~Hello again! I've finally gotten most of the bugs (pun not intended) out this chappie, I think.

In other news, I've posted a Lapis music video on YouTube, if you wanna go check it out. Not sure if it's kosher to share the link or not, but if you search Steven Universe "Tell Your Heart to Beat Again" I'm 99% sure it'll be the first result. ;)

Thanks to everyone who's been reading! Would love to hear from you.

And now, an alien learns about puking.~

You go the rest of the night and most of the next morning without seeing Dr. Drakken.

Usually he shows up on his mother's doorstep fairly soon after the sun asserts its dominance over the other stars' light. But today, you wait and wait and read more of the digestion magazine, becoming absorbed in an article about exotic plants, only to finish it thinking of Drakken and look up to find he has still not arrived. Eventually, you make the short flight to his house to make sure nothing has gone amiss overnight.

Dr. Drakken answers the door-chime. His skin, which normally matches the friendly blue of the sky overhead, is instead tinged with thunderous gray, and black half-circles orbit his eyes in wider patterns than usual. When he sees you, however, his weak attempt at a grin is at least sincere.

"What time is it?" is his greeting, accompanied by a bleary blink.

You glance up at the sun, about three-quarters of the way through its ascent, and shrug. "Morning. Late morning, I think."

"Oh. Well, come on in." Drakken takes a step back, glances at the timepiece on his arm, and waves you through the door. "Wow...late morning, all right. Sorry about that. I'm just not feeling very well."

You glance at his sensitive little fingertips, not sheltered behind gloves today. "You're having trouble feeling things?" you say. It concerns you – while you are all too familiar with the numbness of defunct emotions, you have never lost your sense of touch before.

The strained smile reaches a little farther up. "No, I can still feel," Drakken says as he trudges out of the entry hall and toward the living room. "It's just what I feel isn't good."

You feel your brows gather. "What's wrong?"

"My throat hurts, for one thing."

"Maybe you just need to cry," you suggest. "That's the only time when my throat hurts."

"Oh, believe me, I get that." Drakken settles himself on the couch in wobbly fashion, his legs coming to roost on a crease between two of the cushions. "But it's not that type of pain. It's more of…do you know what's it like to get sand in your eye? Is that something that happens to Gems?"

You wince and nod. The removal process is easy enough, but the flaw always rankles your vision, sometimes enough to water.

"Well, this is like I have sand stuck in my throat," Drakken says.

His voice seems to confirm that. The buoy-words wallow in shallow water, in an airless place where they cannot bob.

"And my stomach's a bit upset," Drakken adds. His lips are dried-out husks that will hardly part for him.

"About what?" you say. Humans have a much closer bond with their bodies than Gems do, and from what you can tell it's not unheard of for their emotions to resonate all the way down into their organs.

Drakken's chuckle quickly deteriorates into a thick cough. "No, I don't mean upset like it's mad at me. It just hurts, too."

He rests a grudging hand on his midsection, and you cannot miss the discomfort that stands out in strings from his neck. An ache forms around the sides of your gem.

"Are you going to be okay?" you say. You perch beside him on the couch's soft reddish limb and squint at him. "Do you need to go see – what are those things called again? Doctors? Do you need to see doctors? You look exhausted."

You speak as calmly as you can. Drakken does look exhausted, the exhaustion of someone whose limbs have been bound for months and for whom all the energy in the universe isn't enough to keep them above water anymore. There is no time for the reflections that wish to swarm you, and you command your mind-tide to carry them back out.

Dr. Drakken cringes as though being ushered into a dungeon. "Maybe I will. See a doctor, that is. If it's not better soon." He claps, and then his face brightens with a pale resemblance to its typical happiness. "In the meantime, I don't feel up to going anywhere with you – but! I thought we could take advantage of this opportunity to show you some nifty old cartoons!"

A cartoon, you know, means it is animated, which means that humans construct it from pictures they've drawn and, by some means, set them to moving. It is technology, you are fairly certain, and yet sometimes you can almost believe it to be magic, when it is done well.

The cartoon Drakken shows you is not done well. The characters bend with jerky suddenness and often appear to teleport to the other side of the screen in a single movement, across a background that rarely changes. One man's hair changes color from scene to scene.

It stars a pack of youngish humans, perhaps about Kim and Ron's age, and a burly brown creature that looks more wolfish than Commodore Puddles but behaves even less so, cowering in corners whenever he hears a threatening noise. They live in a van even more garishly colored than Greg's, which they drive around to solve mysteries, most of them involving types of creatures that have never been proven to exist on Earth. In the first – episode, Drakken tells you the installments are called – that he chooses to show you, they happily descend into a mine tunnel, to the depths where your non-sentient relatives are created. The natives of the area have been scared away by an alien who's made the mine his home.

That word – alien – lodges right into your core, as it always does, and drops only when the alien is referred to as "him." It's not one of your people, then.

The "alien" himself appears onscreen not five Earth-minutes later, lashing out with his arms as though in punishment.

"Is that a Kanatar?" you ask, frowning. "Because that's a pretty good drawing – the nose is perfect – but their foreheads are usually a little taller and their eyes aren't so big –"

Dr. Drakken shrugs rather than speaking and then begins to cough again. You can practically hear the sand sluicing up and down in his throat, a sound that skids across your shoulder blades.

"Citizens of Earth!" the alien bellows. "You are no longer welcome here! Leave or suffer the wrath of the cosmos!"

