~Hello and welcome back! This chapter is a little shivery, but I guess that's appropriate for Halloween - if it's not November in your time zone yet ;). Thanks to everyone who has been reading. I love you guys!

P.S. Graphic novels starring Lapis and Peridot coming out next spring! Must be easier to get the comic books published than the episodes aired, I guess. . . . :/~

Dr. Drakken realizes as he opens his front door and pads across the driveway toward his hovercraft that it was about this same time last year when Hank Perkins showed up in his lair to cure Drakken and the henchmen of their late-winter doldrums. A pang of memory shoots through Drakken, how much fun he had in his business-casual outfit, selling cupcakes, and how he came to trust Perkins as a friend – a mistake if Drakken has ever made one, and he has made plenty.

The pang goes away in his next step, though. There is a preview of spring in the air.

Drakken grins as he settles his back, not quite as achy as it was before spring smacked him in the face, against the driver's seat of the hovercraft. Of course he likes winter. Always has. Back when he was a supervillain, he loved winter because it got dark early and cold often, and that went perfectly with the sinister atmosphere he was trying to create both outside and in. But in the part of him that had never fully hardened, never truly sinister-ed, he has always adored winter for its holidays – Christmas and New Year's and Valentine's Day.

This winter, Drakken's first as a law-abiding citizen since he was eighteen years old, has been even more spectacular than most, because he got to spend all three of those holidays with Lapis. She flew to Middleton for Christmas, a day she had never celebrated before. He told her the Christmas story sometime last summer, but Christmas trees, tinsel, stockings, Nativity sets, and Christmas lights were all new to her. She absorbed them all with eyes that didn't sparkle so much as glow – not a light easy twinkle like glitter-paint smeared on top, but a rich, dark shine that seemed to come from somewhere far below, as if the glitter-paint were an undercoat.

On Christmas Eve, Drakken took her back to the Middleton Mall and showed her its window displays. Its Salvation-Army Santas ringing bells outside that clothing store named, for some reason, after bananas. Its huge, crafted-from-tinsel silver star that dangles from the ceiling beside an equally large golden, five-pointed star. That represents Hanukkah, Drakken knows, which is a whole other story – a whole other story he mostly knows, thanks to…his friend, that boy with the – eh-hee – elusive name.

They passed the jewelry store, which Lapis eyeballed sideways the way a sparrow might examine a birdcage. The sign stand outside its glass doors proclaimed, "20% Off All Birthstone Rings!" in alternations of red and green. Lapis zeroed in on the word "birthstone" and frowned.

"Do they give all humans stones at birth?" she asked. "I thought that was just Steven." Drakken could barely see her eyebrows beneath her crop of bangs, but he knew they were cinched, puzzled.

He chuckled and reassured her that, no, most humans are not born with gemstones embedded in their flesh…or consciousnesses…or however it works for her people. "It's just that – you know there are twelve months in the Earth year, right?"

Lapis nodded hesitantly.

"Well, a long time ago, people assigned a stone to each particular month," Drakken explained. "Each stone is supposed to represent certain qualities – like garnets represent protection and strength." Lapis nodded again, in what seemed more agreement than acknowledgment, and Drakken continued, "And whichever month a human was born in, that month's stone is their birthstone. It's just more superstition, really, but it sells a lot of pretty jewelry!"

Lapis squinted at the sign again. "Why do they take twenty percent away from it, then?"

"Wha – oh, oh, no!" Drakken said. "They take twenty percent off the price when you buy it."

"Oh," Lapis said. She tilted her head to one side and studied the sign. "That's nice of them."

It was every bit as fun as the Christmas shopping he remembered to do early this year.

Make that last year, because the calendars have been replaced as of this January. Drakken flew Mother to Beach City to celebrate New Year's with Lapis and Steven at Steven's house on the beach. He brought a paper party hat for Lapis, which she declined, and a noisemaker that she eagerly accepted and immediately blew its ruffles into Steven's face, sending him into hysterics.

It was the first time Mother was introduced to the other Crystal Gems – although, actually, no introduction on her part was necessary. Steven took one look at her and squealed, "Oh, cool! You must be Drakken's mom!" and gave her a big hug that she fit right into.

Garnet spared a sentence for Mother – "Nice to meet you." Amethyst gave her a high-five. Pearl laughed her wind-chime laugh and offered her a glass of sparkling cider which she had poured without spilling a drop.

Peridot crouched on the floor and stared, bold and blank, at Mother, until Lapis informed her she was being a weirdo. At that point, Peridot apologized and began to regale Mother with a tale of how she had set up Wi-Fi access in the barn – a story that seemed to involve getting chased and bitten by some wild animal. Drakken and Lapis muffled snickers behind their hands.

