~Hi! I'm get into some deeper waters (Lapis pun!) here.
At the time I wrote this, the most recent SU episode was Sadie's Song.~
According to the signs that welcome you to this tiny seaside town, it is known as "Beach City." And Dr. Drakken takes it upon himself to introduce you to the sights, smells, sounds, and tastes that he is also newly discovering.
There is the library. You had such things on Homeworld, but they were all vast and grand, lined with intricate works on Gem history, Gem culture, and Gem battle tactics. This building is square-shaped and slung low to the ground, popping with color and peopled with small spherical chairs that squish into bowl shapes when you sit in them. Drakken refers to them as "beanbag chairs," although you see neither beans nor bags anywhere around them.
Drakken runs into the children's section, where he finds a storybook he remembers from his childhood, which he speaks of as if four decades is such an enormous length of time. It's one of his favorites, he says, a story about a little girl – maybe Steven's age – and a giant red creature humanity bred and tamed from wolves over the last few thousand years. They're called "dogs," and this particular one is named Clifford.
He shows it to you, turning the pages slowly so you can marvel at the illustrations. They're not labeled with arrows delineating the important features of a dog's body. Rather, they seem to have been added simply to enjoy. Always, he breaks into a smile wide enough to light the room when you place your fingers, curious and amazed, to the drawings.
You do not mind either the distance between you or the shortness of that distance.
There's a place that serves pizza, which is apparently tomato sauce smeared on bread, topped by melted cheese. Too greasy for the taste buds you shapeshift onto your tongue.
There's the arcade, a store you never make it into because the strobe lights and the cold, polished floors and the noises of simulated combat are too close to the more unpleasant memories you have of your home. You don't fall into panic this time, but you give your head a firm shake, and Drakken skips off to the next activity.
You spend a great deal of time on the beach, lying in the sand, watching the sky gradually darken and lighten as the Earth's rotation tips Beach City closer to the sun and then drags it away again. Much as you've learned to appreciate the grass, sand will always be your favorite texture.
It means safety is nigh.
That's where you are, on the shore with your toes being sprayed by gusts of foam, the day Dr. Drakken becomes extremely distracted. His focus has always been fleeting, lighting on one subject just long enough for to take joy in it and then stumbling off toward the next. But when he says, "Lapis, there's something I need to tell you," his tone isn't rich with laughter the way it usually is.
Alarmed, you rise up to one knee. "Okay," you say, and you hope your own voice doesn't shake.
Drakken's gaze will only meet yours for an instant. His is turbulent, an ocean under siege by sharp winds. "Something…after you hear it, you might think I'm terrible."
Terrible? You survey the human face you've allowed so near yours. Dr. Drakken is not perfect. He's not a very patient person – you've seen him shift from foot to foot and sigh when his pizza takes five extra minutes to bake – but he has always been terribly patient with you, with the things you are frightened or ignorant of. And although he has a tendency to spray saliva along with his hearty chuckles – and his does not heal as Steven's does – it is nothing your skin can't shake off. What about him could possibly cause you to think poorly of him?
"You're not terrible," you say. It is as automatic a reflex as taking the form your gem suggests, the one best suited to your level of inherent strength. "You're one of the kindest humans I've ever met."
"I didn't use to be." Drakken looks down at his fingers, turning powdery at low tide. "A few years back, I was a…I was a bad guy."
You stare at him, as blank and expressionless as a piece of driftwood.
Bad? The word, the concept, they are an immense breech whose sides you cannot pinpoint. Bad. It is something no one wants to descend to, but you are not sure anymore – if, indeed, you ever have been – what takes you to being bad. And certainly this man who holds your hand as he walks you gently across the streets where humans drive their newly-invented motorcars, whose face fills with light when he spots a seashell, certainly he is not bad.
"I don't understand," you say.
"A mad scientist! A supervillain! I wanted to take over the world!" Drakken's words thicken until they are as dense as the pizza grease.
As for those words – you still do not understand them. Some of them individually, but you cannot see what they make when fused together. Definitely not anything that would cause your new friend to hang his head as if he were the one to endanger your precious coral.
"The world?" you say. "You mean, Earth?"
"Yes." Drakken rubs up and down his sleeves. "I wanted to overthrow all the world's presidents and prime ministers and dictators and make myself ruler."
You glance around you, at this world ravaged by war and pollution, and you still fail to see the great offense. "I think you'd make a good ruler," you say.