Your frown expands. A Kanatar's roar does not generally have that quality of static to it, and they don't tend to speak such coherent sentences, though you suppose there are always exceptions. Regardless, no one cosmic race, much less a lone member of that race, would have the authority to enact the wrath of the entire cosmos.

If anyone could have, it would have been your people, and that didn't happen.

The alien chases the young Earthlings and their dog around for a while: crisscrossing into different tunnels, rushing them only to trip on the various objects they thrust in its path, popping up behind them just as the leader says, "I think he's gone." The wolf yips, yelps, and says an occasional discernible phrase. You're not sure you would label it nifty, but your thoughts are engaged enough not to drift to Dr. Drakken's condition too often.

Soon, the alien is caught and tied up in thick yellow bunting. "Are they going to destroy him – just for being from another planet?" you ask Drakken.

Drakken shakes his head. "Watch."

You do, aghast, as the smart girl leans over, hooks her finger under the alien's chin, and strips him of his face. There are only a few species whose faces are removable, and the Kanatar have never been among them.

Underneath is a face far more humanoid, grayed and faded in the way older humans become, a short strip of hair under his nose bristling like puffer-fish spines. "It was Jedediah Mason, the old miner, all along!" the girl who isn't as smart exclaims. "He must have put on this alien mask and scared everyone away from the mine so that he could have all the gold to himself!"

"It was a human?" you say. "Dressed up?"

Drakken nods.

"That makes so much more sense!" you cry. "The Kanatar – their sister planet, Skedis, is almost completely uninhabited, and it's packed with gold." A snort erupts from your nose. "There's no way one would come all the way to Earth for one dinky little mine of it!"

You are surprised by the strength of Dr. Drakken's laughter. Crisped by whatever aches in his throat, it nevertheless blares out like the horn of a boat and sets his entire body atilt. It is a relief to hear.

That's why you agree to watch more episodes with him. They all seem to be relatively the same storyline, only set in different locales and with slight variations in the monster highlighted. Many of the legends could easily stem from ancient sightings of Corruptions. Your fingernails delve into the couch's folds at the thought.

The monster chases the humans and their dog and misses capturing them by no more than a fingerbreadth – Drakken calls it a hair away, which makes sense when you consider the one small whisker that Steven was so eager to show you. The tallest human consumes food at a rate that bests even Drakken. The smart girl loses her glasses. The dog is lured out of hiding by some sort of artificial bone. The monster is tied up and unmasked and revealed to be nothing more frightening than a wayward human.

None of it is anywhere near as entertaining as watching Drakken enjoy it.

And then comes the moment where he doesn't seem to enjoy it anymore. He presses a button on his remote, and he gets to his feet as the screen stills. Every shade of gray and blue that can exist explodes on his face and then drains away altogether. Drakken lurches into the kitchen and hunches over the sink, and you can see his chest hauling back and forth.

"Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no," Drakken says in a murmur that is still louder than your regular volume. He raises it to call, "Okay – Lapis – don't freak out – but –"

The sentence finishes not with words, but with a gurgling noise. A semisolid chunk of debris falls from Drakken's mouth and smacks into the sink. It smells, somehow, both stale and pungent, like old fish bones.

You take a step backward and examine his face. "Is that supposed to happen?"

There is no panic to your question, as there is no sign that he has been harmed in any way. Yet human beings are fragile, Dr. Drakken perhaps more so than most, and the beginnings of tears wet his eyelashes.

"Yes and no. It's a….glitch, but a fairly common one," Drakken says, and there is a weakness to his speech, too, a thin place he cannot protect. "Relatively harmless."

"Then why are you crying?" you say.

"Wha – oh." Drakken dabs the back of his wrist across his eyes as though doing it from a great distance. "Mostly, that's just a reflex. The action makes your eyes automatically water. That and – and it's scary."

Of course, he is frightened. It is easy to see now: the vibration around his mouth; the film of moisture across his forehead that instinct tells you would be cold to the touch; the painful, bulging swallows against a throat that surely must feel as though it is coated with sand.

You glance at the mess in the sink. "Should we put it back in you?"

"Ohhhhhhhhh n-n-no-no, Lapis, that won't be necessary, thank you!" Drakken flails one hand at you, the back of the wrist now positioned over his lips. "As a matter of fact, could you wash that away?"

"Sure," you say. You lift the faucet, and out comes a thin line of water, which you channel toward the mess until it is gone, down into the pipes where it will somehow be disposed of.

The flickering of Drakken's eyes stabilizes, and a ragged sound comes from him as he drops into a chair. "It takes a lot out of you," he says.

You give the sink, now clean, another glance. "It didn't look like that much."

Drakken's smile reminds you of ash. "No, that's an expression. It means it tires you out."

The saying may be baffling, but it's correct. You worry at the dullness that hazes his face, even at your next question: "What was that?"

"That, Miss Lazuli, was throwing up," Drakken says. "Also known as vomiting, regurgitation, and a whole slew of cruder names."

"Well, why you'd do it?" You put a hand to your collarbone. "Is it one of the valves in your throat? Does it get turned around?"

"Ooh! Good guess, but no. It's the body's emergency evacuation method when things aren't working as they're supposed to. That was food I'd already eaten, which my body just decided it would be better off without because it's sick."

"Oh." You study his shivering, poorly insulated form. You have a rudimentary knowledge of what happens to food after it's eaten, yet you never knew that the process could be canceled.

"Mostly it happens when you've ingested something you shouldn't have, like poison or raw meat." Drakken grimaces. "Or four thousand cupcakes."

