrote something on her clipboard again, and the little frown that hung itself on her lower lip told Connie everything she needed to know, and yet, precisely nothing at the same time.

“Aww,” Steven said, tsking playfully. “It’s an even number.”

“Do you have something against even numbers?” Connie asked as he reengaged the floor once more with a totally unnecessary but very cute hop.

He had to think about it for a moment, dark eyes tilted towards the ceiling, head cocked to the side.

“Nah,” he finally shrugged. “I guess I just find odd numbers a little more… exciting, you know?”

She giggled into her hand. She’d never heard it put like that before.

But out of the corner of her eye, she watched as an unspoken conversation passed between Amethyst and her mother.

When Amethyst frowned, her plump lower lip poked out.

“You were… disgusted?”

It was a strong word to describe a pregnancy.

The miracle of life and all that jazz.

“Very much so,” Mom nodded. In the now graying dusk, her face had gained a pinched quality to it, as though she had swallowed something particularly nasty. “Because she knew damn well that pregnancy was dangerous for her, dangerous for any baby she ever wanted to have, and yet, there she was anyway. Glowing. Steven’s father—Greg—was sitting next to her, and he looked like he was about to throw up or pass out one.”

“I don’t… I don’t think I understand.”

“No,” Mom shook her head. “I don’t imagine you do. She had Type 1 diabetes—had had it ever since she was a teenager—and it wasn't even just normal diabetes! Even though she did x, y, and z to take care of her body, and even though she visited Dr. Howard so often they could call each other by their first names, it was still abnormally stressful on her body. Howard diagnosed her with diabetic kidney disease when she was only twenty-three.”

Mom dragged a frustrated hand through her graying hair.

“I was so mad at her,” she said, her voice strained, tight, fervent. “I thought… I thought she was throwing her life away.”

With Steven, her mother was strangely gentle.

Her words were still sharp, but her actions belied their sting in a way that Connie hadn’t taken the time to notice yesterday as absorbed by Steven as she’d been. She took his temperature and clamped a firm hand on his shoulder, smiling a parenthetical smile when he smiled up at her. She checked his blood pressure and was noticeably conscientious as she slid the inflatable cuff up and down his arm.

She and Amethyst bantered back and forth like two sailors home from sea.

“So how’s old Greg doing? Still washing the same five cars of the fifteen people you guys have in Beach City?” Done with recording his temperature and blood pressure on the chart, Mom was now fiddling with the dialysis machine, bringing it to life with some mighty expert button pressing and knob turning. It began to beep steadily.

“You know it, homegirl,” Amethyst grinned. She was already sprawled in the chair next to Steven’s bed, arms behind her head, legs tucked up on the bed. “I think his rotation’s next, so ya should be seeing him soon.”

“Nope,” Steven corrected her. “It’s Garnet’s.”

“Oh, yeah. It’s me and then it’s Garnet and then—“

“My Dad and Pearl,” he finished with a slight flourish of the hand.

Mom shook her head at the mention of Pearl—whom Connie did not know from Eve along with all these other people—a wry smile crooked at the corner of her mouth. “If it was up to Pearl, she’d have all four rotations.

“And then, like, she’d make up a fifth one just to make sure she had every potential shift,” Amethyst said, not without some mischievousness tucked away in the subtleties of her scratchy voice.

The three conspirators shared a knowing laugh, and Connie made a brave attempt at a smile that faltered the more she tried to hold on to it. Water slipping through her fingers.

“She must have known how I felt because she pulled me aside once we were alone. Dr. Howard had gone to check on another patient, Greg had gone to the restroom, so she took me by the hand and made me sit next to her on the examination table.”

And it wasn’t that she was jealous of her mother.

Far from it.

That would be absurd.

No, the something that was gnawing at her chest felt a little more nuanced than that.

There was an intimacy that her mother shared with Amethyst and Steven.

She had long been a part of their strange, little world.

And Connie was on the outside looking in, her fingers pressed against the glass.

Observing the microcosm they had created between them.

Wondering what it took to be let in.

(Okay, maybe she was a little jealous.)