As the countdown began, Steven floated up to the ceiling – that was also new – and as soon as Amethyst screamed, "Happy New Year!" Steven flung two handfuls of confetti down over them. Even with levitation involved, Mother just clapped like she was at a magic show.

Valentine's Day was the very best, because it was the first Valentine's Day where Drakken actually had a girlfriend. He walked into the barn that evening carrying both a heart-shaped box – wedged between the left and right atriums in the crook of his arm, the best way he's found to hold it – and a sturdy blue clipboard that served him well back in his evil-plotting days.

"This," Drakken said as he presented the box to Lapis, "is a box of assorted chocolates. They're 'assorted' because I don't know what kind you like, and I doubt you do either."

Lapis nodded. She had already spotted the clipboard and now she looked at him on the edge of a giggle. "Are we going to do an experiment?" she said.

"You are absolutely correct!" Drakken set the candy box on the floor, wrenched it open, and pulled his freshly-sharpened pencil out from behind his ear as he set the clipboard on his lap. "Then are ten different types of chocolates in here. You're going to take a bite of each one – if that's okay? – and then tell me if you like it or not. This way I'll know what to get you a whole box of next year."

"Let's get to work, then." Lapis reached into the box and pulled out the first chocolate. It turned out to have peanut butter in it, and as soon as the peanut butter went inside her mouth, her mouth slanted inward and the little blue irises came very close to touching. Nougat made her wide-eyed and straight-backed and leery of crunching the next bite. Almonds were rolled around from one cheek to the next, bitten in between rolls as an afterthought.

But the instant she tasted caramel, Lapis stopped and smiled through the overflow of the sweet gushy stuff. "Yeah," she said. "That one."

"Perfect!" Drakken made a checkmark next to "caramel" on his lab sheet and didn't look back up until he heard Lapis sigh that she hadn't known about Valentine's Day and thus hadn't gotten him a thing.

It should have gone down in history: the first time Drakken's brain had displaced a big fat HOLIDAY – TODAY YOU GET PRESENTS memo.

He told Lapis that was all right, but she insisted on getting something for him. In the end, she dug out a scattering of corn kernels she saved that fall because they were red – "A mutation," Drakken told her, and then had to spend the next few minutes reassuring her that no, mutation was not the same thing as corruption.

With the dubious help of Peridot and her glue gun, Lapis arranged the red kernels all around the heart-shaped perimeter of the candy box. "There," she said, holding it out to Drakken. "You can take this home and remember you have a girlfriend now."

As if he could ever forget.

There was only one sour note – and what a strange expression, as though off-key notes taste like lemons – in the proceedings. Drakken noticed on Valentine's Day that the Ruby Brigade's ship no longer sat in Lapis and Peridot's lawn. Fairly soon after the whole "human zoo" escapade, Lapis told him, a Ruby crash-landed on Earth and faked repentance in order to win Steven's sympathy, only to steal the ship right out from under him, laughing the whole time.

"She acted like everything was so wonderful and that she could adjust so fast," Lapis said. "She was smart enough to fool us." She gave a bitter laugh that always sounds like she's borrowed it from someone else. "I hope she's smart enough never to show her face around here again."

The stiff movement of her shoulders, one stacked higher than the other, told Drakken all he needed to know: Someone had taken advantage of Steven's good nature, and Lapis was about as furious as she'd ever been about anything.

Even in light of this horrible crime, Drakken tilts his face to the sky and lets spring nip at it. Yes, Perkins was correct about late-winter doldrums. But there always comes a day when you venture outside and the wind whooshes instead of howling the way it has done for the last three months, and the season changes from late winter to pre-spring.

Today is that day, Drakken knows.

Beach City comes into view a few hours later, and Drakken lands the hovercraft outside the amusement park Steven told him about at New Year's. He's been thinking about taking Lapis there on a – a – well, he guesses technically it's a date, but that word always puts a lump of pure raw fear in his throat, so he doesn't use it.

The park is called "Mr. Smiley's Funland," which strikes Drakken as a little too cutesy. Yet now that he is here, hovering just inside the gate so he won't be charged admission, the place is lively with shouts and bright with jackets, and he can see so many things he wants to try. The roller coasters, both the newfangled metal ones and the old ones with the wooden frames. The booth where they unspool cotton candy that Drakken can smell even from here. The bumper cars clanking off each other and the ride without a floor, where you trust gravity with your life.

The scent of overfried, oily sweetness slinks its way into Drakken's nostrils, and he pivots toward another stand. Its name is frayed beyond reading, but he recognizes the glistening batter of funnel cakes. His stomach fidgets, remembering that one awful villain convention where he was depressed because no one was paying any attention to them, and he ended up eating an entire batch of funnel cakes – all of which came back up later on Professor Dementor, of all people.

Ugh. Drakken backs up slowly, away from the smell and its resulting dizziness. He bumps into something – why don't people come equipped with rearview mirrors? he wonders as he turns around. A jagged scrawl of glass bends his body to beanpole proportions.