You shake your head. "But you haven't eaten any poison," you say, remembering the bottles with the likenesses of human bones that Steven pointed out to you, "or raw meat, and I don't know what cupcakes are, but you didn't eat four thousand of anything."

Drakken nods vacantly. "All very true. I must have caught a bug."

You pull your eyebrows together. "I've seen you catch fireflies before, and that didn't make you sick," you say. It was you, in fact, who were cautious of the tiny insects, knowing deep down in that their intermittent light flashes didn't preface a weapon summoning but unable to rid yourself of the association; Drakken was the one who lured one down and giggled at the brisk little churn of its little legs across his fingertips.

The words float in the air for several moments before Drakken finds and absorbs them. "No, no. Not 'bug' as in 'insect.' I was talking about a virus – which," he explains at your puzzled look, "is a microscopic little….thing – I guess it's alive – that gets inside a human and wreaks all sorts of havoc in there. It mimics the symptoms of poisoning so that your body blames the food. When you say you 'catch' a virus, it means it traveled to you from another human."

You say nothing. You are grounded to the spot by the notion of a contaminated human giving Drakken a casual clap on the back – or perhaps one of those high-fives he so likes – and slipping a virus to him when he is so breakable.

"Does that make any sense?" Drakken says. "Do – do Gems catch things?"

"Yes. But they don't make us" – you pantomime launching a splatter of your own into the sink. "They turn us into raging monsters."

"Oh," Drakken says. His fingernail scrapes at the tabletop. "I don't recommend that. Being a raging monster, I mean. Not fun. Well – I take that back. It is fun while you're doing it, but afterward….ohhhh, afterward you will regret it."

His voice is sloshing over its banks, oblivious to the flooding, and it concerns you. You can't help creeping in a little closer, peering a little more intently, checking for horn fragments or extra tongues or anything else that will indicate the degeneration of his innermost being.

"So – you get sick. Then are you messed up forever?" you say, and your own throat tightens, because his people have such a short time as it is.

"No, no," Drakken says. "The body also has something called an immune system – basically its own personal little army of cells that vanquish things like germs and viruses. A virus this sudden – I felt fine last night – usually only lasts…" He takes another sorrowful swallow. "Twenty-four hours."

Twenty-four hours?

You almost want to scoff. If your time in the mirror had been twenty-four hours, you would have already forgotten it by now. It is nothing to a Gem, and yet you see it looming before Dr. Drakken, unyielding and formidable. Shallow as his sickness is, he is drowning in it, and your being safely ashore does not entitle you to smirk at him from above.

It never has.

You part your lips and look for the easy flow that smoothed Blue Diamond's tone in the times she was placating Yellow Diamond's hasty temper, or on the few occasions she chose to comfort her timid Pearl. "Well…at least it's not any longer," you say.

Perhaps you have succeeded: Drakken's face puckers wearily and then relaxes. Yet, although he is seated, you see his kneecaps warp like metal left too long in the sun. You take a crab's step toward him, half expecting there to be another spurting of corrupted food. Instead, Drakken only moans – a sound lashed from him as though with a whip.

"Are you okay?" you ask.

Drakken's head bobs. "Yes," he says. "I will be." He touches his midsection the way one would make careful contact with an undocumented species. "I'd feel better if I were in the bathroom, though."

You blink at him. "Does the bathroom heal you?"

"No," Drakken says in a fraying whisper. "It's just a more convenient place to be sick."

He struggles to his feet, strange popping noises coming from his joints. His knees wobble again, and you brace one hand on his front, one on his back, so that he does not need to rely on them. Your bare soles barely leave the floor as you guide him out the kitchen door and all the way down the hall toward the bathroom.

"How are you so strong?" Drakken says.

His words are sloshing again, and each step he takes is wary, as if he has not lived on this planet for his entire life. Your wings thrash inside you, knowing they can't possibly help but refusing to listen.

"It's a Gem thing," you respond, giving the bathroom door a nudge.

It swings open to a room much smaller than its Global Justice equivalent, without the harvest of stalls marching down the wall. In a disproportional lurch, Drakken skids over to kneel before the white basin. One arm straggles around the seat, limp, a victory flag with no wind to congratulate it. The shudder of his chest syncs with the staccato rhythm you can see at his temples.

You sit beside him, amazed that your legs cross casually rather than retracting to meet your illusive spine. "You said throwing up is relatively harmless," you say. "What's the catch?" You gaze at his human body, a spare weaving of skin and flesh and stringy muscle over bones that snap, over priceless organs. "Can you throw up something you really need? Like your heart, or –"

Drakken doesn't allow you to finish; he shakes his head, setting the bramble of hair into a riot. "No, no. Throwing up is a malfunction of the digestive system. Heart's in the circulatory system – which is connected, but not directly. You can only throw up what's in your stomach." Another grimace. "Sometimes your small intestine, if you're really unlucky."

"Oh. That almost sounds like too many systems to keep track of," you say. Did the Diamonds know about all of them, you wonder, when they decried the shoddy makeup of Earth's life?

"The brain does it automatically," Drakken says.

You plan to say "Oh" again, and yet it shifts on your tongue and turns into "Wow" instead. This is all right to share with Dr. Drakken, though – he will not snuff it beneath his foot the way Jasper did; will not hold it between two fingers, unsure what to do with it, the way the Crystal Gems still do.

"The only real danger with throwing up," Drakken says, "is if you can't manage to keep water down."

Your gem stirs at the mention of water. You glance down at the floor, puzzled as to how a virus can offset Earth's gravity.