Dr. Drakken's long eyelashes lower until his scar is being brushed. When his eyes open again, they are glassy with the beginnings of tears. "Awww, don't talk like that," he says roughly. "'Cause, you know what? I thought I would, too. I thought I would be a just ruler, and a benevolent one."
"So…why is it a problem?"
"Because power turned me into a whole different person. It made me mean and ruthless, and it wasn't doing wonders for my cardiac health, either." Drakken's smile attempts to be wry. "Besides, my biggest motive was proving myself to these three ex-buddies of mine who'd laughed at one of my first inventions. All I really wanted was to show them not only had I made something of myself – I'd made everything of myself."
A chill comes over your bare arms. You've never taken revenge on anyone who's wronged you, for fear the consequences would be worse than spending eternity as a reflection; you haven't even ever made a plan to, not seriously. There were times, though, when you entertained the notion. And it felt good.
You must still be looking at him emptily, because Drakken drags in air as though it hurts to breathe it. "That's why I was in prison. Because one of my plans got completely out of hand and a bunch of people got hurt, and I was too power-hungry to even care." His voice cracks. "At the time."
Something suddenly bitter and regretful sets his eyebrow in wrinkles. It is hard to watch, almost as hard as watching a brilliant supernova smolder to its inevitable death.
Whatever it was, it matters powerfully to him now.
"You see, being imprisoned with other people is even worse than being alone." Drakken flusters, his thin hands in constant motion. "Well, maybe not worse – my shrink says I'm not supposed to be comparing my suffering to others' because we all have different stories – things like that –"
Shrink? He says it like it is a workman peddling his trade. Do humans have personnel now who are tasked with changing their size? Does it have anything to do with those glossy-covered magazines you saw in display in the library, boasting of having "THE SECRET TO HUGE WEIGHT LOSS!"? Why would a being want to decrease in mass?
"Anyway, it's a different kind of awful, at least," Drakken continues. "A lot of the guys in there are mean – which is why they're in there in the first place, right? And a lot of them are huge. They'll beat you up when the guards aren't looking, you can bet your last nickel on it."
You do not focus on why humans are gambling with nickel. You can vividly picture Dr. Drakken emerging from a rank dungeon, wrists and ankles rubbed raw by manacles, without a Steven in sight.
The brutes are even easier to envision. They encompassed all you knew of humankind before you met Steven.
You nod him on.
"And, as I said, I came out mean. Well, I was mad. Well, I was hurt." Drakken shifts in the sand. "It seemed that the whole world had forgotten about me while I was in there and they all just…moved on without me. I wondered – did I matter so little?"
It is no longer him you are picturing. You see instead, against your will, the bustling memories of a distant planet, no longer your magical home, but a sleek, shiny landscape barren of anything recognizable to you. All the land your feet ever touched long since overturned and packed down and covered.
And before that – angry punches of water. A vehicle hurled in an arc and crumbling on the landing. Heads encased in bubbles. So unlike the dignified manner in which Gems are supposed to conduct themselves on the battlefield.
Is this what it's like to feel sick?
"Keep going," you say.
"I had a friend who I thought would break me out of jail," Drakken says. "And she didn't. So I found a new friend who would. Oh, and this new friend also thought I was some kind of magical prophecy-fulfilling deity or something – which I'm not – I mean, I think I'm pretty great – but then, I'm biased –"
His voice is frantic, searching, scrabbling for ground where you understand. You have witnessed the human condition known as stress, but it's never strung a great weight to your chest before. You nod to him again.
"Anyway, my old friend didn't like the idea of me having another friend, and she came in and attacked my new friend. I didn't mean for her to get hurt, but my new friend fought back – to defend herself, ya know – and she wound up knocking my old friend out because she had a size advantage like you wouldn't believe –" Dr. Drakken speaks as though the words burn in his throat and breaks only long enough to gather more air – "so I wanted to make my old friend stay there and watch while I defeated our longtime arch-nemesis with the help of my new friend!"
When he says "defeated," the semicircles under his eyes stiffen. You do not ask what that defeat looks like.
"I came up with a way to lure my nemesis there," he says. "I used this machine my new friend had brought with her. You turned it on, set the timer, and when time ran out, it sucked all the oxygen out of the atmosphere!"
You tuck your chin onto your knees. You don't remember all of your Teachings on the atmosphere of this planet, but you know that oxygen is extremely vital for these humans and their frail – lungs; is that what they're called?
"I wasn't planning to actually use it!" Drakken hastens to add. "It was merely a ruse at first, so she'd come to stop me and walk right into my trap. But then my old friend betrayed me and fought FOR our arch-nemesis and I – I decided to let the timer run down, and get rid of my foe that way!"
