~Thanks to everyone who's read, reviewed, and been patient with my slow-pokey self. My life has gotten a lot busier over the summer, and I might not be posting as frequently, but I'm not giving up on my fanfics. Hope you all are still enjoying.
And now, without further adieu. . . some Lapis-Mama Lipsky interaction.~
You still have not told Dr. Drakken what it means to be a Lapis on Homeworld.
Yet there are times when you think he already knows. There is something to the tilt of his head when he speaks to you, to the utter tenderness of his touch, to every tiny, maladroit courtesy he shows you. You have to remind yourself that you live on Earth now, and your auspicious purpose back on Homeworld would actually be exactly the type of thing that is frowned upon down here.
There is also none of the ingratiating or flattery that so often permeated interactions with the Elite. Even if you were not in exile, you're not sure you could return to the husks of those behaviors. It is a thought both saddening and liberating.
Twenty-seven hours after his first throw-up, Dr. Drakken has made a full recovery. His skin has gone back to its healthy, sun-warmed blue, and the sour smell has been cleansed by that toothpaste that Pearl loves so much. His lips no longer sport alarming cracks and his eyes, though still outlined in red, have regained their energy.
He is cheerfully insistent on taking you to what he calls a park so you can play on the equipment. The word equipment conjures up reflections of Injectors and other humorless machines stationed on the surface of a planet, but that is far from what this equipment turns out to be.
This consists of small huts fashioned from plastic, connected by a series of parallel rods or rings, or by small bridges constructed from rope. Almost every hut ends with a long curved sheet of plastic that leads to the ground. These, Drakken tells you, are called slides, and if you sit at the top of one and give the sides a firm push, gravity will whisk you right to the ground. He also says it is more fun to do if you shapeshift internal organs first. You give that a try on your second slide down and decide, while you have experienced much worse sensations, that you will stick to a hollow interior for now.
The rope bridges are "funner," as Drakken says. They judder from side to side at your weight on them and toss in the manner of a storm-wracked ship when you jump in place. It is just enough power not to be frightening.
Best of all, however, are the swings. There are long, rubberized strips held on the left and right sides by clamps, suspended from metallic chains that extend all the way to the top of a structure has neither walls nor floor, just a triangular base that narrows to a single bar across the top.
You nudge a swing with your knee. "So how do these work?" you ask.
Drakken beams. "I'll show you," he says, and he does: He plants his backside on the rubber strip, adjusts it with a comical wiggle, dangles his feet as close to the ground as they will reach, and latches his hands around the chains. There is the gathering of momentum – where he backs up slowly until the chains creak a protest – and the release – where his heels leave the ground and the swing thrusts forward, the feet kicked up until they give the illusion of being level with the sky, then curling back under for the return. "See?"
It seems rather complicated, but Dr. Drakken's body, clumsy though it may be, is moving as though confident in this territory.
You perch on the next swing over from him. Your toes just barely whisper over the sand beneath. Its cool caress douses the fear before it can even remember the burning landscape where you let Jasper in.
On your first attempt, you end up swaying wildly, your legs paddling the air, directionless. Drakken cackles until you flick sand at him with your big toe. For your second attempt, you align your ankles and imagine wire springs in them and end up shooting straighter skyward, only veering sideways on the backswing. On your third attempt, you topple out of the swing entirely and begin laughing as soon as you hit the ground, before Drakken's gasp even registers.
It's good to laugh again; you have missed the vibration from gem to throat.
After several more stumbles and failures and flails, you are almost keeping pace with Drakken, at least in single swings. He has the ability to ride the swing back and forth several times, stacking momentum so that he thrusts higher each turn, and shouts words of encouragement between pumps of his legs.
You mimic his movements with the exactness of a mirror, and it begins to work.
When the swing reaches its apex, you launch yourself from it, spawn your wings, and ride the breeze up toward the nearest cloudbank. You close your eyes, feel the sun on the upturn of your nose, and you can almost pretend you have ventured across both space and time back to your true home. Near-muted whispers of free make up your entire physical form.
They are scattered by another laugh from below. Dr. Drakken holds a hand over his brow like a landing strip and shakes his head as he chuckles up at you. "Believe it or not, I didn't see that coming!" he says.