Drakken wheezes – it would be a deep-throated chuckle at any other time. "Down in your belly," he clarifies. "Otherwise, you can get dehydrated."

You nod in understanding and continue to examine your toes. There is one more facet of the relationship between his people and your Purpose.

That is when another noise, not a wheeze but a choking gasp, bursts from Dr. Drakken. His eyes swell until they nearly fuse into a single Sapphire eye. His boots knock against the floor tiles as he curves over the basin, and his head pops up and down, leaving you staring at the back of a mass of dark quills as his system malfunctions again.

Drakken somehow pries one hand, white down to the stubs of his fingernails, from the basin and yanks the lever on the side of the toilet. It is much shorter and stouter than the one protruding from Global Justice's basin and thankfully seems to require much less effort to move. He gives a strenuous gasp and straightens up again, and you wish to flush the red suffering lines from his eyes.

The dark crevices yawning beneath them are moist again, and you pluck a square of white tissue from its silver hook and dab at them. He quavers against you. "Oh, Lapis," Drakken groans. "How am I going to make it through the next twenty-four – well, twenty-three, I guess now – hours?"

You hate the shrug you are forced to give him, and you volunteer an explanation: "I've never been sick to my stomach before. What does it feel like?"

Drakken squints, shaping two red-streaked lines the width of paper. "It feels like…it feels like…like the ocean. During a storm. When the waves are roiling and bashing into each other, and there's no shore in sight."

Pain flares dully around your gem. "I wish it were the ocean," you say, your voice soft and intense even for you. "Then I could calm it down."

Some of the fear appears to leave Drakken. He goes slack, as though he has shapeshifted all his bones away, and starts to collapse against the basin. You put your arm across his chest, so different from your own quiet, vacant innards, so he doesn't fall.

He sags into you instead, and his weight is trifling, even less than you would have expected. To support him is no exertion at all. You scoot nearer to him.

"Just imagine," you breathe into his sizable ear. "Imagine yourself as a being thousands of years old. You've watched galaxies be born and die. Twenty-three hours is nothing to you. And in the meantime…you've got someone to look after you."

Drakken sniffles, the air caving his body as it travels deep inside him. His head lists onto your shoulder and settles there, his breath a warm patch on your neck. It's the closest you've been to anyone since Malachite's separation.

And while it's not frightening, you'd feel better if the two of you were talking. "So…what are cupcakes, anyway?" you say.

A "heh" burbles from Drakken and onto you. He squirms, as if you have accused him of treason and he is eager to recant.

"Cupcakes," he says, "are a small variety of dessert, which…" His tongue sneaks out, his taste buds pebbled like a starfish's skin. "…don't ask me to elaborate on that right now. And – funny story about them. Well – not funny ha-ha. At least, not for me.

"Once, back when I was a supervillain, I'd stolen a weather disruptor. In order to conceal this machine until its ideal time of use, I was forced to open a chain of cupcake stores – just a whole bunch of them – nothing was in chains – I don't know exactly why they call it that. At any rate, running the stores quickly became more fun than villainy had ever been. I got to design my own flavors, and we were making some money –"

You don't want to interrupt, not as his eyes touch the past with such affection, but you need to know: "What's money?"

"Money can be exchanged for goods and services." Drakken's answer sounds automated, as though fed to him on a Peridot's screen.

"Oh," you say. "That paper stuff you use when you want ice cream?" It is still such a strange concept to you, stranger even than the idea of a digestive system that can reverse directions, so different from on Homeworld, where everyone was granted what they had been Designated to deserve.

"Yes, precisely! It can get a little more complicated than that, but…" Drakken shakes his head. "We don't need to go there right now.

"Anyhow, we did well for quite a while, and then we went out of business. That's what it's called when you're not making enough money to stay open. My former business partner" – Drakken seems to line up the buoy-words, tie them into place – "cut and run, leaving me behind with eight thousand surplus cupcakes I had no idea what to do with."

Drakken glances at you, his black eyelids heavy and secretive, as if this information is only shared with his closest confidants. "Now – you see, my mother and I didn't have a lot of that 'money' stuff when I was growing up. My dad was gone, and her job didn't pay as much as his would have. We weren't starving to death or anything, but I was raised not to throw food away, either!"

You nod him on.

"So, I decided to eat the cupcakes," Drakken says. "All at once. I got about halfway through before Shego stopped me. So about four thousand."

You gawk at him. "I didn't know humans could do that."

"We can't," Drakken replies in a peppy voice. "I was sick all night. Actually, to be honest, I didn't feel quite back to normal for quite a few days. Actually, to be honest, I haven't eaten another cupcake since."

You giggle because it is such a sweet, sad mistake for him to have made, and because the sheepish look on his face matches it.

Drakken's laugh gusts around a corner too hard; he sounds sloppy again. "Shego thought it was hilarious. She took pictures. Here, look."

He produces his phone from his pocket, flips it open, and tabs through the screen options before turning it around. You are left gazing at a photo of Dr. Drakken dressed in red clothes in which you have not seen him before, roomy except for where they clench around the bulbous wound on his belly.

A thin gasp slips out of you at the sight. "What happened?" you say. "Did you get stabbed or something? You're all swollen!"

"No. That's all just an excess of cupcakes in there." Drakken's fine-boned finger, which surely cannot be much larger than yours, swirls circles on the basin. His mouth has been cast like a fishing net all the way down the considerable length of his chin. It is as though he has just broken free from an unworkable fusion and is now battered with shame.