HOUSE OF MIRRORS.

Bad idea.

Drakken shakes his head, backing away again. Lapis doesn't appreciate being coddled, doesn't appreciate people going out of their way not to bring up mirrors, as if she is the one made of glass. But he can't imagine she would enjoy walking through a House of Mirrors any more than Drakken would sign up for a tour of a historic penitentiary. Too many memories, too much confinement.

Another step backward, and Drakken smacks against the ticket counter. He's rubbing his shin when someone says, very close to him, "Do you know where my dad is?"

Drakken doesn't even glance her way. "Honey, I don't even know where my dad is," he says.

Then a spasm of guilt jerks in his chest. He is not a villain anymore. He should try to help this child.

Or is it a child? The tiny voice and the nature of the question argue that he is talking to a kid, but the strange little British accent is braced up by something distant and formal that tells Drakken he is not. Not by a long shot.

"That's what I just asked you!" the strange voice snaps now.

Curiosity gets the better of him, and Drakken looks down. He was right. The voice that addressed him was a child's, but the face that looks back at him is not.

Oh, sure, it's dominated by enormous eyes that are positioned over a sweet-looking mouth. But the expression it sports is cold, measured, almost annoyed with his unhelpful answer. Not the look of a frantic child at all.

The fact that it is blue startles Drakken in a way that is, admittedly, probably hypocritical. Her hair, a dark new-denim color, blunts out at her chin in a cute little bob with a bow arranged on top. She is kindergartener-short, with the body of a doll – not a Barbie, but a regular doll with some actual cuddle factor. The black triangles-halves on her shirt and skirt meet, not parted by a ribbon of skin the way it has been…he swallows…every other time he's ever seen it.

On Lapis's outfit.

That is when Drakken notices that the little girl is even littler than he gave her credit for. A toddler, not a kindergartener. Because she isn't standing on the ground. She's hovering above it on translucent blue wings.

Drakken leans forward, preparing to slip surreptitiously around behind her back, but there is no need. It is there, right under her eye, like she's cried it – that little eyelet drop that he was always thought was so pretty, now harsh and glacial. Its texture is a perfect match for her appropriately stony gaze.

For the third time today, Drakken takes several nervous steps backward. He can't hear his heartbeat in his temples this time, though – only the rhythm of the words Lapis said to him at the start of fall: I'm not the first Gem to be Lapis Lazuli, and I won't be the last.

Instant dislike curdles Drakken's belly, as if he is about to lose a gut-load of funnel cakes he hasn't even eaten. He gropes behind him for something relatively solid to hang on to and finds only a rotating admittance arm that nearly sends him to the ground.

Drakken straightens, an electrical fire blazing in his genius brain, burning all reason to a crisp. A single neuron manages to outrun the spreading panic and reassure him that maybe he really did walk into the House of Mirrors with his girlfriend, and all he sees now is Lapis reflected in crinkly glass. No, it would have to be that condensed thick short glass –

Besides, her irises, too sparkly where Lapis's are rich with a below-surface shine, makes that impossible, as does her little British accent, which – how does she have that, anyway? Is there another UK in space? On Homeworld?

And as Drakken looks at her, this distorted version of someone he loves, he understands why Shego was so vehemently opposed to being cloned and, although he would never admit this to her, he becomes glad he never managed to do so.

That is when the discrepancy between who is she and what she has asked clangs inside him like a gong. "Your dad?" Drakken tilts his head, maximizing the amount of neck hidden behind his swinging ponytail. Something about this gal gives him the sense that someone is lurking behind him, ready to grab him with North-Pole-cold hands. "How do you have a dad?"

She sighs the way people tend to sigh when they have formulated an absolutely foolproof evil-genius plot, accounted for all variables, and thirty minutes later find themselves defeated by a plucky little redheaded teenager who somehow figured out their algorithm despite having not yet taken advanced calculus. "It's not a dad, it's a My-dad," she says. "And I don't have one, which is the whole point. Stars, you humans are so dense!"

It's a tired, worn-out insult, one that should have lost its potency by now. One that shouldn't wallop him smack-dab in the middle of the sternum and tear a hole in it that his ego rushes to fill.

Drakken blinks around a persistent stinging and grinds his teeth together. "I'll have you know, missy, that I am one of the finest minds at my workplace!" Okay, so he doesn't know exactly how Global Justice's rankings work – doesn't even know if they have rankings, come to think of it. But Dr. Director has never been stingy with the praise she doles out to him, and when she smiles that one professional line at him, it's easy to assume he's "way up there" (as the teens today say) with her.

"Then your Diamond obviously lacks discernment," she says. The too-vibrant irises take his measure. "You're the right color, but there is no way you could be an Elite."