A tendril of water vapor brushes your arm teasingly, and you grin to match it. "Did you see this coming?" Before Drakken can reply, you have already swooped down, snatched him up by the wrists, and swung in a loop back into the sky.
"Wha?" Drakken's shriek is rough-edged yet sanded by giggles. "Lapis!"
You glance down at him, searching for fear. "Are you okay?" you say.
"Yes." Drakken's head doesn't move, but you see the bump in his throat nod. "For now."
You understand. You navigate turns with more caution than usual, staying low and monitoring your spinning, before you finally put Drakken down as though lowering a palanquin to the ground.
He immediately knocks himself over onto the grass behind him, and his subsequent laughter lures yours to come out and join it.
By the time Drakken delivers you to Mama Lipsky's house for the night, he is panting hard to restock his oxygen reserve, and your smile is wide enough to pain your cheeks. Mama Lipsky takes one look at the two of you on her doorstep, and her eyes grow as shiny as Peridot.
Drakken requests permission to hug you, which you grant, and then the long, gangly arms are around you. You feel their careful avoidance of your gem, their awkwardness as they realize they could circumvent you several more times if they so desired. Your fingers find each other behind his back and hang on, just for a minute, before you have to go and face the night again.
When you do, Dr. Drakken bids you good night and backs haltingly down his mother's steep flight of wooden stairs. His eyes are clasped to yours so that one heel oversteps the stair behind it; he tumbles, end over end, down the remaining stairs before stopping in a net of vines, hurriedly strewn by his subconscious, that suspend him several inches above the walkway square.
You giggle into your hand. Mama Lipsky gasps and runs down the steps to inspect her son's body for damage. Finding none, she gives him a resounding kiss on the cheek and sends him on his way.
The sky is darkening in fat strips, earlier now, which Drakken has assured you is normal for this new season of Earth. The hot air that landed on your skin earlier now has the feel of dividing around it, cooling it.
Mama Lipsky goes back inside and you follow her around the house as she switches off artificial lights, helping along the darkness that will bring her sleep. Her walk is plump and elegant, and the questions she asks you, shrill though they may be, are also rounded off, no sharp edges to stick you.
Mama Lipsky pauses in the kitchen doorway with her hand on the switch. "Do you need anything to eat before I turn in for the night?" Before you can shake your head no, she gives a dolphin's laugh and says, "Oh – silly me. No, I know you don't need anything to eat. But you would like something before I go to bed?"
"No. I'm fine, thanks," you say.
"All right then." Mama Lipsky turns off the kitchen light and gives you a look so full of warmth that you startle. "Good night, dear."
"Good night," you say.
The small space beneath her door displays light for awhile longer, and then it too settles into darkness. It is just you now, alone with the sky – now the forceful shade of purple found at the center of Amethyst gems.
On some nights it is a comfort to watch the stars. On others, their lights are taunting beacons, heralding a shore where you never can return. You are now a maverick living among other mavericks in a place where you can be contented, if not entirely blissful, and yet a tiny part of you corrodes every time you gaze up into the sky and deliberately choose to not look at Homeworld's galaxy.
You turn away from the panorama of stars now and bring your hands behind your neck. You are acutely aware of how empty of Jasper you are, how much angry frightened space she left behind for you to fill.
Rising to your feet, you pace across the shorn carpet, mimicking Dr. Drakken with your fingers linked behind your back and your head down as though you are a shore-bird scouring for crab holes. You read more of the digestion magazine, something about a kind man who builds homes for orphans, which must be like the Off-Colors because they have no place to belong. You attempt one of Amethyst's body-tricks, a "handstand" she called it. Gravity insists on keeping your feet on the floor and your hands in the air, rather than the other way around, and just to spite it you sprout your wings and fly in circles, dodging and weaving around the propeller on the ceiling that you have never seen activated.
You are hovering above the couch when you hear a door open and then shut. Footsteps pad down the hall. Just as it occurs to you that you are thought to be sleeping on the couch, Mama Lipsky appears, holding a glass with a shallow amount of water inside. Her dropped-open mouth tells you it is too late to hide yourself.
"Hi, Mama Lipsky," you try instead.
