Sky Blue, Ocean Blue

by purplegirl761

When a reformed mad scientist befriends a stranger to Earth who's also haunted by the past, neither of them suspects that their blossoming relationship will carry them through everything from ice cream to intergalactic warfare. Welcome aboard a little ship I like to call Drakkis.

47. Poison

~Well, I'm back at long last. Hope you all are doing well and that you'll enjoy this next chapter!~

This announcement should not stun you. Every Bismuth's Purpose on Homeworld was to forge weapons; you have not lived on Earth long enough to forget that. Yet your back startles with the reminder that none of you are as far removed from that time as you would like to be. Beside you, Dr. Drakken begins to make noises, the kind a boat motor makes as it weakens.

"Maybe not this exact one, but I sure made plenty of them back before I joined up with the Rebellion." Bismuth's lip curls at her own words. "These were the Diamonds' favorite way of stopping all the little rebellions before the big one. A Gem steps out of line too often, forgets her place, starts trying to own her own self – all you've got to do is poof them with this, and they come back in exactly the same condition as when they were first made."

You look away from the weapon that glints harshly in the sun. You can think of no circumstances under which you would want to be shattered, but the thought of being returned to the frivolous, cowardly Gem you first were is even worse.

"Oh, no! I touched it!" Peridot screeches. "AM I GOING TO LOSE ALL OF MY CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT?"

Bismuth's laugh is a sheet of plastic. "Relax, Tiny. If you were going to, you already would have."

"So – that's what happened to Pearl and Amethyst and Ruby and Sapphire?" Steven says, almost panting the words. "They got reset?"

"Yeah," Bismuth says.

Pain splashes across Steven's eyes, and your fists tighten. His closest friends have no memory of him.

"When – when Pearl's gem started to glow, Dad and I thought she was coming back," Steven says. "But instead, just this seashell appeared and asked us what 'model' we wanted. And when we said we didn't know, it said it would just go with the default, and then it asked for our names. Dad gave it his, but I guess he stuttered a little when he said it, and now –"

"And now he's My Um Greg Universe," Bismuth finishes for him.

It is so ridiculous, you almost laugh.

Greg places a large, soft hand over his face and groans into it. "Ho geez."

He turns and walks away; Pearl follows him, and Amethyst follows Pearl. It is better for you, not having to look at Amethyst empty and Pearl in a form someone else chose for her, but Steven watches them leave with a frown that consumes his face.

"Ouch," Spinel says.

You glance at her in surprise. She does not appear to be in a stupor like the others. Her eyes are clear and bright, and between them the skin pinches, trying to understand Steven's pain.

"And Steven poofed her with the Rejuvenator," you say, pointing to Spinel. "So that means she reset too?"

Dr. Drakken continues to splutter.

Bismuth nods, and you nod back at her. It would explain why you saw no malice in Spinel when you searched for it: there was none, only the whimsy of a Gem who giggled and contorted her body for others' amusement. Yet in Homeworld's ancient rankings, Spinels are only one tier above Pearls. What reason could Spinel have for wanting to turn Pearl back into a servant?

"So even she has no idea why she attacked me," Steven says.

"I did whaaaaaaaaaaat now?" Spinel says. Even her mouth stretches and bends in absurd proportions.

Steven kicks at a clump of grass and his expression hardens into anger, a look you have not often seen on him. "Great! Just a few hours ago, I thought we were all going to live happily ever after. And now everything is just – wrong! My friends – my family –"

You reach for him, but Bismuth gets there first, crouching to drop her hands on his shoulders. "There's still hope, Steven," she tells him. "The Rejuvenators aren't perfect. Me and the other Bismuths I worked with made sure of that."

You feel a twinge in your gem. She didn't take the opportunity to call them her "Bismuth partners."

"None of us wanted to destroy a Gem's identity permanently," she goes on, "so we programmed the Rejuvenators with a chance to give it back. If you could remind the Gems who'd been reset of who they were, if you triggered a memory powerful enough, it should override the reset and make them themselves again."

"'Should'?" Steven asks.

"We never really got the chance to test that out. But, hey, Steven, look at us. We are the Crystal Gems." Bismuth spreads her arms to you and to Peridot, as if the two of you fought alongside her in the Rebellion, and you find a tiny smile on your lips. "And we never give up on our friends."

You think of the Gems who cared for Steven throughout his childhood, the Gems you once considered your captors. It makes sense to you that their lives would be permanently inscribed on them somewhere at a depth where even a Rejuvenator could not descend.

Ruby marches across the grass, and Sapphire hovers a few centimeters above it. A longing slinks through you, an emotion that until recently you would have submerged in your hollow insides. "I'd feel a lot better if Garnet were here," you say. Her quiet and the suggestion of power beneath the spare surface of her arms unnerve some people, but to you they have become a comfort, her presence never demanding idle chatter.

Steven puts his hands to his temples. "Garnet told me that Ruby and Sapphire first fused when Ruby tackled Sapphire to keep her out of danger."

"It's true. I was there," you say. All eyes turn to you; this is the second private thought you have spoken.

"So…maybe we need to put them in danger?" It is the first coherent thing Dr. Drakken has said in the last several minutes.

Peridot's eyes take on a spark you had almost forgotten. "Well, I'm sure there's bound to be something dangerous around here." She wanders off, muttering, "Let's see – danger, danger, danger," and you believe it would be wise to follow her. You and Drakken follow in her wake as she climbs the length of one of the enormous green refuse boxes Beach City has loaned to Little Homeworld and rifles through scraps of metal and wood and stone. "Danger, danger, danger…

"A-HA!" Peridot hops to the ground, holding a circular saw twice her size with a smooth blade bigger around than her body, supporting its weight with her powers. "This is just the thing!"

"A giant…pizza cutter?" Steven says.

"That is one of its functions, yes."

You decide not to imagine what its other functions are, though by the way Drakken's breaths grow shallow as tide pools, he cannot stop himself from imagining.

"Sapphire, Your Greatness. Is that a weapon?" Ruby's voice, at once high and rough, scrapes the air with its formality.

"Yes, it is." Sapphire speaks at a much lower, calmer, cooler pitch. Both of their voices are Garnet's, and yet neither of their voices are Garnet's. "In a moment, she will hand it to the curly-haired one."

Ruby's eyes widen. "How do you know…Oh. Right. Future vision."

Peridot passes the saw to Steven. Dr. Drakken ducks behind you and then hisses – at himself, it seems – and flips around to plant himself in front of you, a thin lanky barrier between you and the saw. Over his shoulder, you watch the saw wobble in Steven's arms.

"That's right, it's a weapon all right!" he says. "So you better…look out! 'Cause I'm…I'm gonna get you!"

You think of how much trouble he had reciting his lines in the Camp Pining Hearts play you performed years ago. This is even worse, his teeth grinding as if he is attempting to walk against a current.

Ruby jumps in front of Sapphire as Drakken jumped in front of you. They are close enough to touch, but they do not. "Permission to take out the curly-haired one, Sapphire?"

"Negative," Sapphire says. "I predict he will not be able to use it."

"She's right." Steven lets the saw sag to the ground in a flurry of uprooted grass. "I can't do it."

"Don't beat yourself up for it, Steven," Drakken says. "Not all of us can be former supervillains with big commanding voices and chilling laughs…Wait a minute!"

Drakken blinks rapidly; when his eyes settle they are supernovas, bursting with energy. "That's it!" he cries. "That's it!"

He stands, a hard set to his shoulders making them look larger. He takes the saw from Steven and tilts it backward, propping it on end in the grass, and switches it on again. Fierce rough laughter cascades from him, and all feeling seems to ebb from your gem as you watch yet another priceless person revert to what they once were.

Sapphire gasps, the sound of cold water dripping through a crevice in stone.

Drakken screams and drops the saw. It lands on its operators' button as it falls, stopping the blade.

"Well, that didn't work," Peridot, never one to let the obvious go unspoken, says with a frown.

In the tight, frustrated moment that follows you fly to Dr. Drakken, who has fallen into a sitting position, every part of his body shaking, uncomfortable with itself. You hug his shoulders, feeling the wide frail bones beneath their padded façade and watching sweat trail, glistening, down the skin in front of his ear.

"You okay?" you say.

"It came back so easily," Drakken says, accepting your hand between his. "So, so easily."

"We are all still in grave danger," Sapphire says.

You want to glare at her, but you know it wouldn't be fair.

Sapphire's eye remains hidden behind her hair, but the tiny folded hands in their white gloves have begun to shift, something that happens only when she grows agitated. "The Spinel will pick up the saw and turn it back on out of curiosity," she says.