As she speaks, her arms dangle straight, parallel to her sides, cocked up and curving oh-so-delicately at the wrists – just like Lapis's. Lapis is far more durable than she looks, but Drakken never got the feeling that her cuteness was an out-and-out lie.

For a confused moment, Drakken is almost flattered. Never once in his existence has his skin ever been called the right color – whether in its current powder-blue state or its former days as an unbaked-snickerdoodle shade. Then the meaning of the word discernment slams into him, as does the image of Dr. Director's smile-line and the memory of the fear in Lapis's eyes as she curtsied to the almonds at the mall.

Drakken folds his arms. All of his muscles, such as they are, are on fire. "Boy, don't you just think you are –"

All that fizzes out on his lips, never to be said. After licking up happiness for so many wonderful months, he is now aware of how spoiled, even fermented, they taste. Not to be partaken of anymore.

"All right," he says. Tersely. "So you're looking for a My-dad?"

"Yes!" she says, nodding at him as if he is a novice scientist who just discovered the chemical reaction triggered by mixing baking soda and vinegar. "I need a My-dad!"

The finally-someone-understands sunrise on her face cripples Drakken's hands into curls in front of him. Something is wrong. She is both too happy and not happy enough. And how she pronounced "My-dad"…

Well, maybe it's just like an iPod. And the only thing frightening about them is the price.

Drakken feels the potential of alien tech thaw his body out of its freeze-dry. "All right," he says with a grin, "where do they keep the My-dads on your planet?"

It earns him a glare from the hair-bow down. "We don't have My-dads on my planet," she says. "That's why I had to come down here!"

She says the word "here" as if she has been dropped into a roach-infested motel on the bank of a polluted river instead of a quaint little seaside town. He has heard disdain from Lapis before, but nothing that bristles his shoulders like this.

To keep it from piercing his ego, Drakken decides to inoculate his voice with more of the same. "Ohhh, IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII'm sorry!" he says in his juiciest imitation of Shego, and then stops. Bites the inside of his cheek.

That was not good. That was the Old Drakken who said that, the Drakken who is even now realizing that while his muscles may not be bunchy like his cousin Eddy's, surely they are sufficient for overpowering her. The Old Drakken would have already tied her to a light-pole or strapped her to the roller coaster track by now, and he has to end this conversation, has to get out of here before either of those options begin to sound appealing.

She tilts her own head at him. "What are you, anyway?"

"Dr. Drakken."

"Oh." She waves her miniscule hand, dismissing him. "I don't need a Dr. Drakken."

Well, good. He's had too much experience with weird aliens "needing" him.

"No, really, I'm sorry," Drakken re-starts, picking his voice up and dusting it off. He straightens his back and is dive-bombed by another memory. "I'm sorry I couldn't be of any help, Lisa."

The little face puckers. "'Lisa'?" she repeats in confusion.

So few opportunities ever came along for Drakken to explain himself in his twenty-plus years of villainy that he pounces on this one without giving it much thought. "That's what I told my girlfriend I'd call another Lapis, if I ever met one."

Her hands slam onto her doll-like hips. "You think I am a Lapis Lazuli?" she says.

She flashes him a look that could freeze helium. Stern. Offended.

The smell of funnel cakes is everywhere. No escape. "Would that be such a bad thing to be?" he snaps.

She has to stop and think about it, which should be a federal offense in itself as far as Drakken is concerned. "Hmmm….no, not really," she says, after several minutes of clearly-careful deliberation. "Not bad. Rather past her prime, but not bad."

The assessment is as clinical as a surgeon's. All possible retorts are shrink-wrapped in Drakken's brain as he glances down at this stranger wearing his girlfriend's clothes and his girlfriend's hairstyle. He can only stare for another thirty seconds, until he's sure she's sucked his soul right out through his eyes, and then slap his hand over his mouth and bolt down the fairway until he is out of Funland, away from her and the House of Mirrors, crouched over some railing somewhere else.

Drakken drops to his knees, clutches his throat, and pants like an asthmatic puppy. He's almost certain he can still feel her watching him. Whoever she is, she is, to borrow more Shego phraseology, creepy as heck.

Whoever she is. Drakken shivers despite the knot in his side that deals him frantic punches as he breathes in and out. No, he knows who she is, who she must be. And that is the creepiest part.

Yes, he's scared, and Drakken doesn't feel so much as an atom of defensiveness at admitting that to himself. What man wouldn't be scared if he came face-to-face (well, more like knee-to-face) with his girlfriend's wicked doppelganger? Everything about her is wrong – the glint of her eyes, the glint of her gem, the scissor-like cadence of her words, snipping away at him, demanding an answer now-now-now!