Mama Lipsky blinks; her eyes nearly vanish without the lenses to announce them, and her hands smack onto her hips. "Lapis Lazuli! What are you doing awake at this hour?"
Her voice is a velvet-sheathed sword. You come to a landing beside her.
"Being a Gem. We don't need to sleep," you say. You turn over to your new composed, fearless voice. "Dr. Drakken – he said it's like we're plugged straight into the universe's energy and humans run on batteries, so you have to recharge every night, but we don't."
"Well, I suppose that makes sense," Mama Lipsky says, although her blinking only speeds up. "But – honey – it's hard for me to imagine that you don't need any rest. If you're able to sleep, I don't see how it could do you any harm."
She has no idea.
You begin to set your face, prepare to recite whatever she needs to hear so she will retreat. Mama Lipsky stops you with a birdlike tilt of her head and a soft "Lapis?"
At that moment, she is Dr. Drakken in a smaller package and a higher octave. It plies at the intangible barrier around your gem and gently squeezes what is exposed.
You permit your eyelashes to lower, just a notch, and you feel your fists come apart. "It could, believe me," you say. "I've slept exactly once in my life, and I never want to do it again."
To your surprise, Mama Lipsky sets her water glass down and comes to sit on the sofa in front of you. "Why? What happened when you slept?"
"Dreams." The word pocks your lips. "I had to watch everything I was ever afraid of come true right there in front of me. And it didn't matter that they weren't real, because they were still stronger than me. They pinned me down and showed it to me – over and over and over!" Your speech quakes, barely obedient to you. "And if I go back to sleep, they'll come for me again."
Mama Lipsky lets her arms fall, and you notice she is clad in different garments than when she told you good night: a light-yellow pair of short pants, and a matching top with a bow at the neckline that is front-facing and, it appears, unneeded for support. Like her everyday dress, these are decorated with drawings of flowers. The outer of it is lined in fuzzy fabric that appears to have been brushed and rinsed; it reminds you of the moss on Kindergarten Base 19 that would hold a handprint for all time. You imagine its suppleness between your fingers one last time, and then not even the pitying squeak from Mama Lipsky is an irritant.
"So nightmares are our problem," Mama Lipsky says, confusingly using "our" in a manner that implies the singular. "Well, I know all about those. My poor Drewbie used to have nightmares so bad that he would wet the bed."
You do not know what that means, and for the time being you decide it does not matter. Your projected body tenses nevertheless, for in that moment you have the foreknowledge of a Sapphire; it is apparent to you what is coming next.
You are correct. "What are these bad dreams about, dear?" Mama Lipsky says.
Something rushes in you, something that pains your gem at the thought of stalling her recharge any further. You shake your head. "Never mind. It's not a big deal. I'm fine – you should go back to sleep."
Mama Lipsky's hands find her hips and stick there. "Now, I know you probably think I could never understand because I'm just a human and have lived a puny little life. And I may never have gone to the bottom of the ocean or been stuck in a mirror, but at one point, I had a no-good husband run out on me, and my only son was serving a life sentence, so I know what it is to hurt!" One hand moves to pat the sofa beside her. "You tell Mama Lipsky all about it."
There is an instant where you simply stare at her, stunned by the words that scan you with the accuracy of the finest-tuned detector drone. Even with that cloud of hair she only rises to your shoulder, and yet for now she is a Diamond: she is not to be disobeyed. You hitch yourself up onto the couch beside her and, unable to meet her gaze, you turn around and throw your back at her in a hard wall, though you know it is not fair to this woman who has been nothing but generous to you. You only hope she sees the trust inherent in exposing your gem to her.
How do you even begin to make her understand your life? You're not certain you entirely grasp it yourself – how deep it runs and how far back, at what point your obedience became a flaw. But she asked what it is that makes you afraid to sleep, and that is one stream you can follow back to its source.
You take a breath to see if lungs will crowd out the burdensome hollow in your chest. "When I went back to my planet –"
"Back to Homeworld," Mama Lipsky supplies.