The words have just hit you when you hear Spinel say, "Hey, cool! Wonder what this does?" and an instant later, the saw reawakens with a roar that now seems inseparable from Drakken's grim laughter. Unlike Drakken, Spinel hasn't allowed the ground to bear any of the saw's weight, and as it rears back she dangles from the handle, at least ten meters above the grass.

"Whoa," Ruby says, staring at Sapphire. "That's incredible."

Spinel stretches her feet to the ground in the same moment that the saw shakes her off and shears through the grass on its way to the building taking shape next to the tower, which is squat but still well above everyone's heads. A cacophony of screams rise as Gems sprint away from the blade. Little Homeworld has known its share of confusion and mayhem, as will any place where Peridot lives, but it has always been of the peaceable variety, uncorrupted by anyone's need to fear for her life or distrust her neighbors. This sound is both unfamiliar and all too familiar, and it turns you to ice.

The movements of Sapphire's hands have lost their composure, if not their grace. "It will cause a great deal of damage to the unfinished structure," she says, "causing the Bismuth much distress."

The saw shoots up the side of the building, tearing through the wood like it is nothing more than paper. Bismuth yells, "My scaffolding! Not my scaffolding!" She runs toward it with her arms outstretched as though it holds the answer to saving her friends.

"There will be a great deal of falling debris," Sapphire reports.

The blade reaches the peak of the structure and continues down its other side, leaving behind a cloud of dust and wood shavings. Beams fly in every direction; one tumbles straight for Sapphire's head.

Ruby lunges, just as you hoped she would, but not for Sapphire – for the beam. With her palms turned upward, she catches it and plants her legs, spread as far as they will go to maintain her balance. The beam shudders and creaks in her hands, and she grunts but does not let go.

"I won't let it hurt you, My Sapphire!" Ruby's sand-grained voice still holds reverence when she speaks her fusion partner's name, but it is a reverence of duty and not of warmth.

"There will be two small Pebbles walking by on a path made specifically for them," Sapphire says. "The debris will almost crush them –"

You have thrust your wings out and are sailing toward the two tiny figures out for their morning stroll even before Sapphire concludes her sentence: "…but the Lapis will save them." You dive like a seal into the narrow gap between the falling beam and the Beetle Trail and scoop the Earth Beetle and the Heaven Beetle into your outspread hands. Your chest hits the ground hard; to brace yourself would be to endanger the Beetles.

The beam skims the top of your wings as it passes over you. It does not cause them pain any more than it would cause a river pain, yet a feeling of violation still rolls at the edge of your consciousness as you push yourself to your elbows and smile down at the Beetles in your hands. "You guys all right?" you ask them.

They respond with grins and upturned thumbs, a gesture you have taught them; their speech, always high-pitched and difficult to understand, was further damaged by the Corruption Bomb. You crouch in the grass beside them until the crashing sounds have ceased and clumps of dirt no longer stain the air. Your back numbs with an instinct you have come to dread, even though it has saved you and others many times.

"But the worst is yet to come!"

Your head jerks around at Sapphire's panicked cry. Her hands waver on either side of her mouth. "The saw will continue to cut!" she says.

You follow the wide gash of destruction the saw has left in its wake to find it slicing toward the crane you helped Bismuth build. At the end of its cord, directly above Ruby, sways the anvil she and Peridot installed as ballast. Through the crane's open doors you can see Bismuth holding several beams above her head to allow Little Larimar and the Nephrites to pass safely through.

"It will cut through the rope!"

The saw clips the rope in half as if in obedience to Sapphire's prediction. The anvil descends, preceded by a shadow the size of Greg's van that engulfs Ruby. There is no way she will be able to outrun that shadow.

You are in the sky and hurtling toward her before the question of whether or not you can save her passes through your mind.

Time slows and smears. With one beat of your wings, Steven reaches up from the ground and his pink shield, appearing somehow brittle, materializes above Ruby's head.

With a second beat, the shield begins to fade out, and Sapphire says, "The curly-haired one's powers are failing. The anvil will fall, and Ruby – you'll be shattered! I'm so sorry." Tears dampen the edges of her voice.

Ruby straightens, her eyes on Sapphire, frightened but resolute. "Well, then, I'm glad I at least got the chance to meet you, My Sapphire."

When your wings beat a third time, Steven's shield vanishes. At the same moment, Sapphire pounces on Ruby.

A brilliant burst of white light erupts from the ground to the sky, colliding with the anvil and throwing it aside, pulling Ruby and Sapphire together, and you turn away even though you know it represents something beautiful for them.

When the light folds back, you see the Garnet you first saw on Blue Diamond's base: her skin and clothing an amalgamation of pink and blue, her three eyes round, her mouth slackened with shock, her knees bending inward like the quiver of Opal's bow; the only creature on the base more uncertain than you were. The silver glasses that have always hidden so much of her expression are gone, as is the confidence that seemed to course through her body. She cannot reach it any more than Amethyst can find her power of speech or Pearl her sense of self.

For a moment, a crusted ridge of despair builds up around the edges of your back as you observe these three Gems whom you have only recently come to befriend, looking at the fragments of their personalities.

Bismuth takes a cautious step toward Garnet. "Do you know who you are?" she says.

Garnet glances down at herself. "I think…I think my name is…Garnet." Her deep, full voice is muffled as though she is speaking underwater, and it hesitates to move forward.

"Sweet Bunsen burners," Drakken breathes beside you, but the feeling in your gem doesn't lighten. All fusions, even the vile one in which you took part, instinctually know their names, weighing and measuring how their parts differ and how they combine. It does not mean Garnet knows who she really is.

"Where am I?" Garnet turns and blinks at you with the same bewilderment you saw on her face right before you flew away and left the teeming mob of angry Gems to shatter her. The bravest thing you let yourself do then was hope that they would not succeed.

Yet this time the memories, though faded, don't feel as if they belong to someone else. The sense of loss inside you begins to move, reshaping itself into a second chance.

You walk up to Garnet and place the tip of your thumb against the tip of her longest finger, the way she did for you every time she knew you could bear no more touch than that. "You're on Earth," you say. "But it's okay – we're going to look out for you."

Garnet nods, and in the empty wells of her eyes you imagine you see the faintest ripple of trust.

"Garnet!" Steven runs up to her, his hands in excited fists. "Garnet! It's great to have you back…" He trails off as he takes in her blank stare. "You still don't remember anything, do you?"

"Not much," Garnet says. She holds her forearms close to her chest, her fingers on opposite elbows, one component of hers giving the other a hug. "But this…somehow this seems right."

"Well, that's progress," Peridot says, and Spinel adds a cheer.

You say nothing. If fusing did not restore Ruby's and Sapphire's memories, you can't fathom what could.

"I guess so." Steven rubs the back of his neck and stares at the grass. "There's something else that's worrying me, though. What she said right before I poofed her," he says, nodding to Spinel, who now lists from one foot to the other, the tight bundles of hair above her head swaying like kites on strings. "About how my human half wasn't going to be around much longer."

"I don't suppose she could have been referring to the fact that human lives are very brief, almost negligible by Gem standards?" Peridot says.

Steven shakes his head. "I don't think so."

"Hey, everybody!" When you turn toward Spinel, you see that she has extended her legs by several meters so that she stands level with the central tower. She points into the distance. "I don't know if this helps or not, but it looks like we've got a giant needle stuck in the ground over here!"

Drakken whimpers again. You are barely aware of the fact that needles are sometimes used to introduce medicine into a human's body to prevent diseases, a process which he has never much liked. You are barely aware of anything, even as your wings poke out and you float upward, leaving behind the rubble, the saw, and the tops of the trees; then you stop, turned to a living statue by what you see.

On the knoll beside the lighthouse sits an Injector – an older one, by the looks of it, taller and more fearsome than you remember the ones from your day. Its tip pierces the ground, and a Rhodonite-colored solution crawls from it into the soil. Every blade of grass around the Injector has already blackened and bent over, replaced by an eerie pink glaze. Ever since you met Steven, you have considered pink to be a benign color, but the sight of this substance frightens you more than Rose Quartz did, even when you considered her your enemy.

Your surroundings begin to dim, and your clench your jaw tight, trying to keep your mind steady. "Um, guys?" you say. "She's right. We've got a problem."

From far away, you watch Bismuth guide Peridot, Spinel, Steven, and Drakken onto the warp pad. Somehow you land next to them and allow the warp pad to deliver you to Steven's house. Peridot holds up her arms to be carried, and you reach under them and sweep her up, her legs swinging in the sky as the others climb the hill. The two of you arrive first and, and you both stand there studying the Injector while you wait. Just as you suspected, it is an Era One machine, a thin casing of metal layered over stone and bearing the insignia of all four Diamonds.