Drakken struggles to his feet. As his boots drag the stumbling, fear-numbed rest-of-him down the boardwalk, he closes his eyes and tries to download a memory of Lapis, to paste it over and save it under the same file name as the last five minutes, effectively replacing that conversation. But Lapis's image is faint in his mind. Also, he accidentally walks into a mailbox with his eyes closed – metal whapping him right in the solar plexus. Ow.

Well, it looks like Mr. Smiley's Funland is out of the question now. It was quite frankly dubious to begin with, with the funnel cakes and the mirror house, and he certainly can't bear to go back now, let alone bring Lapis along, not with little Lisa hovering there and asking for help finding her missing father. Her non-existent father, if Drakken is applying his knowledge of Gem biology correctly.

A few blocks later, Drakken finds himself walking into a quilt block of a park. Just for a second, he sinks onto a bench – solid metal that doesn't so much as creak beneath him – and glances at his surroundings. The grass is still a pale, wintry green, but yellow and pink heads peek out from it, the first hints of wildflowers. (Drakken's plants have informed him that the term weed is roughly equal to an ethnic slur, so he doesn't use it anymore.) A few thick-trunked trees wave overhead, their branches sprouting leaves as thin and delicate as the mustache Drakken once tried to grow. Pond water. Stubby bushes.

Rather romantic – but also somewhat boring. There's really nothing to do here except admire the landscape. And given that his girlfriend lives in a barn in the middle of a meadow, she probably spends a lot of time gazing at grass – when she isn't sleeping or watching Camp Pining Trees or whatever that show is called. However aesthetically pleasing this place is, it will not be of much interest to Lapis. If only there were a playground of some kind –

No, wait. Isn't it me who loves playgrounds so much?

Not that Lapis hates them, but he would be the one getting the most out of the experience, Drakken realizes. In the part of him that still lives and breathes only for Dr. Drakken, he believes everyone else shares his taste. At least that's what his psychiatrist says.

Drakken stands up again and begins to pace in front of the bench, the warmish breeze batting at his hair. He's suddenly grateful for Beach City's balmy coastal climate – Middleton won't be this comfortable for another few weeks at the very least.

Let's see – where else can we go? Drakken taps his finger to his lower lip in thought, keeping Lapis his mental backdrop as he strolls down the street, assessing, taking scientific notes. Lapis doesn't like to eat anything greasy, which rules out more than eighty percent of the food sold along the boardwalk. The movie theater, still in its late-winter slump, lethargically displays posters for low-budget horror flicks and war movies all but guaranteed to awaken Lapis's PTSD. In fact, the only movie that appears to be blood-free is some eye-itching adaptation of a cartoon that reminds Drakken of the one where he was stranded on the day he learned lethal weapons and cable installation didn't mix. It pulls a shiver out of Drakken, and he scoots away.

If all else fails, he supposes he can always take her back to the library – books are one of Lapis's favorite things. Yet they're not one of his favorite things. And deep down in that same, ever-shrinking part of himself, Drakken doesn't want to spend that much time staring at wriggling print, squinting, hunching, trying to pin letters into place.

Then again, maybe Lapis can read to him. Just considering that option is like a big gulp of hot chocolate.

Before Drakken can even completely absorb the idea, he passes a shop whose doorway opens to a flashing-light, dinging-bell, multi-screened bonanza.

Of course. The video arcade!

Drakken slips inside and whips a glance off the room's neon-painted walls and across its nubby carpet for any potential panic spots. There are a few shoot-'em-up type of games, though from what Drakken has gathered, guns were never the Gems' weapons of choice. He still doesn't want to picture Lapis holding one, even for pretend, but there is nothing at all frightening in the old game where you play as a frog crossing the street or in the even-older game where you play as a half-circle and consume other circles without bumping into the ghosts. In the console with its own steering wheel attached that invites you to crash into everything in your virtual path or in the one where you stomp on the electronic mat in time to cheesy pop music. In the Whack-a-Mole activity that always became Whack-a-Teenage-Nemesis in Drakken's mind or in the ski-ball machine where he usually managed to get a decent score.

He slips his hand into the ball-slot at the front of the machine only to find it depressingly empty. Well, yes, it's coming back to him now. One has to pay to play, in direct contradiction of the old axiom that "the best things in life are free."

With a grumble, Drakken flips open his wallet – he did bring some cash, anticipating a purchase of just-for-today passes to the amusement park – and counts the bills folded crookedly over each other. In the adjacent pouch sits a squared-off plastic credit card, nearly hot to the touch as Drakken remembers its power. The power to make expenses go away without him having to surrender any paper money. The power to paint his checkbook in red and get threatening letters sent his way. Even though the letters Drakken replied with were much more threatening (with written-in cues for evil laughter), they never managed to intimidate the credit companies.

Drakken shakes his head and places one palm over the credit card, blocking it from view. It's no doom ray, but it's tempting nonetheless.