Hearing that name in her velvet-sword voice snares your next sentence in your throat. While you wait for it to pass, you rotate to look at her sideways. " – when I went back, everything was different. My people had big new plans for Earth, and they were super-mad that all the equipment they sent down here kept being destroyed. The Gem they'd Assigned that mission – her name's Peridot –" you have grown accustomed enough to saying that name that it doesn't warp in your mouth"– she tapped into our old tech to figure out what was going on, and that's when she met my friend Steven. He's half-human, and that freaked her out, because she'd never seen a human before, plus he showed her that Homeworld didn't wipe all the Gems on Earth out at the end of the war like they told her they did.
"She sent out a planet-wide request for information on Steven. Well, I guess Peridot's boss – Yellow Diamond – did the math and figured out there'd been a Homeworld Gem recently stranded on Earth."
"You." Mama Lipsky's guess is not a question.
"Me," you confirm. "And Yellow Diamond 'retrieved' me and threw me into an interrogation room for Peridot to have to a chat with me. She brought a giant enforcer with her – Jasper."
Insistent heat rips down your back at that name, and Mama Lipsky does not miss the significance. Her hands take yours, cushioning them.
"Jasper had a whole list of terrible things she'd do to me if I didn't tell them where Steven and the rebel Earth-Gems were." Your voice turns arch to preserve itself.
Pinned on either side by hands larger than your head, frozen in the face of those rasping threats, while the Gem with whom you now share a barn scrolled emotionlessly through the screen formed by her detached fingers…
Mama Lipsky does not supply a guess that time. Her eyes seem to be lined with the same substance that graces her night clothes.
"So I spilled. They loaded me aboard a spaceship and took me to Earth with them. They called me their 'informant.'" You shudder. "I hated that – it made me feel so dirty. I shouldn't have told. I should have stood up to them!"
"That's no easy task when your life is on the line," Mama Lipsky says.
"When we docked in Beach City, Steven and the rebel Gems were waiting for us, even though I'd contacted Steven and I'd told him to run away. I'd told him – but of course he never would have. He's way too loyal."
Standing there, immersed in the greenish light cast by the spaceship's open hatch, even smaller and even more vulnerable than you remembered him. He gives you a look of concern, as though your discomfort upsets him more than the threat of his own demise.
"Jasper and Peridot threw Steven and the rebel Gems – and me – into cells on the spaceship. They were going to take us back to Homeworld to stand trial, I guess. But Steven managed to escape…"
His figure growing still smaller and stubbier as he disappeared down the corridor's menacing gleam. "I'll come back for you."
"…and one of the rebel Gems damaged the spaceship so it crashed back down onto the beach. Jasper came out of the wreckage, and I could see she wasn't interested in letting anyone stand trial anymore."
Jasper's feral fingers pressing into your cheeks as though she wishes to brand you. The solution lurks at the bottom of her demands like a flat shark on the ocean floor, ready to devour you both.
Let it.
"I knew I couldn't let her hurt Steven…"
No, you will not bring fusion into the conversation. You will be here until dawn, if not longer, attempting to explain that: the blinding togetherness, the lurid contrast, Jasper's essence daubed onto yours, and then the coarse sobs. Malachite cried the tears you and Jasper were both too stubborn to shed.
You rest your chin on the filmy strip of skirt that drapes your knees. "So I grabbed Jasper," you say, speaking carefully around the gaps in your rendition, "dragged her to the bottom of the ocean, and used my water powers to chain her up and hold her there."
"For six months?" Mama Lipsky's eyebrows climb.
You nod. "Yeah. I'm tougher than I look." You sense Mama Lipsky's human heat and her odor, the thin, itching scent of overripe flowers, moving in closer.
"But eventually I was overpowered," you say. Mama Lipsky's shoulder releases a faint shudder so near yours. "Jasper took control. She tried to hurt people, and I was too weak to stop her." You remember it now, the vacuous quivering in your limbs where your power once swam. "By the time Steven and his friends saved me, I wasn't even conscious anymore. That's when I had the dreams."
Mama Lipsky stops with her hand extended in midair. The flesh on her upper arms fits loosely, in the same way Dr. Drakken's pants do, and it wiggles slightly now. As shrill as she is, there is something noble to her bearing, unlike her son's poorly coordinated, charming manner.
There is another thought left inside you, a thought broken and separated, like the bones of Greg's leg. It must be released, for you have no healing powers of your own.