Only the sound of Dr. Drakken wheezing for breath anchors the moment; he often has trouble holding on to air after a strenuous climb. You turn toward him and offer him your shoulder for support, and he leans against it and gives you a weak smile that begins to erode as soon as he looks at the Injector.

"I don't know exactly what that is," he says with a shudder, "but I know a Doomsday device when I see one!"

"Cool!" Spinel turns her ankles to springs and bounces up to the Injector, eyes cheery and undisturbed. "You're saying I brought this here?"

Steven nods at her, and she asks him another question that you do not hear because your attention has been captured by Peridot, who kneels beside the Injector and retrieves a fingerful of the substance as the Injector squeezes more through the tip. More than one voice among the group screams, and you might join them if your throat felt strong enough, but Peridot has entered a realm where the acquisition of knowledge is the only thing that matters. She is diligent and precise as her other hand presses an indentation on her tablet and its lower half unhinges, revealing a glass slide against which she rubs her finger, smearing the substance from one end of the slide to the other. Another press of the button, and the slide retracts, her tablet churning and grinding in thought. Drakken makes a noise of awe.

Words and figures flash across the tablet's screen, reflected in Peridot's visor and in her eyes, which now appear to be made of glass as well. She clutches the star on the front of her shirt and swallows before reporting: "This is a highly efficient bio-weapon gel. Origin: Homeworld. Purpose: eventual elimination of all organic matter on a planet's surface."

"I've never heard of it before," Steven says.

"It's strictly a last-resort measure, reserved for especially troublesome planets when the conventional methods of colonizing have not proven effective." Peridot does not look at you when she says that, and you love her for it.

Drakken sticks his hand into the air. "So – wait. Does that mean this thing is going to –"

"Yes," Peridot says. Her grip on the star tightens. "If left unchecked, it will destroy all the organic life on Earth."

Cold streaks your back, but not soon enough. Once the words "all organic life on Earth" meant nothing to you; now they mean Greg, Pumpkin, Mama Lipsky, Shego, Kim, and Ron. Most of all, they mean Dr. Drakken, whose beautiful weak smile has been washed away by a wave of terror that leaves no evidence of anything before it. You think of the time you believed the Diamonds would attack Earth after learning of Steven's existence, when you ran away and tried to persuade Drakken to come with you. He refused then and he would certainly refuse now; he still feels he must atone for his crimes against the planet, and he cannot be happy unless it is saved. This time, neither can you.

You will still drag him onto a warp pad and beam him to Homeworld if everything else fails.

For a moment, a darkness flashes through Steven's eyes that you have never seen there before. He turns to Spinel, hands folded at the front of his jacket, entreating. "Spinel? Do you have any idea why you brought that thing here? Or, even better, how to turn it off?"

Spinel's cheerful expression does not falter. "Nope!"

She turns her eyes and smile to the sky, where birds still sing and squawk and where leaves still rustle in the breeze as if she has not upset their world. In a few months, those leaves will explode into color, the air will dry up and sharpen, and the days will begin to shorten, a cycle you have finally begun to understand; Earth's rhythm has become yours. A small facet of your gemstone still holds the memory of life without tiny organic beings but no desire to return to it.

The situation seems cramped and impossible, as though you and your friends are crushed into a narrow space with a large boulder on either side, and yet you are able to release your jaw without shaking. Steven has pulled himself out of tight crevices before. You are not afraid yet.

Dr. Drakken, however, is. Despite his attempts to hold it steady, his chin wavers, lines squirming and forcing ridges into its normally smooth texture, and when you gaze at him you think you can see every fear he has, strewn across his face. He inhales and clings to the breath, only setting it free when you reach over and touch his arm.

The Injector rattles and another share of poison squeezes from the tip, the circle of ruin around it widening. Every blade of grass it touches bends in the middle and hangs there, brittle and purpled. With one hand still on Drakken's arm, you knock him behind you, shoving him away from this substance that will take his life as easily as the tide takes the sand, and you don't stop until you reach the base of the hill. Steven and the others are close behind.

"She doesn't remember," Steven says. The heavy tension between his words pinches your back. "All because I poofed her and sent her back to who she first was. So much for happily ever after."

"Wait a minute," you say. You look at Bismuth. "If there's a way to undo what the Rejuvenator did to Garnet's, Amethyst's, and Pearl's memories…isn't there a way to restore Spinel's, too?"

Bismuth grins. "Absolutely."

"That's great!" Steven straightens for a moment, reminding you of a healthy plant, and then you watch his shoulders fall again. "Except that I don't know anything about her life. None of us do."

You glance warily at Spinel. You know how much you hate when others speak about you as if you are not there, but she has thrown herself onto her back in the grass, waving her limbs back and forth.

"Unless…" Light flickers back into Steven's eyes. "Right when Spinel first showed up and she was waving the Rejuvenator everywhere, Amethyst said, 'Who the heck is that?' and Pearl said, 'Could she be –' and then never got to finish."

"So Pearl knows!" Drakken says. His fingers cannot remain still; they glimpse off each other, pluck at the air, and tug on his collar.

"Pearl might know," Steven corrects him. While you have grown fond of Steven's new, deeper voice, there is now something grave stalking through it that you do not like.

"Well, she at least has a clue," you say. "Which is more than the rest of us have."

"Lapis is right." Bismuth steps forward. "So – Steven, you go on out and work on getting our friends' memories back. The rest of us will stay here and see if we can't find a way to wreck this Injector before it wrecks the planet."

Bismuth gives Steven a firm look, her eyes gripping him like clasping hands, and you realize she is handing out assignments now. She does not do it as well as Garnet, who still stands off to Steven's side, staring in confusion at the trees around her and the clouds above her.

You release Drakken's arm and miss its warmth as soon as it leaves. "You should go with them, too," you say, gesturing to the poisoned circle. "The farther you are from this stuff, the better."

Drakken's eyebrow folds, sadness pleating the dense hairs, but he nods. "Don't worry," he says. "Between my genius and Steven's, we should have very little trouble getting everyone back to normal."

Garnet walks past, her sinuous legs taking halting steps. "Is this…where am I supposed to go?" she asks you, and your powers ache at the vulnerability in her gaze. If she has no memory of the last several thousand years, even her future vision has been weakened to the point of uselessness.

You point at Steven. "Go with him. His name is Steven. He'll help you, I promise."

Garnet accepts your word and trudges after Steven.

The white van with its sweeping bands of color lurches to a stop in the sand in front of the Temple. One of the front windows lowers, and Greg's shining, ruddy head emerges. "Schtewball?" he calls.

"Hey, Dad!" Steven breaks into a run toward the beach, and Drakken bolts after him; you shadow them at a slower pace, tossing glances backward to ensure that Garnet is still following. "Are you ready to go fix the Crystal Gems?" Steven asks his father.

"You have no idea," Greg groans. A tissue, clutched in Pearl's hands, glides across his forehead, removing the sweat, and he looks like he wants nothing more than to push it away. Through his window you can see Amethyst in the rear seat, staring straight ahead, her eyes still blank and unmoving.

You wait for the scene you are witnessing to blur and fade for you as well until it becomes something unknowable, yet it never does. The corners of everything before you stay sharp and distinct, and you feel them cut into you, causing not pain but a pressure against your back that urges you forward.

"Be safe," you tell Dr. Drakken, quirking your mouth at him so he won't cry. You love him, deeper and fiercer than you could have imagined caring for an Earth creature.

His hands flail at his sides. "Gggh. Yes. You too," he says.

You lift yourself onto your toes and kiss his cheek, directly below the lashing mark. A petal brushes your nose, and you smell chocolate and chemicals that you cannot name. "You be safer, because I'm not organic."

"Duly noted," Drakken says, his words squirming.

Spinel and Steven climb into the van and make their way to the backseat, and Garnet sits on the floor. With a gentle push, you propel Drakken into the van, where he sits awkwardly beside the hollow-eyed Amethyst, who continues to gawp at each person she sees.

"Come on, Amethyst," Steven says, taking her hand. "Let's see if we can help you remember who you really are."

The door claps shut behind them, and you see Amethyst's lips moving and know she is repeating Steven's words back to him. Peridot, who has been muttering behind you all this time with her face nearly attached to her tablet, calls after them, "Yeah, Amethyst! Get better quick!" The tires squeal as the van edges backward and then turns around to drive away from you. You watch it until it has disappeared from view and the sand has settled again.

Peridot sighs and drops her arms. "That was foolish of me. So what if I want Amethyst back most of all? She doesn't know who Spinel is or why she came. Only Pearl does, so therefore, Pearl should be top priority!"

