~Hi again, my friends. Hope you are all warm and well and that this craziness doesn't last too much longer. Writing is how I'm coping. ;)~
42. Growth
You stand in Dr. Drakken's living room, Pumpkin warm and wriggling in your arms, and stare at the closed bathroom door. Behind it, you can hear the undulation of Drakken's voice, more wheedling than usual, as he speaks to his dog, offering reassurances pitched too wildly for you to decipher.
Peridot turns and her eyes meet Pumpkin's. "All right, Pumpkin, get ready," Peridot says. "In a few minutes, you will be introduced to an operative by the name of Commodore Puddles. Your mission: to convert him to friendship. Understood, sweetie?"
You snicker to yourself.
When Peridot first brought forth the idea of introducing Pumpkin to Commodore Puddles, Drakken brightened at first, exclaiming, "Oh, that would be so cute!" before his fingers went to his chin in thought. "Yes. I can envision it…supposing they could get along. And there's no chance they'd have babies, since they're not the same species. Heck, they don't even belong to the same kingdom!"
You were not sure how kings and their domains relate to babies, but you nodded at him anyway.
"You don't think –" Drakken began, then paused, the short narrow fingers beginning to tap – "you don't think she'll be afraid of him, do you?"
You laughed then. "Um, she wasn't scared when she met Lion. And your dog's a lot less scary."
"Oh, but don't let him hear you say that," Drakken said, his eyes sparkling.
You gaze now at the top of Pumpkin's stem, a remnant of what kept her tethered to her vine before Steven roused her to life. You have never known Pumpkin to be anything but friendly, though you have heard that sometimes pets will become fierce to protect their families from malevolent beings. The question of what Pumpkin would have done if faced with Jasper floats in your brain for an instant, yet Commodore Puddles is the opposite of Jasper in every way you can imagine.
"Are you ready?" Drakken inquires through the door.
"Yes!" both of you call back, Peridot's cry swallowing up your own, much quieter affirming reply.
The bathroom door swings open, and Commodore Puddles streaks out into the living room in a blur of pink fur, the jewelry on his collar clinking. Although you have never gotten close enough to see, you know Drakken's name and address etch their silver surfaces, allowing other humans to bring Commodore Puddles back to where he belongs in case he should get lost. He comes to a stop in front of the couch and his attention snaps to Pumpkin.
The moment is made of air and contemplation as they eye each other, and then Pumpkin leaps from your arms and runs across the room to Commodore Puddles, who goes almost as still as sleep, moving only in slight, abridged twitches. His delicate pink ears roll back, and he steps backward too, nearly hitting the couch. His small shoulders stiffen, but he has yet to curl his lips and expose his teeth.
Pumpkin stands before him, her head tilted to the left. She wears a look of concerned curiosity that you recognize from all those nights you awakened screaming from nightmares to find her watching you, silver and shadowed in the starlight that fell through the windows. If only one part of your life in the barn could survive, you are glad it was her.
"It's okay, Commodore Puddles!" Peridot tries to make the words light, cooing, yet they still hold the sharp scrape of metal against metal.
Commodore Puddles flicks fearful eyes up to Drakken, his front feet taking turns touching the floor. The dog's whine sounds frustrated. You can understand why he and Drakken are such good friends.
Drakken comes down the hall, edging around Commodore Puddles to stand on his other side. He reaches down and clumsily pats Pumpkin on the head, initiating first contact like a scout on an unexplored planet; she sweeps his gloved wrist with her tongue.
"Yes, everything's fine, Commodore Puddles," Drakken says. "Nothing to be afraid of. She? –" his eyebrow pinches and he looks at you, asking you a question that you answer with a nod – "yes, that's right, she is a friend! That's why she's here, in fact – to play with you!"
Commodore Puddles makes a soft, wavering sound in his throat and steps toward Pumpkin. His nose brushes close to her, scrolling through Pumpkin's scent the way Peridot will scroll through her tablet. With once more quick glance to Drakken for confirmation, he closes the gap between them, the pink and orange heads now side-by-side.
Pumpkin's short legs can hardly bend, yet she manages to crouch, her eyes raised to Commodore Puddles. She yips a breath, a courteous bid for permission. Peridot grabs your arm and shakes it.
Commodore Puddles responds with a tight, careful bark. He lowers his head, leaving it suspended just above his paws, and the lower half of his body eases into the air, shivering. It does not mean anything to you, but it clearly does to Pumpkin, because she bounds across the room as though on springs, all four feet on the ground with one yip and all four off in the next yip. She twists around to see if Commodore Puddles will follow her.
He does, navigating around Drakken's mussed living room at a more cautious pace somehow familiar to you. It is easy to join a friend in play; it is easy to pursue an enemy. It is only those unidentified who slow you down.
Eventually, Pumpkin bumps against Drakken's television screen, Commodore Puddles in front of her, and she has nowhere else to go. You walk over and extend a hand in case she needs comfort, but she does not. With the curled vine of her tail dancing back and forth, she leans into Commodore Puddles and gently licks his cheek.
Drakken and Peridot squeal in unison. You remain silent, afraid to cut into the moment.
Commodore Puddles puts his paw on Pumpkin's head, his own tail fluttering; his suspicion has vanished, another Earth event with such little distance between its commencing and its concluding. He barks again, the sound no longer restrained, and backs up, making room for her to pass. She bounces down the hallway with him in pursuit. They are panting when they return, mouths lolling in positions that resemble smiles.
Peridot, too, begins to bounce. "Aw!" she says. "I ship it!
"Even if they can't grow babies," she adds when you snort. "They don't need to be in the same kingdom to be in love!"
She draws the word out, expands it without complicating it. Her shimmering eyes are so like Steven's, a reminder that touches your gem just long enough to ache. You still talk to Steven almost every night on Peridot's tablet, but it has been months now since you were close enough to hug. His voice these days is the same tune in a different key – thicker and heavier, descending into his chest and catching there instead of piping directly from his throat the way it once did. An easy feeling still washes down your back when you hear it, yet the path it travels now has new twists and forks in it.