Tears have escaped from Drakken's eyes and are pooling underneath. The semicircles glisten black like a wet road. "I asked for an oxygen mask for myself. Not for anyone else.
"I don't think I really wanted to kill everyone! I just thought – just thought –"
His vocabulary, always so buoyant and endless, appears to have dried up and left him. You finish for him – "just thought that everyone could go back inside their gems and heal themselves?"
"Something like that. I suppose." Drakken gives you a peculiar look, scrunched at the edges. "I wasn't thinking clearly, at any rate! Not that I can promise I would've done anything differently if I had been thinking clearly…"
In the crevices of your memory, you see Greg the human crawl from his van on all fours, alive but clearly not unhurt. More fragile than you had expected. You recall your triumph, your horror, the pleading at your core for it all to stop.
You nod yet again, gaze intent on your ocean.
"Anyway, it doesn't really matter to what extent I realized it," Drakken says. "It doesn't change the fact that I could have destroyed all life on Earth!"
He spirals out that last sentence, as if waiting for you to pronounce his crime unforgiveable. You hurt at the cringe of fear with which he's holding himself.
And all you're doing is looking at him, at this man who has shown such regard for your safety – your contentment, even – and thinking how if your people had gotten their way six thousand years ago, he never would have even been formed at all.
Dr. Drakken has tilted forward now, shielding his face between heaving shoulders. You don't dare to touch them – they seem sharp under the synthetic stuffing in the coat-for-labs. But you inch across his isolated gap and rest your hand next to his. You float it, in a whisper, toward your friend:
"I don't have any room to judge you."
So quiet, little more than a tickle on your lips, and yet you are stunned by the strength and clarity of it.
Drakken makes a noise that attempts to be bitter and rueful only to end in a whimper. "How? I mean, that's really, really sweet of you, thank you, but – how the heck do you not have room to judge me?"
You burrow your palms deep into the sand, down to where the grains are almost chilly. This will be a story you have never told any human. Steven probably already knows, though he has no doubt received a badly twisted version from the Crystal Gems.
But you cannot reply to Dr. Drakken's complete, painful honesty with anything less.
His eyes are earnest as you begin, "Well, you see, my people – when they reproduce –"
To your bewilderment, that is as far as you get before Dr. Drakken is pockmarked with pink globs. He takes his hands away and flattens them against his ears. "La-la-la-la, that's okay, that's enough! I already got that talk, thank you!"
No. This is not a logical reaction. How could he have already heard of the Gems' history when five Earth-days ago, he had no knowledge of what a Gem was?
"What talk?" you say.
Dr. Drakken grows even pinker if possible. You don't think even flimsy humans burn in the sun at such a rapid rate. "You know," he coughs, "the whole 'when-a-mommy-and-a-daddy-love-each-other-very-much' thing."
You have never heard anyone string letters together so quickly. And that's all they are, combinations of letters that wash right out with the tide.
"What are you talking about?" you have to ask.
Drakken blinks at you with eyes that have grown tremendous, and then his blush-blood goes back in and he permits a sheepish grin. "Oh. Never mind. Keep going."
You do as he instructs. "When my people reproduce…we have these machines called Injectors, see? They drill deep, deep down into a planet and carve holes in it, from the lower crust downward."
A pause for the gathering of memories. You were once so sure of their meaning, and now every word feels like steps across moss-covered rocks, common on planets of Class-B importance. You have never explained the Kindergartens to anyone. Strangely, you did not wish to tell Steven. As necessary for the Gems to flourish as they are, the Kindergartens are not the proudest aspect of your culture. You would hate to be the one who traded in Steven's innocence for his knowledge of how things must be.
Dr. Drakken, from what you have just heard, has seen horrific things already. Something in him remarkably resembles innocence, but it is not – it is deeper, stronger. He is no more innocent than you are, and yet there is something – an earnest goodness – that has stayed in his eyes.
No, you do not think him terrible.
Your hands find the cooler sand again. "A new Gem is planted in each of those holes. Inside of them, they grow and develop until they're ready to emerge. And when they do…it wipes out all of the pre-existing life on that planet."
You shut your eyes against the half-formed images of lush valleys, stately trees, and gorgeous rushing oceans. Of unsophisticated species you took such care never to look too closely at, never to have contact with, that needed to be eliminated to make room for a new generation of Gems.