"I spent so much time down at the bottom of the ocean," you say, "holding Jasper in place with all my might. The only light was what the fish used to attract their prey. The water was colder and heavier than I ever knew water could be. The ocean was my one safe place on this crummy little planet – and now it's ruined for me."
You are stronger this time; only one tear falls, and this you are able to catch on the back of your hand and flick away with a dash of your wrist. Your head is also heavier than it should be, and you let it tip forward to meet your legs.
Mama Lipsky begins to stroke your hair, sifting ragged strands away from the brow they hide. "There, there," she says. "It'll be all right, Baby Girl."
There is nothing piercing about her voice anymore. All you can think in the moment is that you have never been anyone's baby girl before, not even Blue Diamond's. Her touch, though never cruel toward you, had the untamed force of one of the Gem ships that could strip the ground for meters simply by landing. Mama Lipsky's touch is a cloud descending, skimming the ground in whispers of vapor.
It is not the sort of thing you should luxuriate in, yet you cannot lift your head. You do manage to sniffle, "I – I'm thousands of years older than you," with only half the strength that lives inside of you.
"Shhhh," Mama Lipsky says. "Not right now."
Once again, she rewrites all the laws of the universe with a brief statement. Your wings are a turbulent sea inside your gem, and you don't dare to challenge her.
Mama Lipsky continues to pick at your hair as though searching for bugs. Steven had told you that some animal mothers do that with their babies. "My stars, you have been through a lot," she says, and she must truly mean it if she is evoking the stars. When you have no answer for her, she continues:
"One thing I've learned over the years is that the more times you focus on a memory, the more powerful it grows. And the more times you deliberately push it away, the dimmer it becomes." The happy dolphin breeches in her chuckle again. "Now, goodness knows it's much more complicated than that, but it's my Drewbie who's the therapy expert in our family, not me."
You turn to look into her eyes, the black beads that have always reminded you of Plastic, and instead you see in them her son's larger, slightly lighter ones, waiting to console you. Certainly you are aware, as her disclaimer shows that even she is, the solution is not that simple. Yet the deeper you look, the more you long to believe the hope in her eyes.
If only you could manipulate internal reflections as well as the external.
The unwelcome – Jasper, the Crystal Gem with the battering fists, Peridot in the interrogation room, and especially Malachite – continue to traipse through your mind to this day. They circle around like a swarm of corruptions, and there was a time their presence could bully yours into silence. Now you have begun to strike back, a fact that serves to pack your gem with granite whenever you think of it.
Mama Lipsky's fingers warm your scalp, unexpected heat vents on the seabed. "I'm sure as long as your lifespan is," she says, "there will be a time when the ocean doesn't frighten you anymore."Her admiration is evident. "And in the meantime, Drewbie and I would love to be your safe place."
You close your eyes for an instant. She is not the only one feeling admiration. Yours, however, is skittish. It has spent so much time bubbled inside you, denied healing past a certain stage, that it has almost forsaken its ability to re-form, and you don't know if Mama Lipsky can see it when you push it in her direction.
Water has always been one of your closest companions and surely the most consistent. Always dependable, within the last dozen or so tides it has evolved into something dark and volatile.
Both of you have.
Mama Lipsky's legs cross in front of her, forming a small, snug lap reminiscent of Steven's. The soft folds create a perfect resting place for her hands. Even with fatigue depleting her features, there is a serenity about her that you covet fiercely. You are surprised enough of your Elite character remains to find the feeling rough and unfamiliar.
Underneath all of the ocean-floor grime you cannot swish away, though, there is a tiny, surviving shard of kindness. It glimmers now in Mama Lipsky's company, just as it does around her son or around Steven.
And you know you will dedicate the remainder of your existence to preserving that shard.
All at once the thought exhausts you. It is not the exhaustion that comes from governing a fusion to the point of collapse, but the exhaustion of a tree in one of the Earth storms you observed from the mirror: too solidly rooted to fear for its own shattering, yet still hurting as branches crack off and leaves are stolen by the wind, desperate for a break in the storm.
You let your head tip forward, ever so slightly. Your hands are sent out ahead of it, and they find the softest fabric you have felt on Earth as of yet. With caution, you place your head on your crossed forearms. The couch begins to slowly distance itself from underneath you, until it could be lightyears away and you are submerged in a reflection beyond your control.