Drakken thrusts his arms into the air. "All right, it worked! We're amazing!"
"We didn't really do anything," you say.
Drakken's smile does not fade in the slightest. "Well, we raised them up right, and that counts for a lot!"
You look down at Pumpkin as she runs for Commodore Puddles again. You do not recall doing anything in particular to raise her. Perhaps it was enough for her to come into existence and not be immediately given shiny limb enhancers and graceful lies. You step closer to Peridot.
Commodore Puddles veers to the side, missing Pumpkin, then loops around behind her and presses his nose to her back. Her answering bark could be a laugh.
"Well, perfect! They can keep each other company while we're out and about," Drakken says. "Errr…if you ladies want to go out and about, that is."
"Absolutely!" Peridot clambers onto the couch and stands there, her head still several levels below Drakken's. "Where are we going?"
"I was hoping to go to the pool today, actually," Drakken says. "You see, the month of September just started, and that means summer isn't going to last too much longer, and that, sadly, means that the Middleton Community Pool will soon shut its doors.
"For the season," he clarifies after seeing the distress in Peridot's eyes.
You glance out the window and reach a hand to touch it. Although sunshine still warms the glass under your palm, the clouds beyond are thicker than they were a few weeks ago, the sky not such a gossamer shade of blue, and you wonder how long it will be before the vibrancy begins to awaken in the leaves. In your memory you hold a leaf, its orange sharp and welcoming, beginning to eclipse the green of the stem and the paths branching off from it.
"Hmmm," you say. "The pool." You think back on most of the pools you have seen in your life on Earth: stained the vibrant shade of an Aquamarine's skin; forced into a shape, a circle or rectangle, too uniform to be natural; kept clean enough that you could see all the way to a bottom empty of organic life. They do not seem things to be praised, but this wouldn't be the first time you misjudged something from a distance. "I'll give it a try."
Peridot cheers and leaps down from the couch, landing just short of Commodore Puddles, who startles back down the hall. You watch the play of Pumpkin's tail disappear as she follows him.
They are still chasing each other when Drakken shuts the front door behind him and skitters down the driveway to his hovercraft. Peridot balances on her trash can lid, and your wings rise and poke through the surface of your gemstone.
The roads below you begin to change, the buildings growing higher and the spaces between them wider, until you feel a faint tug and look down to see a landscape of glossed water below you, stretched over an area larger than Smarty Mart's parking pavement. You reach the ground before Drakken or Peridot.
Drakken leads the two of you to a small hut, the kind humans lived in when you first visited Earth, though you can tell even from here that it has been built of something smoother than wood. A woman peers at him from behind a pane of glass; he passes her a handful of Earth money through the small uncovered space between them.
"Now we're going to get our pool passes," Drakken informs you and Peridot. "Just like this! Just watch me."
The woman wraps a strip of green paper around Drakken's wrist, then pulls back and lets it slap into place. He makes a noise of surprise, not pain, and stillness spreads through your gem.
"After you." Drakken steps forward and bows to you, a motion that would look elegant if he had full control over his long, flailing arm.
An unneeded breath loosens your body, leaving only your wrist stiff. You take a step forward, turn the underside of your arm upward, and offer it to the woman. She ties off a yellow band and gives it a snap to make it cling. Its grip is tight but thin and placid, nothing at all like angry fingers.
Peridot receives an orange band, and she tugs at it, scowling, as she traipses behind you, around the hut and through an artificially cooled room out into the sunshine again. Before you lies the pool.
It does not look as you imagined it. Rather than a circle or a rectangle, the water is housed in a loose shape with three straight sides, the fourth open to let waves brush a wide expanse of beach, white and sandless with a material that looks strong enough to scratch skin. Smoother stone layers the ground directly in front of the entrance, notched with holes about the width of your hand, from which arch spouts of water. They move in rhythm, not in unison, droplets cresting to a point near your waist and then scattering as they fall back again, each picking up where the one before it left off.
Benches line the other three sides of the pool, and behind the benches opposite the entrance a gray partition splits the ground in two. It is almost too high to see over, yet it does not hide the building that points into the sky, metallic stairs stacked over each other up its sides and a platform bolted to the top. Two thick pipelines, one with a top and one without, curl like eels down from the platform into a deep pen of water; you surprise yourself by not shuddering at the sight.
A girl in a red bathing costume sits atop a wooden throne on the third side of the pool. You recognize it from Camp Pining Hearts as the perch of a lifeguard, though you have never seen one in real life.
"Wow," Peridot says.
"Told you it was impressive," Drakken says with a measure of smugness. "Just let me change into my swimsuit, and I'll be right out!" He twiddles his fingers at you and steps through a swinging door into a room pale with weak light and dark with clandestine corners.
Peridot starts out after him, and you catch her by the arm. "No. We're staying out here. Changing outfits is something he has to do by himself," you tell her.
"Oh." Peridot's eyes look confused, but she shuts them a moment later and begins to shapeshift her outfit into something waterproof, the fabric thickening and rippling as it reflects the sunlight. Her boots disappear, replaced by a pair of red shoes shaped like yours that expose the tops of her tiny green toes. You can't help but giggle.
She walks over to the far side of the pool, imprinted with letters that warn against diving, and sticks her feet into the water. You see more than hear the contented sigh that rises from her.
Several meters away from the benches, a small ring of concrete has been hollowed out and filled with water shallow and gentle. Your thoughts travel to Blue Diamond's palace, and you picture what you have never seen: her immersing herself in the water and allowing it to carry some of her essence into the ground.
Although this pool could never hold Blue Diamond, you find yourself smiling at it before joining Peridot. Water touches you, and your back begins to decipher it. This variant is loud and gaudy, yet when you push beneath the excessive brightness, you can feel the connection waiting for you.