“You hate me, she had said. And I think I may have just glared at her, or if I did say something, it wasn’t very kind. I remember that I couldn’t look at her. I stared at my lap, at those godawful green scrubs that residents had to wear, and my fists were clenched on top of my knees. Maybe I’d been prepared to punch her.” She chuckled lifelessly. “Who knows?”

“What did she look like?” Connie asked as her mother took a deep, steadying breath.

A not quite smile turned the corner of Mom’s mouth.

“She was a very beautiful woman. Tall and big. Gorgeous pink curls—she liked to dye her hair—spilling over her shoulders.”

A not quite frown upended the not quite smile.

“Steven looks a lot like her.”

It was a fitting conception , Connie thought.

Steven as beautiful.

Steven was sharp, intuitive, more so than she had ever realized in the twenty or so hours she had known him. With an embarrassed jolt, she caught him staring at her from the top of the bed, his brown eyes softened in sympathy, in what was surely understanding.

The intensity of his gaze intimidated her, and she looked away, looked down at the pristine hospital floor where the scuff marks caused by beds and shoes and machines were the only scars that marred all the white.

She was being seen.

It was a foreign sensation.

“Hold up a sec, guys!” Steven said, interrupting the laugh session. “We gotta fill Connie in on who all these names are!”

“Heck yeah,” Amethyst consented with an almost serious nod. She grinned at Connie from the other side of the bed. “If you’re gonna hang around, Connie-Con, you’ve gotta know the whole cast!”

Connie-Con, huh?

That was a new one.

She couldn't help but offer a shy smile in return.

“Well, while you exposit, do me a quick favor and pull on your masks,” Mom said, adjusting hers to her lower face in an instant and throwing them each one. “I suppose we’d better get this ball rolling.”

Connie caught hers by the tips of her fingers and wrapped it around her ears in a few delicate motions.

Steven was still staring at her—she flushed to notice—and even though his mouth was now hidden, his wide smile could never be as equally as concealed.

“And then—I’m mortified to admit this now, Connie—I let it rip. I read her the Riot Act and enumerated every single reason she had to be ashamed of herself. Her body couldn’t handle the stress. She had put herself at a statistically liable risk for all sorts of complications. Hypertension. Cardiac arrhythmia. Severe anemia. Death by multi-organ failure. Not to mention what her condition might inflict on the baby!”

“You never did have the best bedside manners, did you, Mom?”

Mom couldn’t do anything but accept the criticism with a bitter smile.

“No,” she agreed grudgingly,“but for all the pansy hand holders in the field, I feel strongly obliged to contend that there should be at least one person who’ll tell you to it straight, no honey nonsense, no sugar. And Rose, despite all I said, despite every hurtful word I leveraged her way, did nothing to stop me. She just sat there and took it, a small, sad smile on her face—which made me even more angry, mind you.”

Mom took a hand off the wheel to indignantly stab it into the air, stiff fingers splaying towards the road.

“What business did this woman have smiling when I was confronting her with the fact that she was probably going to die? I wanted to shake her. I wanted to interrogate her. I wanted to know why .”

“So basically, I’ve got one cool dad and three great moms,” Steven said before jerking a thumb at Amethyst. “This is Amethyst, and she’s, like, the fun mom. We goof around a lot.”

Amethyst nodded approvingly at the description, her long, rather messy bangs shifting from behind her ear to cover one of her eyes.

“Yup, that’s me.”

“Steven,” Mom interjected, very much in doctor mode now, “prepare yourself. I’m going to flush your lines.”

“Roger that, doc,” Steven replied and leaned back on the pillow as she gently peeled back one of the shoulders of his paisley studded gown to reveal what Mom had yesterday explained to be a central venous catheter, or CVC for short. It was a thin tube that had been surgically grafted into a vein just below Steven’s collarbone. On the surface of his skin, it extended into two, short tubes called lumens that would be used to connect to the dialysis machine. Connie watched mesmerized as her mother quickly and skillfully relieved the lumens of their clamps, squinting at them with a searching gaze as though looking for any flaws in them, and huffing in satisfaction when she seemingly didn’t find any.