Would the arcade be a place Lapis would want to go?

He doesn't know. Drakken steps out and leans his elbow against a nearby newsstand as he rummages through the dollars in his wallet, estimating how many tokens he could purchase, which games he could invest in to reap the most tickets, which prizes they could buy. As his brain toggles between daydreams and algebraic equations, the breeze scampers over his face and he begins to lose track of time, and when he lifts his head, he feels the dizziness of having it down far too long.

Drakken gazes at the horizon to prevent a backward-topple – always embarrassing, especially in a town that's still full of mostly strangers. On the way to that horizon, though, his eyes snag on Funland again. He swallows, half-expecting the wooden roller coaster to go up in flames at any second – or, more likely, for a tidal wave to engulf it out of nowhere. Didn't Lapis say they can all control water, all the other –

The thought comes to a rubber-burning halt that would do Eddy proud. Drakken's head still feels like someone screwed it on backward, but he gives it a shake anyway. He doesn't want to finish that sentence. He doesn't want to think other Lapises – even though he just did, albeit in the context of not wanting to think it. And the only euphemism he can come up with – other Gems like you – doesn't fit, not at all. Lisa may have the wings and the hair and the gemstone, but she is nothing like his Lapis.

By now, the air has chilled, and the sun seems to be slumping lower and lower in the sky. Drakken isn't sure just what time it is when his cell phone shakes in his pocket.

The number on the screen isn't familiar, but it has a Beach City area code, so he goes ahead and answers it.

"Hello, Dr. Drakken speaking."

"Drakkkkkkkk? Itsoawfulwhatwhatwhatwhatodowedooooo?" The tiny voice collapses into nasal sobs.

Drakken's heart catapults into his throat. The last time someone called him crying like that, it was DNAmy with the news that Monkey Fist – a fellow supervillain who Drakken cared pretty much nothing for, but a fellow supervillain all the same – had been turned to stone for all eternity. Whoever cries on the other end sounds young and female, but she isn't DNAmy.

"Yes?" he says. "Who is this?"

"Hethewethesteeeeeeeeeeeevvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv." This time, before the voice dissolves into cracker crumbs of noise, Drakken catches a buzz on the end of it, as if he is talking to a despondent mosquito.

He takes a wild guess: "Peridot?"

"Uh-huh." There's a pause, a sniffle. "YougottawethisisntIdont…"

Drakken's aching heart slowly begins to slide down to its proper place in his chest. Peridot's emotions break high, like his own, over things people like Shego (and, to a lesser extent, Lapis) would consider no big deal. Skinned knees. Broken devices. Bittersweet television finales.

"Peridot?" Drakken rubs a layer of gentleness over his own voice. "Peridot, I can't understand you, sweetie. Can – can you give the phone to Lapis?"

In the wordless gushiness there must be a nod, and then there is a bumping of fingers as, Drakken presumes, the phone changes hands. Empty air rushes from the other end.

"Lapis?" Drakken says cautiously.

"Hi."

The word is flat enough and thin enough that you could skip it over the surface of a pond with ease, and it would make a louder sound if you did, too. A visceral reaction twists inside Drakken – he is now the wedge-circle from the game, in invincible mode, and any enemy who touches him will be vaporized and sent back to start to reform.

"Lapis, what's wrong?" he says.

"He's gone."

Drakken squeezes the phone tighter to his ear, his other fingertips burrowing into his scalp and plowing upward. He's heard Lapis speak without inflection before, but this is something much worse – this is dead. And Lapis knows a very, very limited number of "he"s.

"Who?" Drakken asks.

"Steven." The name floats out as if Lapis is in a trance. "They took Steven."

Oh snap.

The next thing Drakken knows, he is fumbling the hovercraft to a shaky landing on the winter-stiff grass outside the barn. He trips on his way out the top and hits the ground with the roof of his mouth pounding, wondering how it is that his memory has elapsed and how his heart can be in so many different locations at once.

Well, actually, he knows the answer to that one. Those are just pulse points being activated like power-ups in his fear. Hearts can't actually change places, according to the medical community. Of course, that same community sneered at the idea of brain-swapping, too, before Dr. Drakken waltzed in and stole a government weapon from inside a soldier's body.

Oh, yes, and the bunny trail into theoretical science? That's also a symptom of fear. Maybe not in the general population, but in mad scientists? Definitely.

Drakken pushes himself into a mostly vertical position and lurches across the grass until he almost collapses in the barn doorway. The first thing he does is go to Lapis and fold his arms around her. It's like trying to hug a coat hanger.

She will not yield of her own volition, and it would be beyond cruel to try and force her, so Drakken lets her go and holds her hand instead. It doesn't protest, just lies limp and cold in his own.