A few minutes later, Dr. Drakken emerges from the secret room in his bathing costume, his black eyes sparkling above his grin. You pull your feet from the pool and stroll over to him so he won't have to scan the crowd in alarm for someone he recognizes as you have seen him do.
"Good afternoon, ma'am," Drakken says with a chuckle, linking his arm through yours. "Well, what do you think? Ghhhg, no, I shouldn't ask you that yet! You haven't even jumped in and swam yet – or visited the snack bar – or gone down the water slides!"
You do not get to answer or to ask what a water slide is. A boy cuts in front of you. He is about Steven's age but his eyes are older, with less light and more doubt. His mouth inches upward as he stares.
"Why are you guys blue?" the boy demands.
It is a tone you have heard proud Homeworld Gems direct at Garnet, with her unlikely blend of fire and ice. You feel Drakken tense beside you, his body contracting, soft wet droplets turning to icicles.
You don't move. You stare back at the boy, your eyes just missing the place where they would meet his. "Why aren't you?" you say, your voice flattened.
His mouth gapes, silent and harmless. You take a wide step around him, bringing Drakken with you, and walk away, back to the pool where Peridot floats on her back. The boy's stare follows you, you suspect, but you don't turn to check.
Peridot rolls over and looks up at you, her brow crisped with a question. "Who was that?"
"Just some rude kid," you say with a wave of your hand.
Dr. Drakken's grin returns, luminous with sincerity and admiration rather than cockiness. "Lapis sure took care of him!"
You sit, blushing, and your feet slip into the pool. The water pulls you forward, asking for more, and you follow it in return for all the times you have relied on its obedience. You ease yourself into the pool and flinch a little at its chill. You are all too aware of how cold and bitter the ocean can grow, but you have grown accustomed to the water near the shoreline being warm and supple, happy to mull over the parched places in your life with you.
Memories of Jasper and captivity surround you. You exhale to free the air and interrupt the trapped feeling, and the memories dilute as they get wet. The pool floor has a slight tilt to it, a smaller reproduction of the one where the coastal shelf falls off into the ocean's depths, and water softens and mellows where it brushes you. You trace a finger along the top of it, disturbing it no more than if a water-bug had walked across it.
Dr. Drakken leaps into the pool then, creating splashes and waves, showers of gleeful water tossing forward. He treads up to you and his limbs move like an amphibian's, a creature who knows the water yet has not mastered it.
"Watch this!" Drakken says. He pinches his nose and dunks his head, swimming up to the side of the pool where a valve emits a steady blur of additional water, whipped white by its speed. Drakken sticks his finger into the center of the valve and splits its water in half. Two streams blast him with even greater force, and he shakes and bubbles with laughter before bobbing up again. "Now it's your turn to try!"
He nods toward the valve and you swim closer to it, your pants drenched below the knees, a solid calming weight. You don't want to force the water apart, so you simply push your hand closer to the stream. The water runs into your hand and then runs past it almost before you have the chance to feel it, only its possibility left between your fingers.
You let your arms grip the pool wall and hoist yourself back out onto the concrete, smiling at Drakken, Peridot, and the wet prints you leave on the ground. Peace finds you as though it has been looking for you; the sun smooths over your gemstone.
A great chorus of jubilance draws your attention to the room through which you entered. Across its threshold steps a woman with five children, four running and shouting around her and the fifth, who must be younger, clinging to her hip. The woman looks like a younger version of Mama Lipsky, but she does not remind you of Mama Lipsky. She reminds you of Pearl: her hair tied at the base of her neck, loose strands swirling out; her eyes and hands trying to be everywhere at once; her body tight as string.
One of the children, a girl, tugs at her mother's sleeve and whines something, while a taller boy runs over to the machine that dispenses drinks in exchange for Earth money and begins to beat it with his fists.
"No, Jeffrey!" the woman calls. She hurries to join her son at the machine, dragging the whining little girl and another sweating boy with her. "I told you before – we are not getting sodas! I brought waters for all of us."
The smallest of the children old enough to be walking around, dressed in a bathing costume that covers only the distance from his waist to his knees, does not follow her. He turns and charges directly toward the pool, wobbling from side to side as if unfamiliar with Earth's gravity. He drops off the edge. There is a faint sound of impact, and then the surface flows together once more.
You watch through the clear water as he sinks to the bottom.
In your mind, you hear Steven gasping and see his eyes bulging as the water bubble seals around his neck. Had you already learned that humans couldn't survive underwater? Did you remember in your panic?
The questions are bruises, sore to the touch, and you don't bother to tend to them. You know what has to be done now.
You leap into the air, supported by your wings, and lift your hands, palms upward, fingers straightened to quicken the motion. As the girl in the red swimsuit climbs down from her throne, you swipe one arm as far as it can go to the left and the other as far as it can to the right. The water rises and shoots back on either side of the boy, leaving an inlet the length of the pool bare and dry around his body. Before your eyes, you see this happen in a matter of seconds, but in your gem it takes much more time, the water reaching for you and clasping hands with you, moving with you as one being.
There is a moment where no one moves except for the girl in the red swimsuit. Her arms fall to her sides, strings of seaweed. In the next moment, the mother rushes into the pool and scoops her son up in her arms, smothering his cheeks with kisses as you have seen Pearl do to Steven after many battles. The boy begins to cry.
"That's a good sign," says a voice behind you, a deep voice trying to hush itself. "Really. It means he can breathe."
You sigh and release the water.
The silence swells so Dr. Drakken's words stand by themselves. You locate in the sea of humans around you the boy who gawked at you and Drakken earlier; he stands beside a tall man, an awestruck look on his face that does not match the man's expression. His eyes are swamps, hiding predators beneath their waters.
It is this man who breaks the silence. "Freak," he mutters.
