~At last I got this thing done and ready, and not a moment too soon! I can't be the only Lapis fan who needs a little pick-me-up about now. :( Hope this can help.
Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season. :)~
Dr. Drakken hurries to type his weekly lab report, heedless of typos and misplaced commas. This is only his first draft, after all. He is enjoying the klackity-klackity-klack of his fingers across the keys when another sound, a soft dling, startles him with its announcement that he has a new e-mail message.
After taking a moment to settle his nervous system, Drakken opens the window and frowns at the subject line. You have been tagged on Chirpsy, it says.
Chirpsy? I forgot I even had an account! It hasn't been used in – what – two, three years? He used to Chirp about his plans for world domination, although he found its character limit very stifling. Gave up entirely when Shego pointed out he had only one follower and it was Kim Possible.
Heart already dancing to a something-is-different, something-is-wrong little ditty, Drakken clicks to see who has mentioned him. And stares.
Peridot5XG.
The number means nothing to Drakken, but he only knows one person named Peridot.
How does she have a Chirpsy account? Come to think of it, how does she have Internet access at all in that barn?
DOES ANYONE KNOW WHERE I CAN FIND DR. DRAKKEN? she asks.
Taking a breath so deep his lungs balloon, Drakken types back:
I'm here, Peridot. What's up?
Peridot5XG: HAVE I SUMMONED YOU?
DrDrakken: No, you tagged me.
Peridot5XG: "TAGGED"? DOES THAT MEAN YOU ARE "IT" NOW?
DrDrakken: No, it just means I got an e-mail saying you used my name. Why were you looking for me?
Peridot5XG: I THINK LAZULI NEEDS YOU.
DrDrakken: Why? Did something happen?
Peridot5XG: I DON'T KNOW ALL THE DETAILS…
DrDrakken: What happened?!
Peridot5XG: JASPER.
DrDrakken: fdoigpdoigodpfgidpgimfksnxoir
Peridot5XG: poakjfsklfmwoa
Peridot5XG: WHAT ARE WE SAYING?
DrDrakken: No, that was just me having a heart attack. Is Lapis okay?
Peridot5XG: YEAH, SHE'S FINE. I CAN SEE HER FROM WHERE I AM NOW
Peridot5XG: SHE'S STARING AT THINGS LIKE SHE THINKS SHE CAN MOVE THEM WITH HER MIND. WHCH SHE CAN'T, BUT I CAN. ISN'T THAT COOL?
DrDrakken: Yes, that's very nice, Peridot…where is Jasper now?
Peridot5XG: I DON'T KNOW. I GUESS LAZULI WATER-PUNCHED HER SUPER-HARD, AND SHE FLEW FAR AWAY.
Peridot5XG: HASHTAG GO LAZULI
DrDrakken: I'll be right there.
Peridot5XG: WOW THANKS.
You stare at a flower, standing surprisingly firm despite the cooling of the breeze and the shifting colors in the leaves it stirs. It does not stir you, despite your effort to make yourself care about it, about anything. All the emotion you possess surged out at Jasper, crested and billowed, then turned to vapors that blew away with her.
When Steven came to collect you from the barn earlier that morning, he promised he had a "surprise" for you. It turned out that Greg had rented a boat, which is apparently like buying one, only it costs less money in exchange for having to return it after a time.
You looked out at all that water, knowing it would sink every ship in the harbor should you command it. It makes you cringe back from it, remembering how cruel and heavy it felt pressing against you – against her and the gemstone on her back she was beginning to forget. You wanted nothing more to do with it.
Yet Steven was so happy, and he was so thoroughly convinced that you would enjoy yourself once you gave it a chance. You could not let him down, not when he has shown you this much unearned kindness.
For a while, you were able to fool yourself into forgetting. Steven loved it when you blew the boat horn; his laugh blew out with it, and you would giggle as well. Greg was so patient, so generous, offering you a turn with his pole as soon as watching him fish become boring. You managed to hook something, something large enough to be stronger than you, something you could not yank aboard even with Greg's and Steven's help.
Soon after that, the storm bullied its way in. In an instant, the ocean went from docile and puckish to violent, slamming its waves against the side of the boat, determined to have its own way, regardless of whose legs it had to break to get there. The boat's motor began to fail, which unnerved Greg. This, in turn, unnerved you; you are still unaccustomed to boats with motors.
The water turned a putrid grayish-green, almost the shade of Malachite. You stared out at it, remembering the heaviness, the chains, the souls twined together so tightly you could not tell where your anger ended and Jasper's began. Without it, you were too light; you might just drift away.
And then Jasper stormed aboard. Her eyes went through your physical form as easily as Rose Quartz's sword would, and it seemed only fitting that she should find you again, as though this is the way it was always meant to be.
Except for Steven. Steven was not supposed to be throwing himself in front of you, brandishing his shield; he should be far away from you, living the life he deserves. But there he was, face set and convinced he was protecting his innocent friend from the clutches of evil. You gazed into Jasper's eyes, haunted and mesmerized by the gleam within them, and you knew it was not that simple. It will never be that simple.