Peridot, by contrast, climbs without hesitation into Drakken's lap, settling a little too close to his snarled-up insides. The peak of her yellow-green parakeet-hair bumps his chest, and Drakken strokes it as she continues to weep from the bottom of her…of her…well, wherever it is that Gem tears come from. He doesn't have much experience with them, after all. There was once a time when Lapis cried in front of him and let him blot her tears with a tissue, but that time was so long ago and far away that it seems now to be nothing more than a too-many-pancakes-before-bed dream. His girlfriend is clearly nowhere close to tears right now.

In fact, she seems to be nowhere close to anything right now.

The pain of it nearly steamrolls Drakken, and he hugs Peridot tighter. Something else floats to the forefront of him, however, something like disbelief or puzzlement, though Drakken would prefer to think it's his scientific curiosity at work. "Who did this?" His demand for information quavers, and he's glad – he doesn't want either of them to feel interrogated, especially not Lapis. "Who would want to hurt that sweet little kid?"

Another run of gibberish from Peridot.

Lapis glances up at him. "Homeworld," she says, her blue eyes as blank and broken as her voice.

It takes Drakken a moment to recognize the word that used to come out of her with such adoration, such longing. When he does, his thoughts scamper across his mind in all directions like cockroaches. One in particular, not much bigger than a roach herself, hangs stationary in the air, lifted by a pair of watery wings. Made on Homeworld might as well be stamped across her forehead.

"Homeworld?" Drakken repeats. "Oh, no, oh no! Does this – does this have something to do with the other Lapis I saw earlier?"

Drakken waits for Lapis's eyes to bug out, but they only blink. "Another Lapis?" she says.

He's starting to nod when he remembers the sneer that formed on Lisa's little blue-china face when he spoke his girlfriend's name as a plural. Stuck "another" in front of it – what would his seventh-grade grammar teacher have called it? A qualifier? A numberescent? A – a –

Oh, what does it matter?

"Well, I thought it was another Lapis," Drakken amends himself. "She was a cute little blue thing with wings! But she was really little – littler than you," he says to Lapis. "Littler than you, even." He nods to Peridot, whose diminutive self is still curled in his lap. She cocks her kitten-like head.

Lapis's palm lifts and goes rigid in front of her mouth, trying to cover it but unable to find it. "Did she have a ribbon in her hair?" she says.

This time Drakken does nod. He's never thought of hair ribbons as being ominous before, but the atmosphere that hangs over the three of them could have been stolen from a horror film.

"That wasn't a Lapis." Every wire line in Lapis's body pokes inward in a silent oh-no-oh-no. "That was an Aquamarine."

Drakken gasps. "Egad! Wait. What's an Aquamarine?"

Under normal circumstances, that would crack a smile from Lapis. But her cheeks are pulled in, measuring a negative number on the ol' Smile-O-Meter. "It's an Elite," she says. "A very, very elite Elite. Some of them are probably nice, but I've never met one. If Blue Diamond spared an Aquamarine…"

She doesn't finish, just looks down at her lap, her small lashes fencing in her fear.

Aquamarine. The name does sound vacantly familiar, as if he knows it is the answer to one of the questions on his quiz but has no idea which.

Drakken scoots across the grass toward Lapis, just one tentative little scoot. "What are you feeling right now?" he asks her.

"Nothing," Lapis says. Listening to her talk gives Drakken the same flat, hard feeling he gets when he plunks himself down in a chair only to find it less padded than he had anticipated. "I don't feel anything at all."

Peridot sniffles and speaks her first coherent sentence of the day. "Do you need me to pinch you?" she offers.

"No, no!" Drakken takes both of Peridot's wrists captive. "We don't need any pinching, thank you!"

"Definitely not," Lapis says, as if from halfway across the continent. "It's gonna wear off soon, anyway." She clutches her hair until the color's strained from her knuckles. "And then it's going to hurt like nothing else."

The backs of Drakken's eyes prickle like someone is stabbing them with thumbtacks as he stares in fascination. He knows the fight-or-flight theory is oversimplified. There have been times when adrenaline has turned him into a paraplegic, where he could only flail his arms and shriek as certain doom – usually in the form of a certain redheaded teenager – swooped in on him. But Lapis – she's frozen stiff, as if she has no adrenal glands at all.

Well, she probably doesn't, as a Gem –

Suddenly, Drakken wants to know everything about the chemical makeup of a Gem's body. Just how artificial is it? How they bleed if they're not "real"? He needs all the answers. Write them down. Put them in a book. Hit the best-seller charts. Do anything other than face this particular reality.

"What happened?" Drakken asks, baritone-screeching the last word. Because he eventually must ask.

"I just know what Amethyst told us." Lapis stares at her toes. "She said there were a couple of Gems – but she never mentioned an Aquamarine. They'd been creeping around Beach City for the last couple days, kidnapping humans from a list that Steven gave –" she pauses – "some Homeworld Gem a long time ago. They got Connie. And Greg. And some others."