Your physical form goes motionless, yet your surroundings do not recede as you look back at him. You are not detached from this place, only from him. You consider grabbing him with the water and flinging him aside, but you think better of it when you remember Greg's crumpled van and crumpled leg.
Beside you, Dr. Drakken spews nonsensical syllables.
The mother turns to the man, her hands in fists she probably does not know she is forming. "That 'freak' just saved my son's life," she says, and the pinched feeling between your shoulder blades loosens.
"Absolutely she did!" Drakken slings his arm around you and grins at the crowd. "That's my girlfriend who did that!"
The woman comes up to you and tucks her free hand into both of yours. You turn your eyes downward, seeking your fingerprints. Your powers are as much a part of you as they are, so natural to you that you forget how they appear to others.
"Thank you, young lady," the woman says. Her fingers tremble between yours, and you realize she is crying. "Thank you so much."
It seems almost laughable to you that this woman who can scarcely be in her third decade calls you "young." Yet you look up and meet her gaze, which is bright and strained and holds no hint of danger, and you nod.
"I'm – I'm just glad I was able to help," you say.
The swamp-eyed man turns and stalks away, the crowd dividing to let him pass. The little boy trails behind and tries to gape back over his shoulder but is quickly jostled along by the man who must be his father, though you see no resemblance to Greg in him. Pity trickles down your back.
Your senses are then filled with Peridot as she hops up and down in front of you. "Lapis, Lapis, Lapis! That was amazing! I never realized how – how life-saving your powers could be, which is kind of odd, considering you've saved our lives with them multiple times, but never in a non-combative situation, which opens up a whole new dimension to them –"
You laugh and swat at her hair. "Peridot, take a breath."
"I don't need to!" Peridot protests.
"No, but Drakken does, and I don't think he's gonna until you do," you say. You glance at Dr. Drakken, his body gone stiff like new wood and his eyes scudding back and forth as they try to track Peridot's words.
"Fine." Peridot sucks in air and Drakken relaxes, his bathing costume fluttering.
The girl in red has reached the boy's mother now, murmuring apologies. The woman looks up from where she is attaching synthetic inflatable sacs to the boy's arms and smiles. "Oh, don't worry," she says. "You had a great reaction time. I can hardly be mad at you for not having magic powers as well." Beside her stand the boy's siblings, the tallest carrying the smallest, who you see now cannot be much larger than one of Steven's watermelon creatures.
Something warm takes shape in your gem, and you wonder if this feeling lives in all Earth creatures alongside their pounding-surf hearts and busy insides. "So – where are these water slides I'm supposed to try?" you ask.
"Right there!" Drakken points over the gray wall to the elevated platform with the stairs leading up to it and the pipes slithering down. A closer look reveals that these pipes are not metallic as the stairs are, but rather a firm green plastic.
"So – these are like slides at the playground?" Peridot climbs to the top of the wall to scrutinize the structures from behind her visor. "And at the end, you land in water?"
"Even better than that, if you can imagine!" Drakken says. "There's water in the slides the whole time! It pushes you along and makes you go really fast, and there's one turn where you can practically taste your kidneys – well, I mean, you couldn't, unless you decided to shapeshift internal organs – but! It is so very much fun! Boy, if I ever took over the world, I planned on having water slides in my palace."
His face darkens, trapped in some other place for a moment, and then he shakes his head. "Only one teensy problem – you have to walk up like ten jillion flights of stairs to get up there."
You grin. "Make that no teensy problems."
You scoop Peridot onto your back, grab Drakken's small fine wrists, and flap your wings, carrying the three of you over the wall and toward the platform, leaving the stairs behind. People wait at the top in a short line that you join, some young children who squirm and fidget in excitement and some grown humans, of whom only Drakken squirms and fidgets. Another human, also dressed in a red swim costume, sits in a chair and holds a lightweight object the shape of an obelisk on his lap. He appears to be in charge; the humans do not move forward without his permission.
When Drakken has received a nod indicating he is free to go, he turns to you instead and waves you forward. "You can go first, Water Wonder," he says with a glimmer in his eye. "Which slide strikes your fancy?"
You don't know what the combination of words means, but you step in front of Drakken and see two openings on opposite corners of the platform. The slide nearest to you has a roof, while the other one does not. Water rushes from tiny fountains and sweeps down the tunnel formed by the roof, and you can hear it gurgling all the way down: the full, echoing sound of water running through an underground cavern, one of the best places for a Lapis to begin her work on a new planet.
You turn around and walk to the open slide.
"Lie on down there," Drakken says before the man on the chair has a chance to say anything. "Face up. And you've got to cross your arms over your chest before they'll let you go."
You climb into the open slide's pipe and lie down on your back, the water a protective layer between your gem and the hard plastic, and fold your arms across your chest so the elbows stick out like a second pair of wings. In temperament, this water seems most similar to Amethyst, brash and reckless yet friendly and loyal.
Drakken's face appears upside-down in your vision, smiling from one comical ear to the other. "You're all set!" He glances at the man in the chair. "Isn't she?"
The man nods again.
You close your eyes and open your mind. The bond is instantaneous, diving beyond conscious thought and intertwining with every facet of you that is real. It presses against you and senses your hesitation, your willingness, your uncertainty. Peace makes itself known again, not as a neat cozy place in which you can hide this time, but as an encompassing atmosphere that expands with every new move you make.
And then you plummet, great streams of water whisking you downward, and snippets of sky peek through the ridged edges of the pipe that secure your descent. You are surging, sailing without a ship from one coiled section of pipe to the next. The water is graceful and perceptive even at its rapid pace, murmuring reassurance at every sharp curve you take, always taking care with your gemstone.
There is no time to be afraid.
You struggle to sit up, arms still crossed. The pipeline abruptly straightens and you stream down it like floodwaters over a plain, spilling from its final plastic incline into the basin, where the water catches you and cheers for you. For a second, your head is pushed below its surface, and you swim in a world of plain gray and pure cerulean.