You can still hear Jasper now.
Laughing, a sound like a clump of wet sand striking the boat – You're pointing that shield the wrong way, Rose. She's the one you should be afraid of.
Gushing – I thought I was a brute, but you! You're a monster!
Pleading – It'll be different this time. I've changed! You've changed me!
You could have done it: restrained her again, vented the rage so unbecoming in a Lapis on a deserving target, relieved the Crystal Gems of the burden of caring for you. You could have.
But you didn't.
Jasper's burly form bounced off the wave, arms and legs wheeling in the thick stormy air. Not until the wood beneath you began to cave forward did you remember there had been a boat between your feet and your waves. You snatched up both Steven and Greg, whose only comment was, "I guess I bought a boat after all."
Once you returned to land, you set them down. Your wings retracted immediately, edgy as though they were littered with specks of sand.
Steven collapsed on the shore, his small chest heaving in and out. "Phew!" he gasped. "I think I speak for all of us when I say that was too close for comfort!"
His voice is so innocent with the truth that you cannot help smiling.
It is Greg, however, who you face. He has a winsome smile so much like Steven's and he had not treated you with any bitterness on behalf of his leg, yet you still felt shy when you turned to him. You forced your gaze to connect with his rather than with a point on the ruddy sphere of his scalp. "I'm sorry about your boat, Greg," you say.
Greg flung out a bewildered sort of chuckle. "Well, I'd rather lose the boat than the kid." His eyes grew serious, and he took your hands between both of his. His hands were much larger than the other two pairs you trust, but there was the same compassion in the grip, in the broad palms damp with sweat that suctioned them to yours. "Thank you, Lapis."
You are unsure how long he stood there, his leg firm and true and unyielding. Eventually Steven offered to accompany you back to the barn. You were about to agree to that when you heard something behind you, a whisper amidst the chaotic storm.
Lap-is, Lap-is, Lap-is.
You turned back toward the ocean. The waves hurled themselves against the shore and reared back to charge again. They ached to come farther – you could feel it in your back – yet awaited your permission.
That was when you realized. The ocean does not hate you, does not fear you or judge you. It. . . misses you?
You walked over to it, your first steps toward it in many tides. With your wings fluttering inside your gem, you reached your biggest toe out and placed it among the waves. The water rushed forward, eager to submerge it, to treasure it and pay tribute to it.
"Someday," you whispered to the ocean. You could sense the sigh in its currents.
The wind beat your hair back and speckled salt on your lips, at odds with a fragile peace within you. Only when the barn was in sight, Peridot rushing toward you with a metal spoon in hand, chirping about how she managed to move it – only then did your shaking begin and numb you from the back inward.
You are still haunted; not by Jasper, but by Malachite, her fractured mind and her more serpentine quality, from the lean body to the quiet resolve with which she could wait for prey. Where did that come from? Certainly not ox-like Jasper.
Peridot hovers in the background, novel in her smallness and her concern; it almost hurts that you have nothing to give her in return. You have only a small amount of goodness left in you, and you are fairly certain your earlier deeds have used up today's supply. Your gem feels shapeless, and it is not hard to imagine tiny streams of granite fanning out from its edges, tainting the surrounding skin.
That is when Dr. Drakken walks up.
You would think him a hallucination had you ever been known to have a pleasant one: his skin a warm, welcoming blue, his eyebrow a soft smudge over dark eyes filmed with concern.
At the sight of you, his skitter speeds up. You startle and stare at him, letting your arms drop and your lower lip with them.
"What are you do –" you begin, and then you stop. "I mean – how did you know?"
Drakken's smile is uncharacteristically small and quiet, a firefly's wing. "A little bird told me," he says.
You trail his gaze over your shoulder to Peridot. Her triangular face, once so devoid of any emotion, now bubbles with both shyness and pride.
For the first time, you smile at her.
Only when Dr. Drakken sinks down beside you do you become aware of the ground where you are sitting. Before, it was vacant beneath you, as undefined as the realm of regeneration. Yet now you can feel the shoots of grass that remind you of Drakken's hair spiking gently between your fingers, the soil accepting the weight of your toes.
Drakken's hands begin to mimic the orbit of a double planet. "You want to talk about it yet?" he says.
"No." Although a shudder vibrates inside your gem, your body doesn't move.
Drakken nods and keeps nodding, so many times that you lose track. "Should we go get ice cream?"
"Yes," you say.
You fly Drakken back to the boardwalk and the ice cream shop. He is not much of a load, especially when the air is no longer laden with unspent rain and danger. He orders his usual chocolate concoction. You order vanilla; you need vanilla, and Drakken does not ask you about other flavors this time.
Licking your ice cream, the two of you journey to a shale-brick wall where you settle, away from the ocean you are not yet ready to face. The salt breeze nudging your back is reminder enough. The taste of all that can be good about Earth occupies the space where the bitter iron coating of fear sat moments ago.