She looks up at you, and you see a few tears slide down her cheeks.

You hold her against your side until she can stop crying.

At the top of the hill, the Injector continues to pump. You twist away from it and its dark ring, destitute of life, and you hope.

---

Lather, rinse, and obey!

It's time to wash your hair today!

Dr. Drakken drums the nervous fingers of one hand against his knee and the equally-nervous fingers of the other against the van window, and wonders why he has the chorus of his Brainwashing Shampoo rap stuck in his head. Generally, he doesn't like reviewing foiled plans – even the ones that spawned insanely catchy songs – but maybe it's just easier than looking at Amethyst in the next seat over and seeing her look back with a stare straight out of a science fiction/horror movie. Or gazing out the window at the soft grains of sand growing clumps of beach grass and imagining them shriveling up like a piece of burned pizza if the poison gets to them. Or closing his eyes altogether and envisioning Warmonga and her expansive array of mega-death weapons and knowing that this time he is in danger too. This time he doesn't have an oxygen mask, and the fact that this makes him so much nobler calms his fears not a whit.

Whatever a "whit" is.

Instead, Drakken rotates in his seat to check out what's going on behind him. The elasticized Gem – what did Peridot call her, "Spinel"? – sits in the backseat beside Steven and tilts her head from left to right at a rhythm that clashes with the beat of his rap song, her heart-shaped pigtails bopping against each other. The smile she wears is as springy as the rest of her. And big – so big it might reach to her ears if Gems had them – and happy. Really, genuinely happy.

That can't be true, though, Drakken muses as he flips back around. People who are happy don't spray alien pesticide over the planet Earth and watch its inhabitants squirm. No one in this van knows that better than Drakken. His lungs constrict with the weight of the memories, and he has to clutch the seat in front of him until they're under his control again.

But – here Drakken straightens, barely aware of the snap of pain in his back – if I'm the only one who understands that, then I may be the only one who can help her! If he can understand which semitruck ran her down and knocked her off the straight and narrow, he can begin a plan to coax her back on. He does love saving the planet; he knows that about himself now.

The thought is a feather across his ego, soothing and tickling all at the same time.

Drakken turns in his seat again. "So, you're Spinel, right?"

Spinel thumbs her seatbelt out to its maximum length and lets it pop back against her chest. "Yeppers! Who are you?"

"My name is Dr. Drakken."

"Oh," Spinel says. "You're a human, right?"

Abruptly, Drakken's contacts need airing. She's reminding him more and more of a little girl, the soles of her shoes scraping the floor and her blinks slow and curious, and little-kid newcomers to Earth can't be expected to understand the species immediately.

But it still stings a little.

"Yes," he says. "I'm friends with Lapis Lazuli." Spinel watches him with her child-eyes, and he thinks this might not be the right time to introduce her to the idea of dating. "I'm friends with all of the Gems here, really, but mostly with Lapis."

Spinel nods the pigtails. "Neato!"

Okay, she confuses him a lot.

The van comes to an easy stop, but Drakken jerks as if his insides were jolted with a brake-slam. "This is as close to the boardwalk as I can getcha without driving onto it," Greg says, and a pang skewers Drakken. Lapis told him the first time she spoke to Steven through the mirror was to warn him about some lackwit driving on the boardwalk, straight toward him.

Steven climbs over the middle seats to the door, and at some point his foot shoves into Drakken's face. "Sorry," he says when Drakken yips. He lands in the loose sand separating the street from the boardwalk and turns to his small purple friend, beckoning with chubby fingers for her to join him. "Come on, Amethyst. Let's see if there's anything here you recognize."

Amethyst slides her fingers between his, stiff as dried-out Play-Doh. Her hair's in a bob now, like Lapis's, which would be cute if everything else about her didn't remind him of a zombie. A non-carnivorous zombie, Drakken admits, but spooky nevertheless. "Come on, Amethyst. Let's see if there's anything here you recognize," she repeats in perfect robo-tone.

Drakken's whole brain shivers.

"Garnet? Pearl? You guys coming?" Steven asks.

Garnet is sitting on the floor of the van, between Drakken's seat and the one Amethyst just vacated, and she has her legs crisscrossed in front of her, the way Monkey Fist used to do when he mediated. "No. I need some time to think," she says, and she sounds both calm (which is very in-character for Garnet) and puzzled (which isn't).

"And I certainly can't go!" Pearl cries. "I must stay here and tend to the needs of My Um Greg Universe!" She makes goo-goo eyes at Greg.

No, not goo-goo eyes. What her eyes are giving Greg has nothing to do with flirting or romance and everything to do with undying, slavish devotion. Greg's grip tightens on the steering wheel. He looks like he wants to slam his foot down on the gas petal and drive the van right into the ocean. Drakken wouldn't blame him if he did.

Now, though, he has to get out of here. He can't be around Pearl when she's like…this. It reminds him too much of what he used to want, reminds him right in the pit of his stomach.

You may think I'm a villain

Yo, I'm just chillin'

No, he needs to focus. He unbuckles his seat belt and trips over his own boots as he exits the car. Spinel literally cartwheels out after him, and they follow Steven as he traipses across the sand.

On the boardwalk where Drakken first met Lapis, Steven takes Amethyst softly by the elbow and leads her from one store to the next. Spinel bounces behind them, and Drakken narrows his eyes to hold his focus. Right. He is supposed to be getting to the root of her psyche right now.

"So, Spinel?" he begins.

"So, Dr. Drakken?" Spinel's neck twines back around so they're face-to-face, even though her toes continue to point forward.

Oooh, that's frightening.

"Have you ever been to Earth before today?" Drakken says.

Spinel shakes her head, still grinning like a panting dog. "Nope! Today's my first day."

"Oh," Drakken says, and he tries to keep the disappointment-frown out of his voice. "So you can't think of any reason you'd have to try and destroy it?"

"No way!" Spinel says. "I mean, I haven't been here very long, but it seems like a really cool place."

All right. So Earth in particular isn't the problem. It's something deeper, then. "Did…did anyone ever laugh at you on Homeworld?" Drakken asks. He forces one foot in front of the other, straining not to see the Bebes designed by his nineteen-year-old hands falling to pieces, not to hear the rips of laughter coming at him from people he had trusted not to respond to him that way.

"Sure, people laughed at me on Homeworld." Spinel repositions the remainder of her body so all of her is facing the same way and lets herself lag so she can be at Drakken's side. "That's my whole Purpose. I was made for people to laugh at me."

Sometimes Drakken used to wonder if he was, too. But it's not sarcasm he's hearing. Spinel doesn't sound bitter when she says it, and she doesn't look bitter as she sticks her tongue out and flattens it against her cheek, the color of his magenta crayon. He thinks of clowns at birthday parties, making ridiculous faces and hoping the birthday kid doesn't flee in terror. Is that what she was made to be?

Drakken puts a damp hand to the back of his neck to regroup. So that wasn't her motive. It was the first one that came to him, for obvious reasons, and he chased his own scent back around in a circle. That didn't mean there weren't plenty of other possibilities. From what little he knows about Homeworld – at least, the Homeworld pre-Steven's-fixes – mistakes weren't considered a laughing matter there. He tries to imagine a Diamond yukking it up at one of her Gem's failures, and he absolutely can't.

"So making people laugh was your thing? Your Purpose, your talent, your passion," Drakken says. Spinel nods, and he adds, "Did…did anyone ever tell you were – that you were bad at it? Like you weren't funny or something?" The question is like castor oil in his mouth, and he has to fight to maintain a baritone pitch, but his falling-apartness-ness doesn't register with Spinel; it hits her face and slides off the way it would from a greased pan.

"No way. If I were bad at it, White Diamond would have recalled me. And she never did, so I must have been doing it right."

For a moment, Drakken's esophagus goes dry and rigid. She pronounces "recalled" as if it means nothing more than having to retake an exam. He doesn't want to know what it really means, how many Gems were recalled before Steven persuaded the Diamonds to see sense.

Ahead of them, Steven stops at a booth tucked in between buildings and pulls a five-dollar bill from his pocket. The woman behind the counter gives him two red soda cans in return, and he gives one to Amethyst.

Drakken swallows the urge to beg for the second one, imagines the fizzy goodness gurgling down his throat and clearing it for him. "Were you…lonely on Homeworld, then?" he tries again. "Maybe you didn't have friends?"

He is grasping at the proverbial straws, he knows, but nothing about her fits into the shape he thought pretty much all villains came in.

Spinel stares at him as if that is the strangest question yet. "No, I wasn't lonely. I had a friend – the best friend in all the galaxies, and I was made for her!"

Drakken can't hold back his smile. Now they're getting somewhere. "So, your friend? Is she still on Homeworld?"