You know the feeling.

"Oh." You glance back down at the mound that starts directly below his chest and extends all the way down beneath his waist, tight and livid against the waistband of his red pants. "That looks like it hurts."

Drakken's hands leave the basin and clap against his cheeks as he begins to shake. You don't know if he laughs or cries; he appears unsure, as well. "Oh, thank you, Lapis," he says, wiping his eyes. "You have no idea how badly I needed to hear that. It was a story that upset –" his voice snaps as his fingers twiddle – "some of my fellow villains when it got out."

You know every word in that sentence, and it isn't helping your understanding one bit. "Why?" you say.

"Well, you know. Because of the –" Drakken puffs his arms out from his concave midriff to illustrate the swelled ramifications of his error.

He receives no "oh" in return this time. While he has communicated effectively, there are still depths you have yet to fathom. You return your gaze to the picture. It isn't such a shocking change, considering your people have been known to transform into everything from birds to candy bars; you can recognize him by the soft blue of his skin and the silly curl of his nose.

"The former business partner? He described it as being 'exactly the type of slovenly behavior that makes me glad we parted ways when we did,'" Drakken says.

"What would that sound like if a normal person said it?"

Drakken's skin twinges. "That it's, you know….gross."

You take him in, breathing rankly against your shoulder, deep valleys forming under his eyes, new gratitude juxtaposing with old bitterness just below the surface. "So it's gross. So what?" you say.

The gratitude wins. Drakken does not flash this smile so much as crank it up – a reedy one that is nevertheless still unmistakably his.

Before you have the chance to return it, his body slants in half in front of the basin again. More food is rejected with a husky sob.

His anguish lodges in your back. Now, though, you know what he is up against and what he does and does not have to fear. Your resolve once again engulfs your identity, only you are not a being of glass this time. You are instead made of cloth: you wrap, you shelter, you soothe.

At Drakken's direction, you retrieve a white towel and dab the gems of sweat from his forehead. You pull the basin's handle and hold his hand until faultless new water swirls in. You tuck his tied-back hair down into his collar so it cannot be dirtied.

These are duties you have never performed in your life, not even as a member of Blue Diamond's entourage. Certainly she would say there is no glory in it, either. And yet, in an offbeat sense the Diamonds wouldn't recognize, you feel honored to do it.

At one point, you catch sight of the clock on the opposite wall. The number on the left has changed, become one unit greater, and you think you know what that means by now.

"Twenty-two hours left," you whisper to Drakken, and he finds the framework of another grin. Although you don't see it, you can feel his facial muscles as they tick upward.

It doesn't seem that you stay this way a long time, even by Earth standards, and soon Drakken begins to shift his legs; they crunch like twigs caught underfoot. "Uwwwgggh," he groans. "My back."

You regard the stoop in his spine. "Your back doesn't have a virus too, does it?"

The smile Drakken supplies is as feeble as his fingers. "No. Old injury. You remember the time I danced with a robot?"

You nod. Drakken's stories tend to be not easily forgotten.

"Well, let's just say it wasn't nearly as fun as dancing with you." His voice fades into static again.

"You sound funny," you tell him.

"Do I?" Drakken says limply. His head tips forward, grazing against your arm, and there is the feel of fire being kindled under his skin.

The fact that human beings produce body heat is still startling for you, but you are growing accustomed to it – and you suspect that is not what you are facing here. This is more akin to what emits from a Ruby before her footsteps scorch the floor.

"You feel funny, too," you say. "You're all hot."

"Oh. Swell," Drakken says. "I've probably got a fever on top of everything." At your puckered face, he adds, "It's an elevated temperature."

You frown, still perplexed. "But I thought humans' body temperatures were constant," you say. Steven has told you that the lizards that roam Beach City, the ones his lion likes to eat, depend on their environment to determine their temperature, but you were Taught that humans had a superior regulation system – though not one advanced enough to render temperature irrelevant altogether.

Drakken heaves a stagnant sigh, hot as his skin. "Normally they are. When…"

"…things are working the way they're supposed to," you finish for him.

He grunts with appreciation and presses both hands into the space where his back dips, provoking another twig-snapping noise. "Urgh. Can you help me to the sink? Please?"

You don't speak or even nod. You simply stand up and pull him gently to his feet. Drakken turns on the faucet and fills the cup resting beside it with water and from there shuffles back out to the couch, with some additional help from you. He produces a vine, which flicks across the room and hauls back a brown, bland version of Blue Diamond's footrest. Only once he's laid down on his back with a volley of twig sounds does he make a frustrated wave at the air.

"Snap," Drakken says. "I forgot to get a bowl. Lapis, will you bring me a bowl just in case?"

"In case you want to eat cereal?" you say. It seems a ridiculous possibility.

An ugly shudder appears to wrack Drakken from the inside out. "No. Absolutely not. And not one that small, either. There are larger bowls in the cabinet right below the sink – in case I have to throw up again."

Hesitant to leave him, you nevertheless steal into the kitchen and crouch to open the panel beneath the sink. A stack of bowls rests inside – you recognize their concave shapes, though these are, as Drakken said, of larger, sturdier dimensions. You select one and bring it back, setting it on the footstool beside the water glass.

It is a good thing you did. No sooner has Drakken lifted his glass and taken a sip of water than whatever holds his stomach under siege repels it. You shove the bowl forward just in time.

Afterward, Drakken's eyelashes bow toward his cheeks and then twitch rapidly.