On rising again, you sweep your wet hair from your eyes and give the basin a long look. The smell that hits your nose speaks of harsh chemicals rather than salt and kelp, but they remind you of Drakken and you can no longer disdain them. The water nudges you playfully over to the side of the basin, where you wrap your fingers around cement as droplets fall into your smile.
You like water slides.
Another figure shoots down the green plastic pipe. Her screams follow her around each bend. It has to be Peridot.
She crashes in with a flurry of bubbles, giggling as her head bobs underwater; she lets the artificial current carry her directly over to you. "Lapis!" Peridot shrieks. She shakes her head and squints. "That was….that was….incredible! My life flashed before my eyes!"
"Not to be dramatic or anything," you say and give her a gentle splash.
A sound accompanies a third figure down the pipe, a sound of joy wrapped in rough cloth, a sound of the last keys on a keyboard struck in heavy enthusiasm. Dr. Drakken hits the water with a cheer, three lopsided petals blooming from his neck, and the basin erupts in waves.
"Ah!" Drakken's arms and legs churn as he makes his way to you and Peridot, his hair plastered against his forehead in crooked rows. "Boy, am I glad I don't have to be ruler of the world to enjoy that!"
"Can we do it again?" Peridot says, eyes begging.
You don't even bother to roll yours as you lift her onto your back once more.
It does not take as long for the sun to lower in the sky as it did a few weeks ago, and it takes very little time afterward for the pool's gentle temperature to turn from pleasant to imposing. Sharp dots of cold have appeared on Drakken's arms and the skin around his lips begun to quiver before he finally vacates the pool for the day. You fold a towel around his shoulders as he did for you that first day on the beach, and he releases a comforted breath and pulls the fabric that has lain in the sun all afternoon closer around himself.
"Now – to change into dr-dr-dry cl-cl-clothes." Drakken's jaw shakes as he speaks. "I shall return!"
He disappears into the secret room. You sink down onto a bench beside Peridot. She grumbles absently, and you turn to find her wearing a sharp plane of a frown.
"Something wrong?" you say.
"I lied." The tinny voice is fragile and shifting. "When I said my life flashed before my eyes. It didn't. Not the whole thing." You are about to supply a mock gasp when she adds, "It started with the first time I saw Steven."
Peridot looks up at you. Her shadow falls behind her, long and agile, all that remains of your interrogator. You don't wait for her shadow to fade from the ground or your mind this time. You reach out and hug her, obstructing it yourself.
"Not much worth remembering before then, huh?" you say, and you feel Peridot's head shake against your chest.
Drakken steps out of the secret room, now dressed in the sheer shirt and the short denim pants he was wearing this morning, the sun gilding his quiet blue skin, in direct contrast to the loud, sloppy words that pour from him. "Well, I would say that this was a most successful day at the pool! Although we didn't get the chance to visit the snack bar –" he lapses into a fleeting frown – "that's probably more of a bummer for me than for you guys, am I right? Still, I think the saving of a life more than makes up for that!"
You blush but do not lower your head, composing yourself to meet his eyes and accept the admiration in them.
By the time you touch down on Drakken's front lawn, ethereal purple clouds span the horizon and fireflies flicker greetings from among the blades of grass. Drakken holds the front door open for you and Peridot, then swings around and enters himself. In the living room, he comes to a stop so sudden it would worry you if not for how his shoulders fall, all traces of tension seeping off them. You walk around him and see that he has his hands clasped in front of him. "Aww," he says. "Now isn't this just the most precious thing you've ever seen?"
You move your gaze to follow his, and Peridot lifts her face from her tablet, which glows white between her active fingers. Commodore Puddles is asleep on the couch in a semicircle, the tip of Pumpkin's stem secured beneath his chin, where she lies on her side with all four stumping legs poking outward. His tail curves, limp, on the cushion between them, while hers rests atop his back. Their breaths, heavy and rich with sleep, fuse as soon as they touch the air.
"Awww!" Peridot's squeal awakens Commodore Puddles, who jerks upright and searches the room warily until he finds Dr. Drakken. Pumpkin yawns and flexes her legs, and then scoots over to rejoin Commodore Puddles, all without opening her eyes. "I told you I shipped it!"
You pretend to groan. "Shipping again? Peridot, just let them love each other. You don't have to make everything more complicated than it needs to be!"
"Who says I do that?" Peridot throws up her arms in indignation, and the tablet becomes a meteor, striking the ground at your feet. The words ALGORITHM FOR MAXIMUM WATER SLIDE ENJOYMENT stare back at you.
You pick it up and wave it in front of her. "This says you do that."
She sticks out her tongue at you as Drakken pulls the drapes shut over the last puddles of sunlight. He clicks on the artificial light, which washes over the room and makes everything a shade or two brighter: the glare off Peridot's visor, the stalwart blue on Drakken's shirt, the pink ringlets of Commodore Puddles's fur. You are a bit surprised to see the dog so calm, as he has appeared skittish and frightened almost every time you have seen him before, but you know what it is to feel the tugging toward someone who has shown you kindness, the tugging that made Crystal Gems of you and Peridot.
Dr. Drakken brings a box out of his room and opens it to reveal a track like the type you have seen on game shows. This track, however, is only big enough for scraps of plastic – flat on the bottoms, pinched in the middles, and knobbed on the tops – to race each other. The objective, he explains with several enthusiastic flourishes, is to make it all the way around the track and to the finish line first.
The race is not even close. Peridot's green scrap of plastic wins by a wide margin, which earns her a high-five from you and an unconvincing scowl from Drakken. When you bid him good night before leaving for Mama Lipsky's, he kisses the top of your head and protests only a little when Peridot leaps into his arms.