"No. She's right there." Spinel thrusts a finger in the direction of Steven and Amethyst, her arm a coil of strings that she braids back together again. "She just looks like him now for some reason, but I know her."

Hot breath hisses between Drakken's teeth. Naturally. She is someone else who has known Rose Quartz or Pink Diamond or whoever she was. Whatever her beef with Earth is, it goes back to Steven's mother.

The thought sticks in his backbone like it's demanding he hand over his wallet. The poor kid shouldn't have to answer for her mistakes, and he's already spent at least the last two years cleaning up the mess she spilled everywhere.

"Okay," Drakken says. And then has no idea what to say next.

Steven hooks one finger into the tab of his soda and pulls it back without even cutting himself, and for a moment all of Drakken's assorted emotions are replaced by a sense of envy. Amethyst holds her soda between her palms, her stare about to bore twin holes in it until Steven reached over and opens the tab for her.

"Yep, that's soda, Amethyst," Steven says. "Your favorite brand, too. We drink it all the time when we're watching TV together. Remember?"

Amethyst parrots his words back, and Steven sags just a bit inside his pink jacket. "Come on," he says. "Can you at least give it a try?"

He raises the can to his lips, and Amethyst imitates him. Both of them take big gulps of the soda, lower the cans, and wipe their mouths with their wrists.

"Tastes good, doesn't it?" Steven says. The hope in his eyes is almost painful to look at.

"Tastes good, doesn't it?" Amethyst's eyes are still a vacant lot as she says it, but for an instant, just an instant, her voice blips in and out – like robots' voices always do right before they gain consciousness and then turn on their masters. She jiggles the can up and down without waiting for Steven to do it first.

Steven glances over his shoulder, and his eyes meet Drakken's, half-bleak and half-something-else, something they are almost afraid to be.

Drakken tries to arrange his face into an encouraging expression. "That's…well, it's different," he says. "Is that good or bad?"

Steven shakes his head. "Let's just assume good."

"I'm all for that!" Spinel says. Her arms sprout like Drakken's vines until they are wide enough to fit around Drakken, Steven, and Amethyst, and she pulls them all close, sandwiching Drakken between Steven's warmth and Amethyst's cold.

He tenses. Hugs are another thing he feels better being in control of. He doesn't do well when arms go around him without his permission, unless those arms are Lapis's. And he's certainly not used to being embraced by someone whose arms feel like vulcanized rubber against his torso. This should be a happy occasion, and perhaps it is for the others, but all he can feel is his rap song pounding its beat all throughout his head, lyrics forgotten.

"Spinel." Her name comes tightly out of Steven's mouth, which is mashed somewhere in the vicinity of her armpit. "Can you let go now? You're kind of squishing us."

"Sure thing!" Spinel drops them and her arms snap back into their sockets like a pair of tape measures.

Drakken manages to brace himself with his palms in time to prevent a chin-collision with the boardwalk. From this bizarre, almost-a-pushup position, he can see the barber shop where he and Lapis got lollipops that first week in Beach City. The memory of sinking against the outside wall next to her and demonstrating how to peel the plastic covering away from the sugary goodness that begged to be licked – that memory glimmers in his head as if someone has bathed it in iodine, cleaning it off all clear. It snags at some part of him to remember it.

Steven directs a look down into his can of soda, a leaden look that Drakken would label a glare had it come from anyone but Steven. "So I guess that was progress," he says. "But it looks like we're gonna need a stronger trigger."

Drakken busies himself adopting his most nonchalant expression – or would that simply be his "least chalant" expression? Triggers is a word he hears all the time when he's working with his shrink. (Most of his are self-made, a fact that Dr. Klein says doesn't make them any less valid.) But he doesn't know what Amethyst's triggers are, and for some reason, that makes the pinch sharper.

"So it's time to bring out the big guns," Drakken says. He glances at Steven. "You do have big guns, don't you?"

Steven nods. "Just one, but it's pretty big. Come on. Follow me."

He leads them away from the boardwalk, away from the beach and the town, across a wide green panel of land overflowing with plants that call out inaudible greetings to Drakken as he passes – wildflowers in full summer-bloom, poison ivy that can't hurt him anymore, shaggy grasses longer than Drakken's stunted-runt legs. Spinel giggles for the entire trek, like a kindergartener who gets to go on a field trip.

Spinel, who started all of this.

Drakken stumbles along behind her, his brain flipping back through its files until it reaches a day he would sooner forget. It violates every ounce of self-preservation he has, but this time he allows himself to recall Warmonga, her smorgasbord of death rays, the timer ticking down on Earth's population – all except him. Even now, he can remember the way pain crashed through him with every pound of his pulse, because every moment he was awake and not ruler of the world was a moment he was conscious of the fact that his best friend, his only friend, had abandoned and betrayed him. There'd been nothing to break that fall, and he'd landed right on his heart and skinned it.

And thought that nothing short of the Apocalypse could set it right.

The buildings behind Drakken grow smaller in his depth perception as he scooches around Spinel to study her from the front. Something must have scraped her heart, too – not literally, because he has a good view of her heart-gem and there's not so much as a dent on it, but something had to have happened to make this happy little jester take up a weapon and make plans to destroy a planet she'd never so much as visited.

When Steven finally comes to a stop at a set of railroad tracks whose steel sturdiness Drakken envies, Drakken himself is wheezing, his lungs more than ready to curl up and rest, and he's not entirely sure it's from the exertion of the hike.

Steven glances at his watch. "The train should be here anytime," he says.

Terror hits the back of Drakken's throat like the Popsicle stick he almost swallowed that one time. "Are we going to have to leap onto the train while it's motion? Because I saw that in a movie once, and it looked extremely dangerous! I mean, all the actors were fine, but I have to do my own stunts –"

"No, Drakken." Steven doesn't laugh the way he usually does when Drakken's tongue starts revving up. "The train stops here every day. See?" He gestures to the posts on either side of the tracks topped with empty black circles that Drakken can imagine flaring red, and the yellow-and-white-striped flaps, currently nosed upward, that will descend to instruct the train to stop. "And while it's stopped, then we can climb into a boxcar. Me and Amethyst have done it before."

"Oh. Yes, that sounds much better," Drakken says. He sighs and fights off the slump of relief.

Along with the nagging thought that it's technically illegal to hop in a freight train and get a free ride – Drakken remembers enough of fifth-grade history to know that that got people arrested all the time during the Great Depression. Drakken's fists curl inward, hard. He hopes the people who have been good guys a lot longer than he has understand that he has to do this to help save all life on Earth.

All organic life, that is. Whatever else happens, Lapis will survive, and Drakken wishes he were unselfish enough for this realization to dissuade his dread entirely.

The train Steven anticipated comes to a slow, brake-squealy stop, a rusted-looking boxcar rocking in front of them before it settles with a huff of steam. Steven jogs up to it and gives its door a yank. His neck turns bright red and sweat pours down from his scalp and his breath churns, but he succeeds in prying the door open – which, Drakken thinks unwelcomely, is probably more than he himself could have done.

Amethyst stares at the train, her eyes amnesia-glazed. Steven comes up behind her and gives her a gentle boost through the doorway on his way in. Spinel pogo-sticks in after them.

Drakken grips both sides of the opening, one in each hand – please don't let the train start moving again. Please. Please. Please! – and bunches every underwhelming muscle in his body and heaves forward. Somehow, he makes it through the doorway and sprawls across a floor that smells like stale grain and too-warm dust. Spinel applauds for him, which Drakken will admit sends a thrill through him.

Steven walks back to the doorway and sits inside it, his legs dangling over. He pats the floor next to him and nods at Amethyst to join him. She does, still lifeless-eyed.

The train splits the air with a warning whistle, and Drakken hears the wheels begin to chug, feels the floor begin to move, senses potential energy converting into kinetic, and presses closer to the wall in anticipation. Unlike the train in the movie, though, this one doesn't race so much as mosey away from Beach City, as if its schedule demands very little. Not frantic. Not desperate like they are.

It makes Drakken's stomach sizzle like a keg of dynamite trying to outrun its fuse. Speed might actually help him feel better at this point.

"Wow-kazowie!" Spinel says. "I never saw a land-ship like this before!" She gives a whistle of her own, which would probably be amusing under different circumstances, and gazes around the boxcar. "I wonder how big it is! I wonder how fast it can go! I wonder who's driving it!"

"Spinel," Steven says, and Drakken can hear the kid's ever-present kindness beginning to splinter. "I'm really sorry, but that's not helping right now."

Drakken pulls his knees to his chest, side-eyeing Spinel. He's known planetary destroyers – himself included, at least on the list of wannabes – to rain down their wrath for less than that.