She was so distracted by this process that she didn’t realize that Steven had continued on with his introductions until what had been a vague buzzing in her ears materialized into his cheery voice once more. “—one we were talking about earlier was Pearl, who is the strict but very loving mom. And then there’s Garnet, who is just, like, cool; there’s really no other word to describe her, and like, finally, my dad, Greg, who is kind of the best. And that’s the family!

Connie recovered her wits quickly enough to laugh. (Was Pearl the cool one, or was she the strict one? She hoped she’d never be tested on the specifics.) “That’s a pretty cool setup you’ve got there. Stick it to the nuclear family unit!”

“We’re a nuclear family unit,” Mom inserted dryly as she flicked the tall syringe she was holding. It was filled with some kind of clear liquid—some sort of solution, Connie supposed.

“I dunno what that means exactly,” Steven smiled, all sheepishness, “but yeah, it is pretty cool. I mean, most kids only get to have one mom in their lifetime, and I’ve gotten three. They’re the best.” He slid his hand downwards and poked the tip of Amethyst’s boot. “I don’t know where I’d be without any of these guys.”

Amethyst made a big show of pushing him away, but her brown eyes were bright with something other than the grin haphazardly slapped across her round features.

“Ugh, shut up, little dude. You’re making me emo.”

“Oh, no!” His eyes widened in mock disapproval. “We can’t have that, now can we? That’s Lapis’s thing!”

Amethyst and Steven’s belly laughs shook the bed.

“And you know what she said to me?”

“What?” Connie asked when her mother wasn’t immediately forthcoming, seemingly lost in thought.

“She squeezed my hand just like this”—Mom reached over and enveloped her entire hand, their fingers intertwining, warmth passing between them like a third touch—“and told me that she didn’t expect for me to understand, but she’d long made peace with the fact that she wasn’t set to have a long life and that before she died, she wanted to bring someone in the world who could enjoy all the things that she could not.”

“That life was supposed to be an experience, not a curse.”

“That if she passed away tomorrow, Greg and all of her friends would be left with nothing but memories, and memories were like petals. They were pretty until the crumbled to dust. She wanted to leave them with roots. She wanted them to have a chance to grow.”

Roots and petals and the potential for growth.

Connie immediately thought of the sunflower fields near their townhouse, how the tall stalks bloomed in the sun.

How all the yellow looked like spun gold.

“I told her she was stupid. I told her that she could have had a relatively long life even with her condition. She could have lived to forty, maybe even fifty!”

Priyanka laughed. It was a harsh sound, like metal clanging against metal.

“And she told me that once I got the giant stuck up my butt seen about, I’d see what she meant one day.”

“Did you?” Connie prodded after a long moment of silence. “Did you ever see what she was talking about?”

Mom’s syringe hovered over one of the lumen for the briefest second before she injected the solution into its exposed opening. 

She had been watching Amethyst and Steven.

The way they looked at each other.

As though they had everything to lose if they lost each other.

“I did,” she paused, reconsidering. “I do. Greg and all the rest? They’d be lost without Steven, unanchored.” 

“That’s how they were for a long time after Rose died. I was there when it happened. I saw all their faces. I hope I never have to see it again.”

“How did she die?” Connie wished she could have taken back the question the moment it left her mouth. Her mother’s grip immediately tightened on the wheel, and the resulting paleness clamored up from her hands all the way to her face in the very way poison ivy slowly overtakes white walls.

“We had to do a c-section, and her blood pressure was rising too rapidly for any machine or doctor alike to keep up with it. We delivered Steven, let her see him, and then started to work on her… but it was no use. She went into a diabetic coma and never woke up.”

They were approaching traffic and the city now. 

The sedan rolled to a stop behind a line of other early risers.

It wasn’t a nuisance for her mom this morning so as much as it was a reprieve.

Priyanka dipped her head and inhaled sharply, her black hair dripping, framing the sides of her face. Connie could no longer see her expression.

She didn’t know if she even wanted to.

“We pulled the plug two weeks later.

“I wish they could make a more flavorful saline solution,” Steven grimaced as her mom injected the replenished solution into the other lumen. “It tastes like salt.”