Mama Lipsky herself waits for you in the dim light over her sagging porch. She accepts Peridot's hug with much more readiness than her son, and she folds her arms around you as well. Her hold is tight yet you are okay with letting your breath go.
You sit down on the couch, resting your head on your knees, until the light beneath Mama Lipsky's door shuts off. Peridot sits at your feet, Pumpkin in her lap and Lyle the Lion leaning against her, and shows you a game on her tablet which she plays as a deep-sea diver trying to locate sunken treasure with the help of friendly sea creatures. You watch for a longer period than you normally would before falling asleep; even a facsimile of the ocean, compressed onto that tiny screen, holds a beauty hard to look away from.
There are no nightmares that night, nor the next night, nor the night after. You don't forget the panic that used to overtake you, yet it is now adrift inside you rather than anchored in your consciousness as it was before. Earth treats you as though you deserve this life, and while that it is not entirely true, you come to believe it is not entirely false either.
When the trees begin to release their leaves in a whirl of scarlet and brown, the three of you travel back to Beach City to check on the progress of Little Homeworld. Leaving Middleton behind makes you aware of a liquid feeling in the center of your gem, a feeling that began as homesickness and evolved into something beyond your understanding.
The tides sing a welcome to you before the ocean even comes into view. Peridot cheers as her trash can lid sails over your meadow, which is now filled with frameworks and filigrees, undoubtedly Bismuth's work. Below you, a group of Quartzes throw a ball around, and a Larimar leads around by the hand a mammoth Gem who is clearly a Topaz fusion and whom you don't recognize from the healing a few months ago.
Bismuth herself comes to meet you when you land. "Hi, Tiny!" She rustles Peridot's hair, which doesn't move in the slightest from its angular peak, and then turns to you, her eyebrows tying together. "Hey there, Wings. Too soon for a hug?"
Her face is so placating in its sincerity that you want to tell her no, but you will not lie anymore. "Yeah," you say. "How about a high-five?"
She obligingly holds up her hand, and you slap your palm against her wide, rough, imposing one. You surprise even yourself when you grin at her and mean it.
"Hi, guys!" someone else calls. Steven comes running across what remains of the field, his Rosy cheeks aglow. "Lapis! Peridot! Drakken! Oh, it's so good to see you guys again!"
He reaches you. You stoop to hug him, only to halt when it becomes apparent that is no longer necessary. His eyes are mere centimeters below yours.
The liquid feeling in your gem springs the smallest of leaks.
His shirt features the same yellow star you remember, but all around it is a blue only slightly darker than your skin. Over it, he wears a glimmering pink jacket; the ends aren't attached, and they dance in the cooling breeze.
There is a pause, as long and awkward as Dr. Drakken's arms.
"Wow. Steven." Your voice is slight, a thread of sound. "You've grown."
Drakken claps a hand to his forehead. "Oh, thank goodness! I thought I was shrinking!" he says, his sloshing words the only things that sound correct in this moment.
"What is this?" Peridot flings out her arms as though to indicate the whole of Steven's larger form. "I used to be taller than you!"
You still are, yet not by much.
Steven rubs the back of his neck, a nervous gesture of Drakken's that, you realize at once, he can mimic now that he has a neck. "Yeah. My dad said I was probably due for a growth spurt one of these days. I guess 'one of these days' turned out to be this summer." His voice is also larger, thick and solid, the voice of a Quartz with all its scratching edges planed down into something soft and amiable.
You give him a smile. "That's…actually kind of amazing. Do you think you'll be as big as your mom?"
Steven shrugs. "Maybe. No one has any idea. Not even the Diamonds. This is all new to them."
"You know, I don't think I've ever seen…Rose? Was that her name?" Drakken asks, tapping his lower lip.
"It was the name she wanted, yeah," Steven says. "I've got a photo of her in my room. I can bring it here if you want to see it."
Drakken nods, his ponytail flapping up and down.
Steven gives your hand a squeeze and says, "Okay, be right back!" He climbs onto the warp pad and dissolves into moving light.
In the minutes that follow, you turn and squint in the direction of the beach, your body instantly synchronizing with the tide's pattern. Amethyst comes up and gives Peridot a slap on the back, while Pearl hovers around them like a delighted butterfly. A long shadow falls over you, Garnet making her presence known without so much as a touch from the strong, steady hands that hold two disparate Gems.
A few minutes later, Steven returns, carrying a frame of wood and glass that you remind yourself contains nothing more than an image, a memory. He places it in Drakken's hands, rotating it until the correct side points upward. "This is her. With my dad," he says.
"Oh," Drakken breathes. "Oh, she's beautiful." He does not say the way men on television sometimes say it – as though it is being wrung from some desperate place. There is a shine to his voice, uncomplicated by anything else.
You creep closer and peer through the clear glass at the Gem you have only known as Rose Quartz; even now that you know the whole thing to have been a charade, you doubt you will ever be able to see her as Pink Diamond. "She really is," you say.
Steven gives you a curious look. You have, after all, already seen his mother.
Yet you haven't, not truly. You saw Rose Quartz as the leader of the rebel alliance, her sword arm flashing through Homeworld soldiers, her pink curls swinging forward, their ends sharp and almost metallic.
This Rose gazes down at a human who does not even reach her shoulder, a smile sweet as the air after rainfall on her round lips. The sunlight softens her ringlets, alleviating the barbed edges. Age does not mark her eyes or wear them down as it does to the things of Earth, but they have lost the freshness Steven's eyes have always had. Even so, you can see them searching herself for goodness and clinging to whatever pieces they can find, in an expression that seems familiar. Her body is shaped from rises and valleys that you do not have, and her white gown flows around it as though she has clothed herself in ice cream. Across her generous stomach, fabric has been left out to create a five-sided figure, the star that promises Earth her protection, and in the center of it glints the deceptive flat surface of her gem, a home for the shield and the bubbles you have come to think of as Steven's.