Spinel, however, shrugs, taking no visible offense, and lets herself flop back into a spread of straw in the center of the car. Drakken starts to edge closer to her, still feeling obligated to keep watch over her, but the view trundling by outside distracts him. The scenery has grown wider and wilder, with enormous gaps between buildings and nothing to compete with the trees as they extend their thick branches toward the sky like they're trying to tickle the underbellies of the clouds.

Curiosity wins out over everything else. "So, where are we going?" Drakken asks Steven.

"To Amethyst's Kindergarten."

Drakken folds his hands over the dynamite smoldering in his gut. Kindergartens. He's heard all about those from Lapis – they're the sites where Gems get tucked into the ground and are left to grow, slurping all the nutrients and minerals out of the soil as they do so. Lapis's face was stiff, deliberately stiff, as she talked about them.

"Oh." Drakken taps his fingers together. "So, you're taking her back to the place where she – oh, what do you call it?"

"Emerged," Steven says.

"Emerged." Amethyst's voice is a hollow, husky echo.

"Right!" Drakken says. "And that'll jog her memory! With any luck! I remember my mother once showed me the hospital where I was born, and I had absolutely no recollection of it; it was like I'd never seen it before. Of course, I wasn't exactly operating at full capacity when I was born –"

Steven buries his fingers in his cotton-swab of curls and shakes his head. "Drakken, that's not really helping either."

The words rub against Drakken like a grain of sand in his flip-flops, petty and pernicious. He locates the sting, imagines extracting it with a pair of tweezers and flinging it aside – this is no time for it.

That done, he sinks down beside Spinel, trying to ignore the straw poking at the seat of his lab coat.

"What are they doing?" Spinel places her hands on Drakken's shoulders and stretches her neck like hot taffy to see over his head, redirecting Drakken's gaze to Steven and Amethyst. Their legs still hang out in empty air, and Steven is talking to Amethyst in a hush about when they first did this – how it was Amethyst's idea to show Steven where she came from because he'd still thought she was made on Homeworld, how they watched the sunset from the roof of the train, how they were attacked by a raccoon that wanted Steven's picnic lunch.

Drakken gets the strange feeling that he is eavesdropping, even though Steven surely knows he and Spinel are within earshot, and turns back to Spinel. Neurons are zinging from one hemisphere of his brain to the other, overturning each thought placed in their path with the zeal unique to mad geniuses, searching for an explanation that will not make Spinel's kid-face crumple.

"Amethyst…got her memory erased," Drakken says, making excellent use of the passive voice. "Steven needs to help her get it back so she can remember being his friend, and so she can help us save the planet!" His final exclamation point wobbles but doesn't tip over.

"Okay." Spinel leans back into her bed of straw and starts to hum to herself at a volume that barely qualifies as soft. Drakken tries to concentrate on her rather than on his previous experiences with trains – there was the train that almost got devoured by Syntho-Plasma that nearly ate his mother, too. And there was the train where he and Kim Possible fought on the roof, and then Kim Possible disappeared and was replaced by a tunnel that was even less willing to compromise than she was and knocked him into the hospital with a concussion. His few memories of that night are all jagged, like Commodore Puddles has been chewing on them.

Probably better that way.

The train slows as it chugs above a flat rise in the earth, sort of like a hill with a buzz-cut. Steven, still holding Amethyst's hand, gives Drakken a polite push out of the boxcar, and before Drakken can even begin to calculate a safe trajectory, he's on the ground, halfway upright, his left kneecap buzzing in pain. The Steven/Amethyst unit lands next to him amid shaggy yellow grass that reminds him of Eddy's hair, and Spinel shrieks with glee as she completes their party.

"It's not far from here," Steven says.

The flat-topped hill tumbles gently downward into a broad valley, which on two other sides is flanked by rough cliff faces and on the last side trails into the distance farther than Drakken can see even when he strains his contacts. He follows Steven down the hill, to a small patch where the ground levels off. The grass gets shorter and shorter, and then it just stops.

And so does Drakken.

A sound, thankfully at least two keys too deep to qualify as a yip, leaps from Drakken's mouth. Everything else barges into his windpipe and cramps there as he stares, awestruck and horrified and shake-kneed, at the barrenness of the world before him.

It would make a great evil lair…you know, if a guy were still into that type of thing.

Purple stains the entire right cliff face and spills outward into the valley itself, zigzagging a line that starts only a few steps away from where they stand now, and while Drakken has always considered purple a noble color, this goes right past the purple of the regal and straight into the purple of the tyrannical. It should be beautiful, or it should at least be striking, but instead it reminds Drakken of an old, shriveled-up raisin, its potential to be tasty hidden within its own folds. Holes scour the cliff face like chicken-pox scars, yawning down at him.

There is no grass once the purple starts, not even the dead stuff, nothing for his plants to communicate with. When Drakken steps over the line, the ground might as well be linoleum for how smooth and sterile it feels, as if it's never known nature. Even the sky is a pallid lavender-gray, like a dawn that's waiting to break but will never get the chance to. It looks like a place where lives end, not a place where they begin.

Guilt flashes through Drakken. He shouldn't think such uncharitable things about the place where Amethyst comes from, but panic is banging against his ribs, wanting to be let out, and his new, unpolished kindness always suffers when that happens.

The only brightness in the place is Spinel's smile, its source unfamiliar, possibly untrustworthy. "Oh my stars and planets! A real Kindergarten!" Spinel cries. She twists her arms under her chin. "I never thought I'd actually get to see one!"

With Steven tightening his face and Amethyst's gaze panning the area like the lens of a security camera, Drakken grabs the first words he can catch hold of and thrusts them out. They turn out to be, "Yes, this place is really…something," which is a true statement, if a lame one. His brilliant mind has reached the boiling point and his thoughts' attempts to materialize last only seconds before they evaporate again.

Which is strange, because he would swear the temperature has dropped twenty degrees. Maybe twenty-six.

Steven leads Amethyst down into the valley, into what almost looks like a dried, dead riverbed strewn with blackened boulders. Spinel boings after them, and Drakken follows for a reason he can't quite explain. Another victory for curiosity, he supposes.

Steven drops Amethyst's hand, just for a moment. "Do you remember this place at all, Amethyst?" She doesn't reply. "This is where you were made."

"This is where you were made," Amethyst says, and she's not speaking in a monotone anymore. More like a confusion-tone.

I really, really, really hope that's an improvement.

Lacing his fingers through Amethyst's again, Steven guides her from one boulder to the next. "See, this is your sitting rock. And this is your climbing rock. Oh, and over there is the rock you kicked into two rocks."

Steven flattens his hand against each rock in turn, and Amethyst flattens hers directly next to his. Her forehead is as rumpled as Drakken's bedsheets after he wakes up from a nightmare.

Drakken crimps his lips together so he won't break down and beg her to remember, even though the planet may literally depend on it.

Steven pulls Amethyst toward the cliff face, closer to the holes – holes which Drakken now realizes have been spaced at precise intervals, the way his mother arranges cookies on baking sheets. It would be a comforting thought if his appetite hadn't already decided to knock off for the day.

At the far corner of the cliff face sits a hole remarkably smaller than all of the others, and it looks like a perfect fit for Amethyst's round-shouldered form. A switch clicks on in Drakken's brain, filling his head with the light of knowledge. At last, something he can understand!

Steven confirms what Drakken already knows. "This is your hole, Amethyst."

It seems a strange time to notice that Steven is now quite a bit taller than Amethyst, but Drakken does and it makes his chest sting.

"See? It's you-sized. You climbed right in and showed me that. And then Pearl came to find us." Steven's voice practically seethes with desperation, a quality Drakken hasn't heard from the kid before. He's not sure if continuing to listen in on them is the right thing to do or not. The right thing can be a pesky gene to isolate from a tangle of other options, which is probably a large part of why he dedicated two-plus decades of his life to finding and doing the wrong things. The wrongest things. If that's a word…

"Hey, you. Drakken."

Spinel's voice pops Drakken's thoughts as if they were floating in a bubble above him the way they do in comic books. She stands in front of him, still every inch the grinning court jester. "Isn't it pretty?" she says.

"Huh?" is Drakken's response. He tries not to imagine Shego's look of disgust.

"This place." Spinel flaps a hand at the Kindergarten as a whole. "Isn't it pretty?"

"Pretty depressing," Drakken mumbles.

Spinel giggles and elbows him in the side, hard enough to hurt. "You're funny."