“Hence the word saline,” Mom remarked drolly.

“You got me there, Dr. M.”

With that tedious necessity out of the way, the process went far more quickly. She connected two tubes from the machine—or Steven’s robokidney as Steven slyly called it to the groans of everyone involved—to the now flushed lumens. The red tube accepted unclean blood into the machine, and the blue tube distributed filtered blood back into the body. It was a precise system and a slow one.

Since the lumens weren’t exposed anymore, they took their masks off and found themselves free to do whatever they wanted to for the next three hours, so long as Steven remained relatively still  that was.

But he was a pro at this, had been for months now, and after Mom went away to tend to another patient and Amethyst wandered off to the cafeteria, Connie pulled The Unfamiliar Familiar out of her backpack to pick up where she’d left off yesterday.

“With or without voices?” She asked, thumbing through the pages until she found her bookmark (a crumpled straw wrapper).

“What kind of question is that?” He snorted. When he did, the tubes nestled against his chest gave a little jump of indignation. “Voices, of course!”

“Sorry, sorry!” She deferred with playfully raised hands. “I was just being thorough.”

“You remind me of Pearl when you say that,” he said. “I’d love for you to meet her someday.”

She tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear and adjusted her glasses.

“I’d like that, too.”

She wanted to meet everyone who made Steven… well, Steven.

The early sun was just beginning to creep towards and above the horizon, bringing with it the varicolored shades of dawn. A muted pink. A slowly simmering orange. Gold shot through all of it. 

The line of cars leading into Empire City was moving forward at a sluggish crawl.

“So where does Steven fit into all this?” Connie could have made an educated stab at it by this point, but she didn’t see the need to when her mom was being so generous with her details. 

Priyanka took the opportunity to take another sip of her coffee as she composed her thoughts, exhaling softly, with subtle weariness, when she set the tumbler down.

“When Steven was born, we immediately found that he had what was more or less a minor birth defect—unilateral renal dysplasia.” And since those weren’t necessarily easily accessible words to a twelve-year old, even a precocious one, Mom took care to elaborate. “That’s when one of the kidneys is somehow malformed during the developmental stages.”

“And that… developed into kidney failure?”

She could see the pieces coming together now.

The contradiction not so contradictory anymore.

The oxymoron resolved.

The equation having a logical, rational end.

Rose Quartz, despite her best intentions, passed on her bodily demons to Steven.

Case closed.

“Not exactly,” Mom frowned, and Connie’s hypothesis crumbled into her lap.

“Through rain, through sleet, through heat, through hell, Archimedes guarded Lisa’s vulnerable body as the fever ran its course through her small body in alternating chills and sweat. Even when night drew itself around them in curtains made of sky velvet and stars, the falcon retained his faithful watch. He was her familiar, her friend, and he would never leave her… not even if she left him.” She closed the book with a resounding thud. “And that, my friend, was Chapter Four.”

Steven’s chin suddenly lifted from where it had been resting on M.C. Bear Bear’s crumpled head.

“What?! You can’t just stop there!”

“No, Steven—you don’t understand,” she laughed warmly. “I have to. Chapter Five leaves me incredibly tender, and I have to emotionally prepare myself for it.”

“You’re just taunting me now,” he accused, a pout beginning to form on his lips.

“Smart boy! I so totally am."

“Kids with dysplasia in one kidney typically grow up without any noticeable decreases in health or kidney function, so Dr. Howard and I didn’t particularly worry about it too much. Hell, we were just relieved that nothing worse had manifested in his little body.”

“Un-fair,” Steven whined, drawing the word out into the two needling syllables. “I wouldn’t do this to you.”

Connie had gleaned enough about Steven’s personality in the short time they had known to each other to agree with him.

“No, you wouldn’t,” she replied thoughtfully, placing her index finger on her lower lip. “You’re too kind, but more importantly still, you have very little impulse control!”

“Hey!” He laughed indignantly.

“Not that that’s a bad thing per say,” she continued pointedly, arching an eyebrow at him, “but it’ll do you some good to wait until the next time. To feel the suspense build up in you until it reaches a breaking point! To stew and simmer in these characters until I relieve you of the heat.”