"It's okay." You pattern your words after the white Pearl's: light, crease-free, with a lilt of reassurance that all will be well. "Twenty-one-and-a-half hours left." You pick the bowl back up. "Um, what should I do with this? Throw it away?"

"No-ooo," Drakken whines. "Just…just take it to the sink and rinse out – rinse the – and then you can – bring it baaccckk…" His voice once more trails off like a dropped transmission.

You flit back to the kitchen sink, cleanse the bowl, pat it dry with a mildly abrasive paper-piece, and then return it to its spot on the footrest. Drakken's watering eyes thank you.

"Sorry about that," he says. "I – we – humans tend to get a little crabby when they're sick."

You study his arms. While they doesn't seem as smooth as they usually do, each individual hair lifted in a tiny mound, there is no sign of a shell or pinchers. "Like a crab? How?"

"Grumpy," Drakken grouses into his palms. "It just means we get grumpy."

"Oh."

The virus shows no signs of relenting in the hours to come. Drakken takes tentative sips of water at irregular intervals, and every one of them is expelled within moments. Each one appears to frighten him more than the last. His grip on the bowl becomes less and less steady, and you lose track of the number of times you trek to the kitchen and back to empty it.

Drakken finally wraps quivering arms around his stomach. "This is bad," he says. "This is really bad. If I can't start keeping water down – and fast – I'm going to need to go to the hospital. And that wasn't supposed to be a stop on the hometown tour!"

He inhales, and in it you hear a sharp, desperate attempt to calm himself. Your wings feel cold inside your gem at the sound. You have never been to a hospital or even to the infirm tents your people used during the war, and you can only begin to imagine the horrors of broken humans: with enlarged eyeballs that rattle around in their sockets, with grotesque horns poking through tender skin, with limbs askew like Greg's leg…

And yet it is also the place where mothers undergo pain and mess and inconvenience to spawn the next generation, all without forfeiting their own existence. You line your mind with this reflection lest you wind up having to escort Drakken there after all.

"I mean," Drakken says, still speaking as if he has a mouthful of seaweed, "if you were curious, I could take you there to look around – but this would not be the way to do it!"

"Gotcha. Skipping the hospital if we can." You wink. "It doesn't sound like my type of place, anyway."

Water drips from the rim of the newly washed bowl. You whisk the drops away before they can darken the footrest, and then you freeze with your hand still suspended in midair.

Dr. Drakken needs to keep water down.

Water.

It was one of the first words you ever heard as you stood on legs that still wobbled beside other newly-emergent Lapises and Aquamarines. The link was immediate, greater than the one with your own manifested body. You lifted your arms and felt the water offer itself to you, its entire cycle at your disposal, delicate and destructive and utterly alive.

You glance back down at Dr. Drakken, mewling as he attempts to fold the pain inside him. A current of surety zips through your back.

"I have an idea," you say. You lift his shirt, sodden with sweat, and roll it back over itself.

"Lapis!" Drakken yelps.

"Trust me," you tell him, disallowing your mission stance to falter. You do, however, feel obligated to tell him, "Though I don't think I've ever done this before."

The sound that comes from Drakken reminds you of a hot vent streaming into the cold waters of an oceanic trench. It lingers on the cusp of distrust, fueled by a sickness with which you cannot empathize.

Your gaze wanders back to his exposed middle. There, just above the waist-clasp of his pants, is a perfectly circular indentation, just large enough to accommodate three or four peas. It has been notched in with machine-like precision, though its tender pucker speaks of organic mending.

You gasp. "Is that from the cupcakes?"

"Wha huh?" Drakken lifts his torso, the posture seeming too dependent on his elbows. The shirt stays hooked in its own soak. "Oh. That. No. That's my belly button."

"A button?" you say. "What happens if I push it?"

"At this point, I'll probably throw up again, so please don't!" Drakken's buoy-words hasten out. "It's not a real button; just looks like one. The technical term for it is a navel…and do Gems really not have them?"

He squints at you. "Oh. I guess you don't. That's probably how you make that whole crop-top thing look classy." His hands make a vaguely complimentary gesture. "All humans have them."

You shake your head. "Steven doesn't. That's where his gem is."

"Ah." The clouds in Drakken's eyes part for a moment. "Well – when a human baby grows inside their mother, they receive nutrients through a cord –"

"The umbilical cord. And then it gets chopped off after they're born. I know," you say. His cheeks are already sizzling pink; though it may be a result of the elevated temperature, you don't wish for him to exert any more of his waning strength. "Your mother told me all about that part."

"Yes. But there's more! After the cord is cut, a little stump is left behind on the baby's stomach. Eventually, after a week or so, the stump hardens and falls off. What's left behind is the belly button," Drakken says in his knowledgeable manner.

"Oh."

This puckered little marking is the remainder of what once linked him to his mother. She carried him and nurtured him inside without having the life leeched from her. The fact that such fragile humans by nature accomplish something the greatest Gem minds have long since stopped trying to solve makes you feel even more that you are adrift between two galaxies – far away from everything you've been Taught, wondering how much of it was ever real.

You will your attention back to the friend and boyfriend who needs your aid. "Take a drink of water," you tell him.

A weak pout claims Drakken's face. "Lappppp-issss."

"Trust me," you repeat, this time without any disclaimers.

Drakken raises his glass to his lips and takes a delicate swallow of water. You wait a moment for it to hobble down his throat and sink into his stomach, and then you place your hands on either side of his belly button and close your eyes.