As the soil of many solid-based planets must be weeded and tilled to allow for the propagation of crops, you believe is how it was worded in your Teaching so long ago.
"They did that for thousands of years." Your voice is now much quieter, so quiet the sea breeze carries it softly to Drakken and then whisks it away. "And I never stopped them."
Someone else did, though.
There is the fusion. Tall. Quiet. Intense. The one you fear most. You can still imagine her hand with the Ruby gem embedded in it, outstretched, preparing to confine you to an inescapable bubble in a boiling-hot room, surrounded by monsters.
The white one, all points and angles except for the oval gem on her pale forehead. She is neat – fastidious. Always, "Sweep the floor! Scrub the sink! Keep everything neat!" To her, you were just one more mess that needed tidying up.
And the third is younger, only a couple thousand years old, still with a hint of Kindergarten-freshness on her purple skin. Still reckless and energetic, the type to distort her face in the mirror while the white one screams in the background, "That is a very valuable artifact only to be used for the accumulation of knowledge!"
And there was once a fourth…
You glance back at Dr. Drakken. This is the longest stretch in which you have ever known him to be quiet, and the strain on his throat is so great you can see the bulging, carrying tubes that you remember being called veins. He gestures you onward with hand flails, each more impatient than the last.
"One of the planets we tried to convert thousands of years ago was Earth," you say.
"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh." Drakken's face processes that, falling into a frown toward his chin, round and oblong like the gem on your back.
"We failed." This is plainly obvious, even to a human, but for some reason you find yourself wanting to state it aloud.
Drakken's frown softens, lips narrowed in thought. "Did you know?" he says. "Did you know people couldn't – what was it you said? – go back inside their gems and…and…"
"Regenerate," you supply.
An upward swing to the bush of hair. "Like a Time Lord?" Drakken says gleefully.
"A what?"
Drakken flushes again, milder this time. "Nothing. My bad."
You do not gather the memories this time. You are too afraid of what you might discover about yourself. "I…I don't know," you finally say. "But you've got to understand; we're brought up to believe that any life form worth keeping around can regenerate."
"Well, that's rather snobbish!" Drakken blurts. Instantly, his fingers are spread over his mouth, plastering tight. "Sorry," he mumbles into them. "I shouldn't talk bad about your people."
"It's –" You hesitate midway through offering him reassurance. Whatever your people have become, you still do not wish to hear them maligned, not by an Earthling.
"I don't understand it all, either," you give him instead.
And then he crouches there. Your friend Dr. Drakken, skin blushing half blue and half pink like an early morning horizon; raised up on one knee and one foot; blurring the line between brute and good person.
If the line can be that perilously thin, what is Homeworld willing to tramp out?
Your bare feet go suddenly cold, and you lift them closer to the dipping sunlight. Sand drizzles between your toes. "What changed for you, Dr. Drakken?" you ask. "How did you stop – stop being bad?"
Relief floods Drakken's face, suspended in his grin as if captured in cupped hands to share with you. "I repelled an alien invasion," he says happily.
"Aliens?" you repeat in horror. You catch your voice going shrill, stretching, almost shattering, as often happens when you are upset. There it is again – that terrible, diminishing word, and you understand why humans resort to using such crude expressions as the heck. "What…who?"
"Oh, oh, oh, no!" Drakken appears embarrassed, trying to clean sand out from the uneven fingernails of one hand with those of the other. "Not you guys! Not Gems! They were called Lorwardians."
Rows of tiny chills rise to the surface of your skin. Your mirror playbacks display green; heavily muscled; cruel-faced. "Yes. We've never gotten along very well with them," you say. "They're a warrior race, and they're so…wasteful. They conquer planets that they never even plan to use for anything!" You tip your chin, reveling in the pride you can take in what remains of your species' honor.
"Yes, well, right," Drakken says, looking a bit like he's swallowed some of that fine grit sand. "My new friend who broke me out of prison? She was one of them. A Lorwardian, and when she found out I wasn't the magical prophecy-fulfilling alien deity I may possibly have led her to believe I was – but let me add, I had no way of knowing for sure that I COULDN'T have been – anyway, she got mad at me for lying to her, and she got mad at my arch-nemesis for defeating her, so she went back and got her boyfriend and they came back to kidnap us and kill all the rest. Or enslave, maybe. I wasn't really getting a lot of clear answers out of them. But – still! Just because they were mad at two people."
This isn't surprising to you.