She leaned forward out of her chair and booped him lightly on the nose.

She’d make a fine reader out of him yet.

“So…” Steven began tentatively once Connie withdrew. She was leaning over now, replacing the thick book in her bag. Her slender fingers paused on the clasp, and she pricked her ears, equal parts curious and hesitant to hear what he was obviously struggling to say. “So there’s definitely going to be…. there’s definitely going to be a next time?”

“But Steven… Steven defied those favorable odds—every statistic and report that said he was going to make it through life without any kidney related complications. When he started to undergo puberty about a year ago, the natural changes in his body caused him to develop a severe urinary tract infection that injured his functional kidney.”

“I did everything I could to try and clear the infection up, but the damage was irreversible. Eight months ago, I diagnosed him with chronic kidney disease and put him on the transplant waiting list.”

“So it was random,” Connie whispered to herself, staring at the hands she had splayed on her lap. She clenched and unclenched them. “It was just chance.”

“What was that?” Mom asked, having heard but not understood her.

“So we’re waiting,” she amended herself quickly.

“Or, well, I’m waiting,” Priyanka said pointedly. “While we’re on the subject, there is something I wanted to talk to you about, Connie.”

She did not hesitate.

“Definitely!” she assured him. Concise. Clear. Genuine. “It’d be cruel to leave you on a cliffhanger, wouldn’t it?”

But he wasn’t entirely convinced because he clutched M.C. Bear tightly to his chest and asked, “I mean, are you sure? Not that I don’t doubt you or anything, but you don’t have to spend your summer in a hospital, you know.”

He looked away, his dark eyes clouding, impenetrable.

“I wouldn’t want that.”

“Steven is a special case to me, but that doesn’t mean that he has to be a special case for you, honey.” She was being uncharacteristically gentle, vulnerable, and Connie nearly recoiled against her seatbelt.

“What do you mean, Mom?”

“I mean that just as his mother was, Steven is liable to be plagued with numerous complications before all of this is, uh, over,” Mom paused, her voice stumbling over itself for the first time since the conversation had begun. “…one way or the other.”

It was life or death, she was saying.

And Steven was teetering on the edge between the two extremes.

“I know you two get along well, and I’m glad for it,” she said softly, “but, Connie, I don’t want you to get hurt. 

They were in the heart of Empire City now, slinking past skyscrapers and pedestrians and street vendors who were setting out their daily wares in preparation for the long day.

There was a drawn out silence in the car as Connie pieced her words together, thought by determined thought.

Outside the window, she caught a glimpse of the towering D.E. building, which was famous for its jagged geometry and how its glass windows were tinted gold.

“I appreciate that, Mom—I do, but I’m afraid that I admittedly look at it a little differently than you do.”

A sharply raised eyebrow. “Oh?” 

“Steven’s not beholden to statistics, I guess—to probability. You said as much when you told me that he developed a disease that not many kids his age ever get in their lifetimes. So sure, probability’s telling me that I may get hurt, or that Steven might be hurt a thousand times over before he gets a kidney… but I don’t want to think of him in terms of numbers, Mom, not when those numbers just may be wrong.”

Connie smiled sadly.

“I want to be his friend.”

Connie shook her head fervently and grabbed Steven’s closest hand. He was cold and soft.

A contradiction.

A puzzle.

An unsolved equation.

Mom’s stories helped, but there was so much more she had left to discover about this boy.

So much more to learn.

From him.

Maybe even for him.

“I want to be part of your world, Steven.” Her grip tightened on his hand, perhaps to emphasize the sincerity of her claim. “I want to be part of your universe.”

The edges of Steven’s pale mouth wobbled into a smile.

They pulled into the staff parking lot of the hospital and before Connie could unlatch her seatbelt, her mother leaned over the console and pulled her into a hug that was fierce and exacting and warm all at the same time.

After the initial surprise wore off, she leaned into the moment, leaned into the crook of her mother’s shoulder and closed her eyes against the dawning sun.

“I love you, Connie.”

Connie dug her fingers into her mother’s lab coat in response.