Her laughter doesn't hold the edge of mockery that Drakken has been hit with so often, so there's no impulse to snarl back at her. Rather, he sinks down onto the nearest boulder, which offers no cushion at all but at least isn't pointy, and crams his eyes shut to think. It is important, what he needs to say next, maybe even life-changing. Syllables and phrases tilt at haphazard angles in his mind, and he does his best to line them up and then chase down the ones that try to run away.

At last, after he has them arranged in sequence and before anything can make a break for it, Drakken clears his throat. "But, seriously, do you know what these places do?"

"Uh, yeah. Of course." When Drakken opens his eyes, Spinel's neck has turned into a Slinky again, her head lolling to one side, where her arm stretches up to meet it. "They make Gems!"

Oh, boy. This is going to be even trickier than he thought.

"But that's not all they do," Drakken says, tiptoeing his way toward the subject. "There's a…a consequence. Something that happens to the planet where they grow."

Spinel's head sags farther.

Fine. She has forced his hand. Drakken gives up on tiptoeing and tackles the subject from behind like a quarter-line-backer. "They destroy organic life, Spinel!"

Drakken waits for sorrow to pool in her eyes, like it does in all the Gems' eyes when they talk about it, deepest of all in Lapis's. Instead, they blink back at him, almost as uncomprehending as Amethyst's.

"Yeah," Spinel says. "That's how it works."

"Organic life," Drakken repeats in a near-yell, hoping to drown out his heartbeat crashing in his ears. "Like humans!"

"Uh-huh." Spinel's pigtails bob as her head rights itself.

"But I'm a human. Me. And I'm pretty fond of me. And aside from Lapis and my dog, everyone I love is also a human!" Drakken silently apologizes to Rufus, but this is no time to explain naked mole rats.

Finally a shadow falls over Spinel's kid-face. "Oh," she says, hopping up on the boulder next to him, while he makes a valiant effort not to squirm away. "Bummer." She taps her heels together, once, twice, three times, and Drakken half-expects a cyclone to break through the dull sky and whisk her off to Kansas.

Maybe somebody there would know what to do with her.

"I had a friend who lost her memory once," Drakken says. The statement isn't a lie, but it squirms on its way out, trying to find a way to be truer. "Well, she wasn't my friend at the time. She was actually my arch-foe. She lost her memory saving my life."

Drakken waits for the remembering to ache in his throat, but it's already at Maximum Tightness Capacity, and for it to constrict any further simply wouldn't be possible.

Possible. Drakken's heart smiles a little at the name he used to despise so.

Spinel dons a grin of her own. "Wow," she says. "With enemies like that, who needs friends? Am I right?"

She pokes his arm with a fingertip that feels like a pencil eraser. Drakken nods at her and then he's lost in trying to calculate the number of times Kim Possible risked her life for him when he had done everything in his slight-but-stubborn power to end hers. It was something that would have always puzzled him had he ever allowed it to puzzle him. Instead, he used it to throw additional fuel on his fire: Kim Possible was so good, so ridiculously good, in any given situation. It has helped these last several years, being her friend, discovering that even she is not without imperfections.

At this moment, he can imagine her placing her hands on his shoulders with her trademark soft firmness and nodding him toward the mental path he needs to hike now.

"How about you?" Drakken asks Spinel, taking the first step cautiously in case the path is riddled with landmines or trapdoors. If she can't recall having a grudge against his planet, he will have to appraise hers. "Do you have any enemies?"

Spinel's eyes grow donut-sized, and she shakes her head. "No way!"

"Really? There's no one on Homeworld you hate?"

The pigtails wag side-to-side again.

"No one on Homeworld who hates you?"

"Nope. 'Course, I didn't know too many people on Homeworld, but that doesn't matter." She lets her neck bounce in Steven's direction. "Not as long as I have her."

Her being Rose Quartz, Drakken assumes. There's definitely a trapdoor hidden under there.

He takes a big breath, about to reach for it, when movement from the corner of the Kindergarten vies for his attention. Amethyst is sliding out of the hole she grew in, staring down at the soil between her bare toes as though they are analyzing it, reading its pH contents. Drakken wishes that's why they were here. Chemistry thrills his blood and doesn't squeeze it until it turns to spikes in his veins the way danger and memory loss do.

"And then you gave Pearl a hug," Steven tells her, winding down whatever tale he was telling her.

"And then I gave Pearl a hug," Amethyst says. The words clunk from her mouth like bowling balls, like she's been thinking hard about them. And she's referring to herself in the first person – that has to be an improvement, right? Right?

For a weird moment Drakken sees the two of them from a distance. Not as if they're separate from him, not exactly – just like he's viewing them from behind a screen door, their images sectioned into little square patches that fade in and out of your vision when you look at them too closely. He's felt like an outsider before – as in from his earliest memory up to the night he saved the world – and this isn't that. But he's a relatively late addition to their story, maybe even a postscript (which, as the truly intelligent know, is a fancy way of saying "P.S."), and they're flipping through chapters he isn't in.

It's a strange, unsteady thought, but Drakken keeps watching them anyway. He can hardly stand to gaze around him and see this purple bruise of a landmark with all life stripped away.

Steven gives a tension-taut sigh and rubs at the thighs of his denim shorts as if he's trying to iron them from the outside – which, Drakken has learned painfully, is not a good idea. His gaze flicks up to the train tracks, now waiting with no trains in sight, over to one of those warp pads that always remind Drakken of dinner plates, the expensive kind that Mother calls "stoneware." He looks older than he did a few hours ago, old enough to be weary. Old enough to seem like someone else.

The air grows heavy, as if the oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide mixture is somehow solidifying.

Even though nothing is happening, Spinel's cry of "Hey!" feels like an interruption anyway, a loud enough one to bring Steven's and Amethyst's heads up. "What happened to your friend?" she asks Drakken. "Did she get her memory back?"

"Yes," Drakken says. "Quite quickly."

Still perched beside Drakken, Spinel slings her legs over the side of the boulder and lets them run long to reach the ground. "How?"

Steven's eyes turn to Drakken's, so bright and clear they could almost be floodlights, and he cringes, feeling very much like the burglar caught in them. Amethyst's are still smeary and smudgy, like windows that need cleaning, but at least those windows aren't stuck shut by grime anymore. It's still four whole eyes on him, six counting Spinel's, and Drakken doesn't have a speech prepared. The answer is on tumble-dry in his brain, and he has to pull it free, give it a shake, and blow the lint off it.

"Her father," Drakken says, and every taste bud registers sour. "He put together this video montage of all the important parts of her life, and bada-bing, bada-boom, she learned who she was." He frowns. "Of course, he accidentally left out her boyfriend, and that got really weird because then the poor guy had to convince her that they really were dating –"

Steven's voice snips through Drakken's, which Drakken will grudgingly admit is probably for the best – that story can go on for a very long time.

"I wish I could do that for you, Amethyst," Steven says to her. "You and the rest of the Crystal Gems have taught me so many things. And if I have to start all over and be the one who teaches you, then I wouldn't mind that a bit. But I don't think we have time for that." His voice is a study in patience, but the expression on his face begs, Someone help me. "Poison's leaking into the Earth right now, and I don't know how long we have before it reaches the city, so I can't make a video montage and teach you everything."

Drakken hooks his own knees over the side of the boulder and shifts his sitting-weight. His feet swing an infuriating few inches above the dirt. Almost there. Not quite.

Steven puts a hand to his chest, and Drakken wonders if his feels as crooked as Drakken's does, like something inside it has shifted sideways. "But I can try."

The big paw-hand moves until it finds Amethyst's. Steven lifts her arm and parts her fingers to match his, and they stand there, palm to palm and thumb to thumb, Amethyst's short fingers climbing as far as they can up Steven's longer ones. The smile he produces is familiar, except for the effort Drakken can see struggling to hold it in place. "I'm Steven," he says.

"You're Steven," Amethyst repeats, and when she says it, Drakken could swear he hears a plane making contact with the runway, a homecoming.

And then she starts to glow.

White light gushes from her face, her limbs, her body, and it looks blister-hot and it spreads and consumes until there's no way to see the details of her anymore, just a solar flare in the shape of Amethyst. Drakken hears himself gasp, and his limbs flutter, unsure whether to freeze or tremble.

It feels like hours before she vacuums the light back into herself and reappears, though Drakken's watch reports it's been less than a minute. The first thing Drakken notices is the hair, tangling down her back to her rear, long enough to sit on, and then she turns approximately forty-six degrees to the left, and he sees a defiant sweep of it swooshes across one eye, not quite enough to conceal a mischievous gleam. Her black shirt is torn at the chest, exposing a gem like a dollop of grape jelly, and Drakken recognizes the stars on the knees of her pants. Her white-clad feet plant themselves as far apart as her hips will allow and settle there, determined.

