~Hi, everybody! I've had the idea for a Drakkis Christmas story knocking around in my head since last year, and I'm so glad to have finally gotten around to it. I'm a little late to do the "12 days of Christmas," so I'm cheating by posting the first four vignettes together.
Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season.
NOTES: Title taken from a For King & Country song. References to the original Christmas story.~
When Lapis Lazuli lands on what she's learned is called a sidewalk – scratchy under her bare feet – Dr. Drakken greets her with, "Evening, milady. You just flew in from Beach City…and boy, are you wings tired!"
This is followed by peals of laughter.
As usual, Lapis doesn't quite understand his humor, and yet the joy playing all over his face is contagious. She honors Drakken's outstretched hands with a squeeze. When he pulls them back, they twitch at his sides, pantomiming rubbing invisible surfaces.
"Lapis…you're still in that no-belly shirt?" He wedges his fingers over his own midriff, spreads them apart. "And barefoot?" Drakken's words shiver with the clouds of breath puffing from his mouth. Humans expel them when they are cold, she's heard. "Aren't you freezing?"
Startled, she glances down at her legs, half-expecting them to be iced over as if touched by Sapphire. They aren't , so she shakes her head. "No," she says.
Half of Drakken's furrow eyebrow slides upward. "Is that a Gem thing?"
"Yes." Although Lapis can feel the temperature has dropped to a chill colder than any Beach City has ever seen, the slithers of cold around her elbows and knees, flicking at the tips of her nose, aren't uncomfortable. It still surprises her, occasionally, how impacted the humans are by the environment around them; surprises and worries her.
Drakken's "heh!" forces out another wisp of whitish air that hangs between them. "Good luck convincing Mother of that!" he says. "She'll be all over you, demanding you cover up! And you'd better play along if you want to stay at her house."
He raises his hand as though to slap his thigh – something else he does when he is delighted – but instead curls his fingers around hers and pulls her across the sidewalk. Unexpectedly rough in texture, like solidified sand, it runs parallel to the road and is apparently free from modern human vehicles.
The houses are more plentiful here than in Beach City, more widely spaced and set low to the ground, grown in crystals that are more square. Tall poles stand at every corner, throwing off circles of light that would be overwhelming if they didn't comfortingly fuzz at the borders.
Dr. Drakken, in the blue coat puffed out to several times his own body's width and the knitted hat pulled down over his forehead, suddenly skids to a stop once they pass the first pole of light. "Oh, Lapis!" he cries. "Look!"
His hand shields his eyes, though from what she's not certain, since the sun shifted its attention to the other side of the Earth quite a while ago. She follows the tilt of his head upward, toward the brilliant black sky, stark and studded with stars – stars and planets – without the afterglow of artificial light to drown it out.
Lapis finds Homeworld right away. It looks just as it always did – round and luminous, so beautiful, too far away.
"Aren't these stars glorious?" Drakken asks.
His voice is full of wonder, curiosity, even. His knowledge of open space is extensive, for a human, but he has never known what it is like to float mere meters from a star and watch it burn.
These are all still very new.
"It is pretty," Lapis says. She still misses her first home; his grin is making it easier.
Peridot attempted to throw her arms around Lapis when she left the barn, which Lapis fended off with a soft squeeze of Peridot's tiny hand. "I'll be back home soon," she told Peridot.
For now, though, she is off to see Dr. Drakken, and he will demonstrate how to eat different varieties of food; and he will pick at the skin in his ears; and he will fall, at night, into innocent slumber; and he will otherwise be a fascinating, bizarre, winsome human.
"Some people say they see the Christmas Star reappear around this time of year," Drakken says, still studying the spangled sky. "But it's usually just Venus."
This makes sense – Venus is the most reflective planet in the Crystal System. It's the reference to this Christmas Star that laps its questions along Lapis's banks. But before she can ask them, Drakken turns to her and says, "Lovely place, Venus. You ever been there?"
Lapis shakes her head. "No. It was ruled out as a colony long before I was made. It's too hot – everything we tried to inject there just shriveled up."
"Ew." Drakken wrinkles his small nose and beckons her merrily ahead toward his spotted house, nearly falling headlong over the white slats of his fence in the process. Small red bulbs ride around the outline of the house, shining like warning lights – and yet they are a beacon of welcome. The lit room through the window looks wide and comfortable against the crisp, chilled night.
Lapis looks up at the stars again and releases a fraction of a sigh. It feels as though a string, thin as Drakken's fingers, draws along her back – and is then tenderly, wistfully snipped away.