It opens with a crystalline ocean, where the sun's light, rather than blocking all else from view by glimpsing off the surface, turns underneath it and suffuses the Aquamarine sides with translucence. Waves lower themselves to the shore and then gather again as they are pulled back out, singing your name.
And there is nothing else for the rest of the night.
When you surface again the next morning, the sun is favoring this side of the planet once more. Everything – the pale light peeking through the window-cloth, birdsong more melodious than the squawks of shorebirds, and the first stirrings of your wings – seems pink and washed in some manner or another. Even the Earth's gravitational pull has become familiar to your physical form. You realize with a shallow pang that you would need to readjust if you ever were to return to the planet to which you once pledged your loyalty.
Lifting your head, you find both that the weight in its center has lessened and that it was at rest in Mama Lipsky's lap. Mama Lipsky herself sits propped upright; her face, however, sags the same way Drakken's does when he falls into sleep. Her butterfly mouth gawks, a barely perceptible dangling of saliva in the corner. You look at her, studying the nose and the chin and the ears that she somehow replicated for her son while he was still cooking inside her, and you smile.
You're unsure how long you stay like that before Mama Lipsky too awakens. She yawns as humans do, stretches her arms above her head, and rapidly blinks her eyes as they power back up.
"Good morning, Lapis," Mama Lipsky says. Though her voice is dusty from a night of nonuse, it is as shrill and lovely as ever. "Are you feeling better today?"
She pushes herself forward, one hand on the indentation of her back. You watch it, wondering if it is also like Drakken's, so defenseless against aches and creakings.
"Yeah. I really am," you say. "You really didn't have to stay out here with me all night, though. I mean – it was nice – but you could have gone back to your room and slept there, and I would have been fine –"
Mama Lipsky swats away that last word as though it has ceased to mean anything to her. "Nonsense. Dear heart, that was not the first time I've sat up through the night with a frightened child.
"And what I said last night?" She wraps her small plump hands around your fingerprints. "I meant every bit of it."
The pinch in your gem subsides. You assess your gratitude, the length and width of it. To funnel it into speech is to squeeze an Era I Peridot from an Era II's hole, but you owe it to her to try.
"Thanks, Mama...Lipsky," you say.
The anticipated response of "You're welcome" is accompanied by something you never would have anticipated. Mama Lipsky flings her trustworthy arms around you and brings you in closer. Her hug is remarkably similar to her son's. With her slightly wiggling skin, there is a firmness there that can only come from love.
You know then what it is to be rePurposed, and that is something you never would have discovered on Homeworld.
It isn't long after that Dr. Drakken arrives, pressing the door-chime. The two of you open the door and there he is, grinning on the front stoop, looking rather pink and washed himself. Mama Lipsky gives him a hug and a squeeze of the cheek, which he accepts grudgingly yet without protest.
There is a strange simple machine, constructed of wood, on the flat area adjacent to the set of steps, and Drakken sits upon it now. It reminds you something of a bench, except its legs have been misplaced and it has been suspended from the above railings with several cables.
"It's a porch swing," Dr. Drakken says when you ask. "Only it's not built to swoosh back and forth like the swings at the park, so don't try it! If you do, the swing will break and fall to the ground – you'll sprain your wrist and have to pay to fix the swing! Well, at least, that's what happened to this one friend of mine when he was a kid. The buffo – the rather clumsy child?" He holds his hand about five centimeters short of his own head.
"Ron? With the speckles?" you supply, tapping your cheeks where Ron's brown spots are scattered.
Drakken chortles, a rumble that takes shape in his neck and then reverberates down into the deepest facets of his body, jerking it around giddily. "Speckles. I like that. But – yes, Ron. I can never remember that, for some reason…"
The porch swing's seat is wide enough for at least two people, so you carefully hike your knees up next to him. "I heard a couple things last night that I'm wondering about," you say.
"By all means, then!" Drakken holds out his chest even as he wipes a few tufts of the flaky nighttime substance from his eyes.
"So – what does 'wetting the bed' mean?" you ask.
The ragged squeak that slips from him, the stricken red that immediately shades his cheeks, make no other answer necessary.
You don't ask any more questions.