Your powers wait inside you, fervent to be used for something other than harm. Into them you channel thoughts of the calmest seas you can remember: translucent unbroken sheets of water, waves lapping over the rocks like an embrace, kelp's greenness gilded through by sunlight. Your gem grows warm, and you feel the droplets inside him yield to your authority.

Evidently Dr. Drakken feels it too, for his rigid mouth relaxes, and he lets his head drop heavily onto the sofa cushion. He exhales in relief. In a voice that seems unaware that it even speaks, he says, "Lapis, you are sublimely brilliant."

You do this several more times over the next few rotations of the clock. Each time, it is successful. You cannot coerce the other contents of his stomach, which you can only guess at, into behaving, but you are able to ground the water in his belly and prevent him from having to visit the infirmary.

After he's sipped his way through a whole glass, Drakken plucks at the skin above his knuckles. It bounces cleanly back into place, which prompts Drakken to smile and proclaim it a good sign.

Now he lies beneath a ratty blanket, which has aged in mere years as things tend to do on Earth, and he shivers despite the warm muggy weather and the circles of excess heat on his cheeks. One arm flops, immobile, onto the blanket, and you take the other hand in between yours and give it a squeeze. The lines in his palms have turned into sweaty riverbanks that nearly seal your hand to his.

"It's going to be okay," you say. You glance at his wrist-timepiece, only to find that it scatters the numbers around its perimeter and points small sharp sticks at them rather than lining them up to be read.

Drakken takes your cue. "Nineteen more hours to go," he translates.

The buoys bob only faintly as he talks, and it unsettles you. "Do you want to watch some more of that silly mystery show?" you ask.

"No." Drakken's eyelids are swooping in for a landing. "I think I might as well try to get some sleep."

Your shoulders tighten at the thought of him declining into unconsciousness. You try not to let it show. "Is sleep the cure?" you say.

"It helps, yes." Drakken grunts and wriggles himself more firmly beneath the blanket. "Passes the time if nothing else. Although goodness knows the times when you most need and want to fall asleep tend to be the times when it's hardest to do so." His shrug is accepting yet hollow.

"Would it help if I sang you a lullaby?" you say.

Something wells up in the reddened slots Drakken's eyes have become, as though he is observing a ritual as sacred as the old Emergence Ceremony. You can't take the credit for it. Your kindness is not your own; what Drakken sees is the reflection of all he has given.

"Do you know any lullabies?" he asks.

"Well, I guess it's not technically a lullaby." You pronounce technically the way he always does – sweeping widely to broaden the meaning. "But it's a Gem song…and hearing it always made me feel better."

Drakken nods distantly. There is no keenness left in his eyes; they have clouded over to match the slatelike color of his skin.

You take a clean breath to unlock the words and begin:

"Welcome to your life, dear friend

Welcome to your home

Your future's bright; stumble you might

But you'll never be alone"

Millennia have passed since you exposed this song to air. It is like the ocean: liquid and soft, yet with the power of an entire battalion behind it. Even though you gaze at the hair sopping wearily onto Drakken's forehead, you are seeing the planet for which you were concocted, with its former lush pastels and the eager welcomes you received from smiles and whispers. As new legs lurched under you, you knew innately that you were Lapis Lazuli, and that you were fortunate to be a proper, well-molded Gem – an Elite at that – immune to and uncomprehending of the suffering of those beneath you.

"The stars will keep you safe, dear friend

Their light's far more than warmth

Let them guide your way; watch them dance and play

Constantly being reborn

We are one, born from the ground

Eternal unity

Our reach extends, horizon without end

Far beyond our galaxy"

"That's real pretty," Drakken murmurs. He sounds a thousand light-years away.

"So do not fear, my newly made

There is no need to cry

We must move ahead, but wherever we tread

You'll not be left behind"

You shiver at the irony and continue.

"Drink the stardust now, dear friend

Wrap our sun around your skin

There's a whole new sky inside your eyes

You have so much to give

Welcome to your life, dear friend

Welcome to your home

Your future's bright; stumble you might

But you'll never be alone"

You can barely hear your own voice by the time you are done. It has thinned to a trickle, slinking down to take refuge in the earth. A bevy of resentments toward the Crystal Gems volleys between your shoulder blades, not for the present or the future but the past; the memories of that happy time are now malformed reflections that don't tell the whole story.

And yet none of that matters right now, for you are fairly sure Dr. Drakken is asleep. His black eyelids have fused with the underlining bags so that two spots of dark matter rest above his nose, which whistles and rustles in a way that reminds you of the wind snapping through the multihued leaves in that first moment when it seemed possible that you could call this planet home. The motion of his chest has calmed to a peaceful tide. His lips turn up at the edges, as though he dreams of lovely things within his own star system.

Runoff from tears stands on Drakken's cheeks in hard brackish patches. He looks even softer in his sleep and his illness, soft and vulnerable. You look at him and you wonder whether you could brush back the jagged line of hair without disturbing him. Can harm come to humans if this cycle isn't completed? Neither Steven nor Drakken himself seemed to suffer any back at the barn when their recharging was interrupted, but Steven is half-Gem and Drakken didn't have a bug caught in his systems back then.

You withdraw your hand and drop instead into a cross-legged sit beside the couch, still observing the hapless human form that looks stronger than yours yet, in reality, is infinitely more delicate. Swamped in his sogginess and odor, he is nevertheless a marvel. He will weather this with the resilience of humans, and you will see to it that he does it here rather than in the impersonal, chaotic angst of a hospital tent.