"Well, I'd just gotten my plant powers," Drakken continues, "and I didn't quite know how to control them yet. All I'd done so far was sprout flower petals and that wasn't much help aboard a spacecraft mined with laser traps! Then I was mouthing off and thought I accidentally blew up my arch-nemesis, and I always….I always thought that would make me so happy. But I wasn't. Not at all."
It pulses in the space between you, the half-madness of guilt – his healing yet still raw; yours cracked and seeping for the first time.
Harsh sounds emanate from Dr. Drakken's throat. You are afraid he is about to either choke or cry, and you have never been Taught how to treat either of those. "So I made a vow," he says. "Right then and there, I decided to spend the rest of my life trying to make things right. And when my arch-nemesis turned out to have survived after all, we teamed up and I went off to save the world."
You turn your focus slightly toward the ocean, imagine its cleansing waves breaking over you. "How?"
"I went back to my lair and grabbed my Hydro-Pollinator – the device that generated the plants I could control." His buoy-words are cresting on confidence. "There was a giant extraterrestrial machine trying to stomp me flat into the ground the whole time, and I didn't even notice until I'd recovered my precious machine!
"I sprayed the battle machines with Hydro-Pollinator fluid and when the flowers grew, I commanded them to smash the entire fleet and restrain the Lorwardians! It took me a little while to admit I made a much better hero than villain, because this guy I hated was saying the same thing, and I absolutely could not stand the thought of him being right…"
Drakken continues, but only the optimistic rhythm of his voice registers. You are staring at your toes again, coloring in the details of Dr. Drakken, brandishing a Hydro-Pollinator – whatever it is – smiling, sweating, triumphant. Defending his people even though they have caused him such pain.
That is what the best of Gems once stood for.
"You were brave," you whisper.
Drakken's chest expands and then contracts again with a narrow "Huh." "I suppose I was. Rather ironic, considering just about everyone considered me a coward – and I guess I kind of am."
"No." You shake your head emphatically. "No. If you're brave even once, you're not a coward."
The bump in Dr. Drakken's throat crawls up and down.
And then you look down at yourself, at your feet that have never done anything with conflict but run from it. Your hands that shook too hard to hold a weapon. "I hope I can be brave," you murmur. "Someday. When it really matters."
He rolls onto his belly in the dip his seat has made in the sand and lets his legs drape backward over themselves. "I bet you will be."
And there is none of the politeness that other humans occasionally spread over their faces as if assuming an unsustainable form. He speaks genuinely; his smile broad, white, and real; he scuttles forward on his elbows with eagerness.
"You really think so?" you ask him. No longer shrill, you hear yourself: tentative and longing.
Drakken bobs his head of soft black quills. "Really. I swear."
"Oh. Okay." You frown. "I guess you can talk however you want, but it doesn't seem very polite."
Drakken's eyes flicker befuddlement for a blink's span and then crinkle – in delight now. "No, I don't mean I swear like I go around saying. . . well, I'm not going to demonstrate in front of a lady." His flush returns. "'I swear' is just something people – humans – say when they mean they really, really, really mean something one-hundred-percent, and that's the highest percent there is. Except in photo resolution."
The tide takes that last wonderful bit of nonsense away. You rest your arms among the sand and the shells and let the sun beat down on your bare shoulders.
He believes in you.
"It's hard, though, coming out of the whole villainy thing," Drakken states. "Sometimes, when somebody is really rude to me, I still get the urge to take out a freeze ray and frost their hiney! When I laugh, it still sounds a little…kind of maniacal, I guess? And sometimes I still wake up in the night and think I'm in prison. Sometimes it's hard to believe I'm safe."
He quails into a smaller knot, legs tucked up so you notice anew how short they are. The fear is being controlled by quick, careful breaths, and yet it is starkly recognizable.
You wish to take it from him.
For several moments, you watch your hands dive through the flaxen grains. At last you say, "You know you're safe here with me, right?"
That is all you can think to say. That is all – in some marvelous, unknowable way, you have come to value this temporary human.
Dr. Drakken's smile widens even further, until his eyes are tearing from the weight of it. "Yes. I do know that. You're a very nice girl."
Then he reaches over and moves his hand a tiny distance to cover yours. He delicately braids the fingers together until the prints fuse.
Even hours later, after he has gotten up and left, you are still sitting before your ocean in wonder.
~So. Some true confessions, understanding and misunderstanding, and a little bit of foreshadowing for Jailbreak. Hope you enjoyed.
And - yeah- Lapis says "I swear" on The Message, and it struck me as a strangely modern phrase for her to know, so I had her pick it up from Drakken. :)~