"It's my fault!" Peridot throws out from Drakken's lap.

She looks up at him, a piteous, streamy-eyed creature, and anger spurts through Drakken's veins on her behalf. "How in the dickens could it be your fault?" he says.

"Because!" Peridot lets out a hiccuppy noise he has never heard from a Gem before. "It was me! I was the Homeworld Gem! Steven gave the list to me, back when I was bad and also tall! And I gave it to Yellow Diamond…and she gave it to Blue Diamond… and she –"

"Don't be stupid, Peri," Lapis says roughly, before Drakken can even formulate a reaction, much less a proper response. "If you hadn't been the one to give it to them, some other Gem would have. Six thousand years ago, it might've been me. We don't need you hating yourself or anything."

Peridot nods but has to swipe at the tears with the backs of her hands.

Drakken is sure his own heart is about to split open. "So they took everyone back to Homeworld?" he says.

"No," Lapis says. "Steven stopped them. He showed them his gem and said he was Rose Quartz and that he would come with them if they promised to let everyone else go."

Drakken doesn't answer. He can still hear and feel the lub-dub-lub-dub patting in his ears, is still aware of the liquid weight climbing through him, as if he is a feelings-surrogate for Lapis, carrying the emotions she cannot hold herself.

"And they believed him?" Drakken says, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Lapis drags a heavy-enough-to-scrape-the-ground gaze his direction. "Remember how I didn't know what a mother was when I first met you?"

If Drakken's thoughts were cockroaches before, they now encounter radiation and mutate beyond recognition, into the kind of clawed fiends he saw in an old fairy-tale book once. (This requires a little less imagination on his part than it should. Occupational hazard.) "Oh snap," he mutters.

"They think he's just Rose shapeshifted into a new form." Lapis hunches her shoulders together and says it again, every bit as numb and hollow as before: "They think he's Rose."

Peridot whimpers out loud and begins to rock back and forth in Drakken's lap. The knees of her green pants draw up in front of her, each marked with a yellow diamond symbol that surely isn't helping her mood any. She keeps whimpering, keeps rocking, and Drakken understands the tiny gnashing guilts that drive their fists into her, over and over again. He isn't sure what form hers take, but his always come in the shapes of Diablos.

"Don't you have a certain amount of clout with Blue Diamond, though?" Drakken addresses Lapis in a voice so high-pitched it nearly whistles. "I don't suppose there's any way you could use your…Lapis-ness…to vouch for Steven?"

Her bob swings from side to side. "Not when she thinks Steven is the Gem who shattered her best friend."

The question none of them wants to ask suffuses the air.

Drakken asks a different one instead – "So what do we do now? I can't just – I can't just wait around here for something to happen!" Even now, his legs are twitching beneath him and he'd stand up and start pacing if it didn't mean knocking poor little Peridot to the ground.

"I don't know," Lapis admits. Her fists squeeze, her facial muscles still smooth and bleak.

"Well, we figure out a way to fight Aquamarine, of course!" Peridot cries. She spins around, gives another tearful sniff, and then launches into her usual demonstration of the scientific method. "Let's see…if she's that small, she must be an Era Two, so she has no elemental powers. So her ribbon is going to be a weapon. Probably some sort of Immobilizer Beam, if I had to guess."

Drakken feels himself jerk as if she sent a current through him. "I've worked with Immobilizer Beams before! Well, technically, mine is called the Immobilizer 2000 – and I guess technically it isn't mine, per se – but I helped –"

"Great!" Peridot hops off Drakken's lap and stands like a tiny tin soldier in the shadow of the barn. "We should get to work on this right away, then!"

Lapis lifts her head long enough to say, "Let me know if I can help," and then drops it back into its morose hang. Drakken plants a kiss on top of it.

"I'll be back as soon as I scope out our materials," he tells her, as soothingly as he knows how, and he turns to Peridot, lowers his arm about two feet so she can grasp it, and begins to march toward the hodgepodge of junk in the barn and the potential of its untapped greatness. March. March. March. Soon it will be March, and then spring will arrive, and the grass in Middleton will turn green again, and it will be his birthday –

Drakken stops in his tracks, nearly tossing Peridot into the air. He pops himself in the forehead and groans before it even begins to sting. "Now I know why Aquamarine sounded so familiar," he says. "It's my birthstone!"

The silence where Lapis's laughter should be rings loud, the way silence always rings in the ruins of an evil lair once the explosions have finally stopped. It's a memory Drakken doesn't want to have, and it shoves against him, but he shoves it right back, and the petals pop out to replace it. They remind him that he can do something, he can save this boy Lapis loves so much. He's fought aliens before, and he is just as capable of doing it again.

Even with the added weirdness of having to fight his own birthstone.

TO BE CONTINUED