fandomhigh | BWI Airport Portalocity Lounge, Saturday morning

"You are sure you do not wants me to wait with you?" J.Lo asked, pressing his squooshy frog face against Slushious's passenger window.

Tip's mom leaned past him to wave. "Text when you get there safe, Turtlebear."

Tip rolled her shoulders back, putting on her absolute bravest face. "I will." They'd already done the tearful goodbye part, J.Lo just hadn't read the memo. Tip resolutely turned away, heading toward the lounge where the school instructions said to wait for the shuttle bus.

"I am changing my minds!" J.Lo called after her. She heard her mom start Slushious's engine up, then start to putter away. "I am not too many olds for high schooooooooooooool!"

Tip made it all the way onto one of the lounge's benches, her suitcases tucked underneath, before her shoulders sagged again. Which was good, because if she hadn't, it'd be one of those legs-gone-away, dropped-on-her-ass moments. Pardon her language.

"C'mon, Tip," she told herself, swiping quickly at her cheeks. "Chin up. You drove across the US with an alien when you were 11. High school should be easy."

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"Oh, I'll still be a Steven," he replied, with a completely undeserved sagely nod. "This is actually going to be my first school ever. My friend Connie told me a lot about how they work, and the Crystal Gems and I tried to make one once but it didn't go so well. That's why they're sending me to this one, though!"

Tip almost followed that. The part about failing to make a school at home threw her, though. Still, it wasn't like she wasn't used to explaining simple things to people with completely different experiences.

The people in her experience just usually also looked kind of like six-legged frogs.

"Freshman is a class name," she explained. "Your first year at high school you're a freshman, then second year is sophomore, then junior, then senior. Then you're done. You still keep your name the whole time, though. It's just your class rank."

"Oh wow, I didn't realize we'd have ranks," Steven said, taking mental note.

He paused.

"Wait, I'm going to be there four years?!"

His dad and the Gems had not mentioned that part.

"Probably," Tip said. "Some people skip grades, or drop out earlier. But four years is standard. How long did you think high school took?"

"I didn't ask!" Steven admitted.

He took a deep breath.

"...I guess this is why they said I could come back whenever they needed me," he said, calming down a bit.

Tip nodded, feeling a bit more on solid ground with that. "I told my friend the same thing," she said. "He's Boov, so he's kind of all alone and wasn't into me going to school, but we only live just up in Pennsylvania and we have a flying car, so it'll be really easy for me to go home and visit so he doesn't get lonely."

"You have a flying car?!" Steven said, his jaw dropped open. "That's amazing!"

Look, he might have a pet lion who can summon portal gateways, but that doesn't mean things like flying cars weren't cool.

"It's pretty cool," Tip said, with (false) modesty. "It was just a boring old regular car but J.Lo -- he's my Boov friend -- souped it up the first time we met. It can go into space."

"That is so cool," Steven said, rapt with excitement. "We've tried building spaceships but it's never gone right!"

He was totally impressed.

"I've never met a Boov, though. Lots of Gems, no Boovs. They sound nice."

"I probably wouldn't have talked to one at all, either," Tip admitted. "You know, what with the whole showing up and trying to take over the Earth and all. But after he fixed my car, it seemed sort of rude to just ignore him. And then once we got talking, you know, it just turned out we weren't all that different." This was not an easy thing to get most people Tip had met to understand. Because, you know, the whole showing up and trying to take over the Earth thing. "I don't think I've heard of Gems. I mean, other than rocks. Are they aliens, too?"

"Wait, they tried to take over Earth?" Steven said. "That's awful! Why is it almost no one comes from space to give us hugs or ice cream? Why's it always gotta be take us over or hollow out the planet to make it a Gem colony?"

"The Gorg wanted to eat it," Tip agreed. "I don't know. Maybe that's just why beings put in the effort to travel across the stars. Because they need to, to get more resources. It's pretty crappy from our end, but it's not much fun from theirs, either."

She'd never entirely forgiven the Boov for trying to take over the Earth. But that didn't mean she didn't at least sort of understand why they did it.

"I... that's a good point, actually," Steven said. "And if the Homeworld Gems hadn't tried to turn Earth into a colony, my mom would've never met my dad, and I wouldn't even be here!"

"Oh," Steven finally cycled back around to Tip's earlier question. "And Gems are aliens, yeah. Though I guess some came from Earth, but only because they were made there? Kinda like me, but not like me, because there's only one me."

Very clear there, Steven.

Tip nodded quietly while she pieced together that bit of narrative. "So . . . you're part alien?"

Maybe that explained the pink lion.

"Oh, right," Steven said, and like a totally normal kid pulled up the hem of his t-shirt enough to expose the big rose-colored gem where his belly button ought to be. "My mom was a Crystal Gem, and my dad is a human. I'm kinda the first ever mix of the two."

Woah. This kid had a rock for a belly button. ". . . Huh." J.Lo would go nuts over this. Boov and humans didn't even reproduce the same way. "So Crystal Gems are like . . . humans with rock parts?"

"Not really," Steven said, shaking his head. "More like they are the gems, but they can project a body out from it? I'm a little different because I'm part human, but Pearl and Amethyst are really gems." Garnet was a whole other kettle of fish to explain.

"And they're all named after gemstones?" Tip blinked and held up a hand. "Or -- are the gemstones named after them?"

"You know, I don't know," Steven said. "The gems came to Earth so long ago, maybe they are! I should ask them. My mom was Rose Quartz. So... that's why I have that gem, myself."

He tugged the hem of his shirt back into place. "I like it."

"It's really cool." Confusing, actually. But Tip wasn't about to rain on anyone's body positivity.

BWI Airport Portalocity Lounge, Saturday morning

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