The front number on the kitchen clock has changed three times and is perhaps midway to a fourth when you hear Dr. Drakken twitching his way back from slumber. He appears replenished if not fully recovered, his scar not in such harsh relief against his skin.

You sprout your wings and fly over to him. "Welcome back. How are you feeling?" you say.

Drakken's muttered reply is nothing but spiraling, murky water. You give him some more time to smack his tongue and stretch and blink before you repeat the question.

"I suppose…I suppose I've been worse," Drakken says. A yellow petal blossoms behind one of his ears. Though he scowls and yanks it free, you take it as a healthy sign.

"But you've also been better?" you guess.

Rather than answering, Drakken makes a small blipping noise, the kind a ship's interface gives to warn of a minor technical problem, and places a hand to his stomach. You can see the rigor that remains around his eyes.

"Can I get you anything?" you say.

Drakken nestles back into the maroon fabric and seems to ponder this. "Well, actually, I could use a washcloth. And maybe some ginger ale?"

Your eyebrows pucker.

"A washcloth is one of those small towels underneath the bathroom sink," Drakken says. "And ginger ale comes in cans in the refrigerator."

"Okay." You remember hearing that word, refrigerator, used to describe one of the food-closets in the kitchen. Since it sounds somewhat like frigid, you'd wager that it is the cold one. "Coming right up," you say – another phrase Steven taught you.

You find a washcloth under the bathroom sink, just as Drakken said, and rummage through cans in the refrigerator's cold until you locate one that reads ginger ale on the side. Its lid turns out to be one of those odd ones where the small metal pull must be hooked open and then yanked away like a hank of expended planetary crust. Left behind is an impractically small hole.

"Ahhh…thank you," Drakken says as soon as you return to his side with the washcloth in one hand and the ginger ale in the other.

"You're welcome." You tip the can of ginger ale forward so that pale brown fluid froths onto the white washcloth, lift Drakken's shirt, and begin to work the dampened cloth across his stomach.

"Um. Lapis?"

You look up to see Dr. Drakken's face wiggling with either laughter or the beginnings of a substantial groan. "Yes?" you say.

"I probably should have explained this better," he says, scratching at his forehead.

You spend quite awhile after that learning that taking care of humans is not always as straightforward as you thought.

Drakken is expounding on human belly buttons, most of which tuck in like his but a few of which poke outward, when his phone begins to vibrate in his pocket. He jolts and pales with the motion, and you grab the phone to relieve him of it. The spindly letters on the screen read SHEGO.

You flip open the phone as you have seen Drakken do so many times and press it to the earless side of your head. "Hello, this is Lapis Lazuli," you say politely.

"Hey there, Space Queen." There is a mischievous grin in Shego's voice. "Is the Doc there?"

You glance back at Dr. Drakken, who struggles blearily to find a focus point in the meager slant of light filtering through his glass-paned windows. "Yeah, but I don't know how alert he is," you say. "He just woke up. He's sick, and he's been reversing his food all day."

"Oh. Dang. Well, that explains why I haven't heard from him," Shego says. "Normally he calls me around this time to tell me all the little details of his day, so I wanted to make sure he hadn't suctioned himself to the ceiling again or something."

She wields her snicker with expertise, as though nothing could possibly lurk beneath its creaseless surface.

"No," you say, "he just accidentally grabbed a bug for twenty-four hours. It should be done soon. I've been with him since morning."

"You're a trooper, then." The grin expands around her words. "He's such a baby when he's sick."

You sneak another look at Drakken; he has worked his left shoulder into a type of sagging stand, and the remainder of his body falls against it as if broken. He does appear to have de-aged some, his nose weeping something slippery, his rickety collection of bones a Kindergarten mere days from emerging – but not that much. Nor are you a member of anyone's troop, so you reason that Shego must mean something different.

"Well, he's been a little crabby," you say, exploring the brisk new contours of the fresh term. "But it's okay. I've been around people way more unpleasant than him."

You have not said way before in that manner, not in the guise of an adjective as Kim Possible uses it. You like the way it feels leaving your tongue.

"Unlucky you," Shego grunts.

You roll your eyes. "Tell me about it."

Dr. Drakken folds over closer to you, his presence even warmer and more blatant than usual. He structures the question "Who is it?" and you catch it more by sight than by sound.

"Shego," you mouth in return.

Instantly, the fatigue on Drakken's face is overthrown by delight. His active little fingers reach forward and seem to shoo away the distance between himself and the phone. "Can I talk to her?" he asks hoarsely.

"Sure." You pass the phone, and Drakken knows what to do with it from there. It is maneuvered into the bony dip beside his neck with more coordination than you would have expected of him.

This is followed by a stream of cheerful babble. The buoy-words rasp, rattle, and grumble as they bob, and yet the cheer remains somehow undefeated.

You lean your head against the base of the sofa and peek at the kitchen clock once again. Its two rear numbers read 59 – the last number, you have noticed, that they will display before they roll over to zeroes and the front digit cedes to one greater.

He has made it through ten. Only fourteen more hours to go.

Through the side of the phone, you hear Shego ask, "You sure you don't want me to call your mom?"

"Positive." Drakken's reply is bright and affable, the beep of a door granting admittance. "I'd rather have Lapis right now. She's not fussy."

The carpet grows peaceful beneath your toes, and your superficial backbone straightens to raise your head higher. In that instant, you do not feel extra limbs dragging like anchors, the ballast of enormous shaggy hair fastened to your scalp. Your being thrives until there is no room left for Jasper.

On this strange, irregular planet, an instant lasts long enough to matter.