"Amethyst!" Drakken and Steven yell together, and when Steven overpowers Drakken's yell with his own, Drakken decides to go ahead and let him.

Drakken jumps down from the rock; the ground hits the soles of his boots hard, with no vegetation to soften it. His shins immediately send up a complaint, but for now his delight keeps any pain at bay.

"Yo! What's up, Stev –"

It's as far as Amethyst gets before Steven flings his arms around her and nests his chin atop her head. "Amethyst! Oh my gosh, are you back? Do you remember?"

Amethyst scrubs a hand down her face as if she's just awakened from an impromptu nap on the sofa. "Dude. Last thing I remember is being super embarrassed at how out of practice I was at fighting. This skinny little Gem shows up out of nowhere and poofs me before I can get my whip around her? Seriously?"

As if on cue, Spinel lets out a laugh reminiscent of Woody Woodpecker and leapfrogs off the boulder. She does several gymnast-made-of-rubber flips in the air and sticks a far more graceful landing than Drakken did.

Amethyst's eyes shift toward Spinel, and Drakken can't miss the suspicion in them even from five yards. "Uh, who's that?"

"Uh, that's the Gem who attacked us and erased your memory." Steven lowers his hand to Amethyst's wrist before she can lunge at Spinel. "But then I accidentally erased her memory, so she doesn't remember any of that now. Garnet and Pearl lost their memories too, though, and we've gotta help get them back so that all of us together can save Earth!"

"Okay?" Amethyst says it like a question, though her voice is surprisingly sure of itself. She's actually keeping up a lot better than Drakken would expect from her, even when she takes a moment to squint at her surroundings. "We're at the Kindergarten? Did you take me here to remember?"

Steven nods and nudges her toward the warp pad, his fingers on her elbow. "I'll explain on the way back to Little Homeworld."

Drakken manages to herd Spinel over, and as soon as the four of them stand on the warp, Steven thrusts out his arms. Nothing happens. Not a light, not a sound, and certainly not a warp.

"Aw, man!" Steven stares down at his hands. "It did this right after we got attacked, too."

"Weird." Amethyst sounds as casual as ever. "But don't worry. I got you."

She performs the arm-thrust maneuver, and this one proves successful in launching them. Drakken's entire abdomen tingles, the way it always does when he rides inside the warp energy, and his senses fall all over themselves, but this time he manages to keep at least some of them on Spinel. She's still clown-grinning as they land, and he doesn't see in her what he's been looking for – the type of hurt that turns someone dangerous.

She seems so much happier, relieved of it, that Drakken almost regrets trying to dredge it up. But he severely doubts it's ethical to delete someone's personal history for therapeutic purposes, given how much the leftover villain-scraps inside him approve. And then, of course, there's the whole thing where they need it to save the planet.

Drakken stumbles off the warp pad and lets his vision tunnel on the poison Injector at the top of the hill and the little blue figure hovering above it, a stream of water on either side of her. This is their job. This is what they do. They save the world.

If he tries to consider anything beyond that right now, he will shake himself apart.

---

You loosen two parallel slabs of water from the ocean and tug them to the sky. They make no attempt to play with you, sensing your urgency in movements that have become, after these years of peace, usually gentle.

The shape of hands fills your mind, and the water twists to assume the appropriate contours, with reaching, grasping fingers. You flap your wings and the water in all its loyalty follows you to the spot where poison bleeds into the earth; every touch knocks over a piece of grass, their ends too frayed to even reach the ground. The Injector stands tall and dark, its metal casing dim in the sunlight.

You thrust your arms downward and the hands of water descend, sliding to the Injector's undersides and cupping them. If you can get a strong enough grip on it, you might be able to move it, though to where you don't know. Surely nothing on Earth deserves the fate it promises, but perhaps you could warp with it to Homeworld or at least transport to it a less inhabited area and minimize the damage. You curl your hands, and the liquid fingers lock beneath the Injector, and as you give your hands one sharp yank, you fly back several steps, making room for the Injector to join you in the clouds.

It doesn't; it doesn't move so much as a centimeter. Its ancient body shudders as if trying to regenerate, its sides pinch, and then it begins to spurt poison at a more frantic speed than before. The more you try to wrench the Injector from its perch atop the hill, the faster and thicker the toxic pink globules come, everything in their path falling to their dull shine. It has already taken the steep side of the hill that faces the beach and courses in streaks down the sloping side closer to the town.

In an instant, you are immobilized, trapped by what you witness: a Homeworld weapon drowning Earth's organic life, helped along by your powers, as though it was always meant to happen this way.

You shake yourself away from the thought and release the water to return to the sea. There will be plenty of time for regret later, after you have succeeded.

Or failed.

"I can't move it," you call down to the two Gems below you who study the Injector from the ground. Bismuth nods at you and harsh creases form on her face.

Peridot makes a note on her tablet. "I am still attempting to calculate the duration of time we have before this toxin covers the entire surface of the planet." Her voice is bright and eager, holding fear back with science.

Bismuth laughs, bitter as a blizzard wind. "Great. Keep us posted, won't you?"

A cheerful yapping rises at the bottom of the hill, from the direction of Little Homeworld. Pumpkin charges for you and Peridot, only to come to a stop and prance away from the pink substance, her stem shivering.

"Pumpkin, no!" you call. The memory of the grass, turned to nothing as soon as the poison touched it, brings your physical form to life, and you make a dive for her. Fortunately, your wings are quicker than her short, blunted legs, and you sweep her into your arms, holding her to the place where your heart would beat if you had one, and lift both of you into the sky, where at least the poison cannot find you. She presses her face into the bend of your arm and trembles.

From your hovering position, you watch as a cool glint of light, so pale blue as to be almost whitened, travels across the sky and comes to rest on Little Homeworld's warp pad, depositing four shadowed figures. The smallest of them turns and sprints up the hill. All you can see of Amethyst is her hair running the length of her back, and hope shimmers between your shoulder blades.

Spinel follows Amethyst on her hands, her feet waving in the air. Dr. Drakken tries to break into a skittering run after them and Steven presses an arm against his chest, stopping him before he steps onto the poisoned hillside. You hold up a hand to him and nod, signaling him to stay there. Though you can't see it from here, you can imagine the fear that leaps to his eyes.

Peridot lets out an agonized groan as Amethyst approaches. "Don't look at me, Amethyst!" she says. "It's too painful to remember the way it used to be!"

By now, however, you are close enough to see that Amethyst wears the clothing she crafted in her latest regeneration on Homeworld, and the wit has returned to her face.

She rolls her eyes at Peridot. "Yo, I'm back, dip."

Peridot squeals and wraps Amethyst in a hug, the cataclysm creeping around her forgotten for a second, and you find yourself smiling too. You and Amethyst have never been close, but she is part of the family, and you will need every one of them if you are to win this.

You let your hand alight on her shoulder. "Welcome back," you whisper.

Amethyst extends her grin to you as Spinel rights herself and stares in awe at the spreading poison. You fly down the hill and land in front of Drakken. The sight of him is like the sound of a joyful shout in a room filled with concerned murmurs.

"So – you got Amethyst back," you say.

"Yes!" Drakken's teeth gleam as he bounces on his toes, every movement choppy. "One down, two to go!" He frowns. "Or would that be three to go?

"How's that going to work with our favorite fusion?" he continues. "Do we restore Ruby's and Sapphire's memories individually? Or would it work better to stimulate Garnet's collective memory, since she's already fused –"

"All of the above," you say quickly. You do not want to think about fusion right now.

"So, have you guys made any progress?" It is the first thing Steven has said; the shadows under his eyes are long and wearied.

"Well, I figured out trying to use my powers to move it only makes things worse." The words feel calm and flat when you speak them, though the ache in your hollow insides tells you that will only be temporary. "So we'll have to think of something else."

Steven nods, kicking at the dirt beneath his shoe.

"Well, I think I made some real progress with Spinel," Drakken says. His voice is as buoyant as ever, yet he quiets it as he continues to bob. "I don't know if this means anything, Steven, but I found out she knew your mother."

Steven sighs and pulls his hands over his hair. "Of course it matters. Someone knowing Mom always matters."

He does not pronounce his mother's name in the reverent tone Drakken always uses when he speaks of his. He almost spits it, in fact, as though the memory of her is pizza grease he doesn't want to taste. You are trying to decide whether or not to hug him when your attention is called away.

You feel rather than hear the scream, a sound too violent and profound to produce any noise: a silent pandemonium that tears through the surface of your gem and plummets to its core, its ripples fanning outward like cracks, its reverberations indistinguishable from the churnings of your powers.

It can only mean one thing. The ocean.

The poison has spread to the ocean.