No, you never knew Rose Quartz was so lovely.
"Thanks. I guess." Steven rubs the back of his neck once more. "Are you guys gonna be able to stay overnight?"
"Depends on if there's any place for Drakken to sleep," you say.
"Oh, yeah. I'll see what I can find. But you're wanted here as long as you want to be here," Steven says. "Is it a long flight over here?"
"Only a few hours," you say with a shrug. Even after adjusting to Earth time, you can hardly deem that to be of much significance.
"Still! I'd been thinking – you know, now that we're friends with the Diamonds and everything – that maybe we could build a warp pad to Middleton, and you could go back and forth any time you wanted!" Steven's gaze bounces among the three of you, every facet of him shining. "It'd sure make the long-distance relationship easier."
You consider it for a moment, the end of the war, the safety of your new home, and the promise of a warp pad linking it to Drakken's home: the new realities sluice through your thoughts as quickly as the water in the water slide pushed you along. A whisper begins in the core of your gem.
"Wait – you mean we'd be able to warp over to him any old time?" Peridot jabs a finger at Drakken. "And bring him back with us?"
Steven nods.
"Then that would be CONVENIENT AND FANTASTIC!" Peridot exclaims.
"That goes for me, too," you say.
Steven's grin is warm against the strengthening wind.
"I do have one question, though." Peridot frowns and advances on Steven. "Why did you alter the appearance of your 'shirt'?" She still pronounces the word as if it is an alien oddity.
"Oh." Steven pinches the fabric and although he laughs, he does it with a hint of discomfort. "This is actually a whole new shirt. My other one doesn't fit anymore."
Peridot's frown deepens. "Because you are bigger now?"
"Yep!" Steven and Drakken say at the same time. Drakken begins to expound on something called the human growth hormone, while you stare at the grass and wonder how it must feel to know you needed bigger clothes. Probably something like being wrapped in one of Mama Lipsky's hugs.
"At any rate," Drakken says as he winds down, "blue is a good color on you. Of course, I may be biased, but…"
He trails off, and this time when Steven laughs, it is easy and free. "Thanks anyway, good sir," he says. "Now – do you guys want the tour yet or what?"
"Yes!" Peridot cries.
"Absolutely yes!" Drakken shouts.
You throw your fist in the air. "Woo."
"Right this way, then." Steven bows to you and then steps cautiously over a thin, dirt-colored pathway in the earth. "Watch your step at the Beetle Crossing."
"Beetle Crossing?" you say.
"The Earth Beetle and the Heaven Beetle like to go for walks," Steven explains. "And since they're so much littler than everyone else, we're setting up some trails just for them so they can take their walks without getting trampled." He nods at the area where the path stops. "They're gonna have a tiny little house at the end over here."
Steven wanders past the path and points to frameworks spaced widely on the grass, outlined in wood and metal. "We're thinking about putting in a greenhouse over here," he says. "You know, a house filled with green things because plants grow there? It turns out Crazy Lace Agate always wanted to grow plants like Mom did, but she never had the time."
"I could teach them how!" Peridot says. "I am now an expert on plant growth." She nods with an authority far beyond her wisdom, and a flower snakes from Drakken's neck and brushes its petals over her fingers.
"And across from there –" Steven gestures to another frame a wide swath of field away – "we're gonna have a giant building with all kinds of crayons and colored pencils and paint and clay and stuff. You know, helping the Gems express themselves through meepmorp."
"You could teach them that, Lapis!" Peridot says with bulging eyes. "You're the best meepmorpist on the whole entire planet!"
You think back to the forms of everything that has ever frightened you dancing on a windowpane before you washed them away, and you glance around at the masses of Gems with their remaining horns and claws, wondering what it is they remember in the dark. "I don't know about the best," you say, "but that does sound like something that'd be a lot of fun."
"And we'll have an even more giant central building right here in the center – because where else do you put a central building, right?" Steven turns in a circle, nearly bouncing as he continues. "And most of the bigger houses will start right here around it and then kind of spread outward. Biggest houses will be on the edges of the meadow – and that includes you guys'!"
You try to picture the new house: large enough to contain you, Peridot, a television, a bathroom, and many meepmorps; full of Bismuth-made furniture; and strewn with the accessories you and Peridot bought at Smarty Mart. No reflection appears in your brain, the concept still abstract and fluid.
"I can't even imagine," you say with a shake of your head. "Come on, show us what we've got so far."
With your arms wrapped around Steven's waist, you summon your wings and shoot for the sky to lift him as you always have. He does not move; he does not budge.
"Huh?" you barely hear yourself say.
You get a firmer grip on him and try again. One sleeve of his jacket is yanked sharply forward, but Steven stays on the ground, as fixed and unreachable as the wings themselves when you were cracked.
Your back goes limp.
It makes more sense than it should. He is half-Diamond, and the human half is no longer a short child.
"Lapis?" Steven stares at you with timorous eyes.
You realize you have backed up several paces, arms folded around yourself as though to ward off a sudden chill. You let your hands fall. "Sorry." The word rises by instinct, and you turn away. "Excuse me. Just a sec."
You drift across the field until you find a boulder twice your size and slip to the other side of it. It hides you as you slump to the ground and bury your face in your hands. You do not go numb. Every detail is brilliant inside of you.
Clearest of all is the feeling of Steven's feet hooked under the spaces between your arms, his weight warm and chubby on your back as he pointed out the road that led to Jersey and the shifting colors in the trees that he used to show you how things on Earth constantly change. You feel it all the way through its journey. When it finishes and lifts, what takes its place is not pain but a pulling – the pulling of having a foot on two separate landmasses that want to move apart and of knowing that all of your terraforming powers will not bring them together again.
You shove the heels of your hands against your eyes.
Behind you, you hear galloping footsteps and heavy breaths that could belong to any of your three friends, though the creak of knees identifies it as Drakken. "Lapis?" he says.
You don't answer. Unlike Drakken's uncertainty, your uncertainty stops your mouth, and you don't know what to say to him. Whatever he sees in your face saddens him. The grass prickles the seat of your pants; he kicks at a clump of dirt on the ground, and you wish you could reassure him but you can't.
"Are you all right?" Drakken says.
You shake your head and then lower it, resting your chin on folded elbows.
"What – was it – was it something I said?" Drakken persists.
"I think I might know," a voice behind him says. It is heavier than you remember it, but you cannot mistake the first kind voice you ever heard on Earth.
You and Drakken turn around to see Steven standing there. The sun shines at his back, turning his silhouette into a stranger, every proportion askew. You cannot look away.
"Oh," Drakken says. "Should I – you know, get lost, then?" His top teeth run across his bottom lip, as they often do when he needs to be reassured of his importance.
You reach for the words, but Steven finds them first. "Absolutely don't do that!" he says. "But I think Lapis and I might need to talk about this, just us, so maybe you could go check on Peridot?"
Drakken nods. His eyes linger on you as he backs away, and only after he has almost tripped over an uneven patch of grass does he turn around and force them forward, a petal unfurling from each side of his neck.
Steven sinks to the ground beside you. From this distance, his presence feels the same, rounded and snug with the heat of his own body. You remember him running to catch you when you toppled from the mirror; he linked his hands with yours and you were astonished, having never touched a lifeform even halfway organic, at how warm they were.
"Lapis, I –" he begins, and he sounds so sad that you can hardly bear for him to continue.
"Sorry," you say. It seems foolish to react this way, as though you were staring down a maelstrom when in fact the waters are more tranquil than they have ever been.
Steven shakes his head. "Don't apologize."
"Sorry," you say without thinking.
"Lapis!" Steven says, but he hugs you and you feel his laughter as it tumbles through him. "Look, I get it. This is kind of a big deal. No pun intended."
You laugh with him then. "I'm not upset or anything. Not with you, at least. This is just so – weird. I've never seen anything grow before. Except crops."
That, however, was different. You never came to feel affection for corn; you never trusted pumpkins with your life.
"I don't think that's the only thing, though," Steven says. "My dad's lived on a planet where everything always changes his whole life, and he's still doing this proud-sad thing. I guess it's just love."
"Love?" You don't know why it surprises you. You have grown accustomed to the word and how it inundates so many things on Earth, but it still feels as valuable as if it were rare, as precious as if it were Extracted from a Diamond, animating that which would be lifeless otherwise.
"Yeah," Steven says. Your eyes drift to the star on the center of his new shirt as the tide of his breathing pulls it back and forth. "There's nothing easy about watching someone you love grow up. And it's not really easy for the person who's growing, either." He pauses and pokes the dirt with the toe of his shoe. "I can reach some cabinets in the kitchen that I couldn't get to before, though, so that's pretty cool."
You grin despite the fullness damming your throat. Of course he would focus on the good, while your focus has snagged on a reflection from years ago: Greg's boat slipping beneath the waves; sheets of rain smacking against your face as you flew Steven and his father to shore, holding Steven in one arm and Greg in the other; pieces of sunlight bedazzling the surface of an ocean you had just begun to again think of as yours after so much time being her. The memory softens your gem and the thought of Jasper's rough hand coming down on Steven instead of you drives into it like a cluster of nettles.
That is when you understand.
"You're not a little kid anymore." Your words are so small and feeble you would not blame Steven if he missed them, yet he doesn't; he never has. "I can't…pick you up now and carry you away if I need to. And even though there's pretty much nothing left to worry about and no one left to be afraid of, I'm still worried – how am I going to protect you?"
The grass seems to jab at you more sharply, yet the silence that falls between the two of you is smooth and sweet. You look at Steven without demanding an answer, and he looks back at you without rushing to give you one. From above, the wind toys with your hair and sighs as if in sympathy.
"Well," Steven says at last, "you said it yourself, Lapis. I'm not a little kid anymore. I'm better at protecting myself now.
"Besides, if you really needed to" – Steven tilts his head and examines you with eyes familiar but deeper than you remember them – "you'd find a way. I know you would." He gives your fingers a squeeze.
The silent sweetness returns, and you are left with what you saw in White Diamond's throne room when Steven summoned a barrier of pink shields which her powers could not penetrate, and with what reflects on his newly pensive face and resonates in his newly heavy voice: that this boy who defended himself against the strongest being you have ever known and who is even now working to heal the rift between Earth and Homeworld, is something more than a boy now. You relax against the evening air the way you once did against your hammock. All that breaks through is the sound of insect-song and the memory of the waters at the Middleton pool lifting to obey you.
Acceptance runs down your back, rinsing it with a sensation that is in equal measures the pain of cracking and the radiant tingle of healing, a peculiar fusion.
"Are we good?" Steven nearly whispers.
You reach out and touch Steven's shoulder. The flesh does not bend as easily as it used to; it has become firmer and more durable, though not hard. You hope it will never be hard. "I can…I can learn to be okay with you growing up. I know you can't help it." You frown at the sky. "Well, I mean, you could if you really wanted to, but – I'm not gonna force you to stay a little kid forever, just for me. That'd be selfish."
"Thanks, Lapis!" Steven stands up, his smile higher than the last time you saw him but still your lighthouse beacon, guiding you to a shore where it is safe to dock. "So – are you ready for me and Bismuth to show you how your house is coming along?"
He sticks a hand down to you. The blunt little fingers you remember are now almost as long as your own, and you think his strength might equal yours, at least the portion of yours that isn't derived from the ocean. His jacket and shirt echo the sky, pink and blue strips, and you shiver a little as the air grows cooler.
"Yeah," you say.
You reach up and take his hand. He pulls you to your feet and leads you across the meadow toward the foundation of your new home.