Drakken's feet swing back and forth. He breathes, involuntary little huffs of heat. You allow your legs to stretch, to slide across the rough texture and value its grit.
A drop of ice cream teeters at the rim of the sugar cone. You quickly transfer it to your other hand and thrust your tongue beneath just in time for the drop to splash sweetly on your tastebuds. To your own surprise, you giggle.
But when you glance up at Dr. Drakken, he is not giggling with you. A storm blusters across him, faster even than the ones at sea that can scud in on a moment's notice. A wave of discomfort, unrealized until now, breaks somewhere near your hand, below the surface.
Drakken sets his cone down on the flat ridge between you, seemingly so he can examine you more closely. You follow his gaze and the pain, and you discover the vicious purple mark on your wrist, seared into the shape of five brawny fingers.
There is nothing you can say to him.
Drakken clasps your forearm and rotates it toward him. His grip has a caution you might have once mistaken for weakness; now, you are simply grateful that it does not lay claim to you. "Lapis…did she touch you?" he says.
Your head immobile, you are forced to speak. "She grabbed me," you admit.
The color deserts Drakken's face even as you watch, deepening the black mess of his scar. A thread jumps in the front of his neck, pulsing like cricket-song.
He has told you he was once a supervillain, that in his life he has done terrible things. You accepted it as truth. Yet it is not until then that you truly believe he's capable of hurting someone.
"She bruised you." Drakken's voice is a groan, as though punched from him by Jasper's own fist.
You can feel the breaks inside your wrist now, the snapped ends, the cold leaks. You squirm on the wall, taking in another large mouthful of ice cream. "She didn't mean to," you say.
Drakken's glare is almost blotted out by the thick tears layered over it. His chin quavers. You cannot bear to see him this way.
You pick up his cone and hand it to him. "Drakken, it's okay," you say.
Drakken's hands spasm out from his sides. "No, it's not okay!"
"Well, it will be." Closing your eyes, you press the fingers of your other hand onto your wrist, your wince invisible as you make contact. You concentrate on stitching the blood vessels back together again, erasing what has spilled, until the bruise vanishes and takes the dulled throbbing in your wrist with it.
You open your eyes and offer Dr. Drakken a fluctuating smile. "See?"
Drakken throws his face into the pouch formed where his lab coat billows between his legs. "That's not what I meant, Lapis," he says.
"Oh," you say, even though you think you already knew that.
Drakken's hands delve into his grass-blade hair, shaking as if they have somehow stolen your pain and kept it for themselves. "Why – why did she grab you?"
"She wanted us to fuse again," you say. The wire-muscled fusion you orchestrated slinks into your mind once again. You already rejected her once today. Will you have to keep rejecting her, over and over, for the rest of your infinite lifespan?
The breeze grows colder, snapping leaves from trees as it passes. For an instant, you wish for Homeworld's wind, never too hot and never too chilly, and Homeworld's cloudless sky.
Drakken exhales something – it could be either an oath or that praying thing. It is as organic as his heartbeat. Next to him, you feel artificial.
After several frigid moments, Drakken draws his own knees upward. His ice cream is turning to pulp beside him, yet he doesn't appear to care. "And that's when you water-punched her?" he says.
There is not a seam of doubt in his expression. It carves the spot where your bruise once was, an Injector penetrating the planet's mantle. You take a greater distance and turn your back on Dr. Drakken. For perhaps the first time in your friendship, you are too ashamed to meet his eyes.
"Lapis?" There is no buoyancy to Drakken's words anymore. They run with sadness and sympathy. You feel the warmth of his fingers as they near yours, hopping up and down one brick over. "What – what's this about?"
You look up at the sun, peering bravely between two puffy banks of clouds, though it doesn't matter. All you can see in anything, sun or cloud or sea behind you, is Jasper's sneer, jamming your gem the same way pizza grease once overwhelmed your mouth. It was, somehow, even heavier today, bent with something beyond her battle fervor.
Some sort of…wanting.
"Lapis?" Drakken repeats. The buoys rustle with concern, and you can imagine the hurt that will light between them when he hears the truth.
You put your face in your hands. "No, it wasn't. I thought about it. About fusing again."
The silence that follows is unnatural. You are struck with the distinct sensation that you are in the center of a hurricane, momentarily shielded from the hoarse shrieking of its winds, but knowing all along that the worst is yet to come.
Yet when Drakken finally answers, you have never heard him speak more quietly. "What? Lapis – why?" There is no tightness now; his words sag, helpless.
He deserves so much more than a shrug. That is the only reason you clench your wrists around your knees and plunge into a depth of yourself you haven't before attempted to fathom. "We were fused for such a long time that she became a part of me. When we were broken apart," you say, "it felt like I was missing half of myself."
You remember the box-games sitting in front of Steven's favorite shop. Drakken showed you one where metal balls are launched into a surrealistic landscape, directed to crash into unidentified objects, and eventually they will fall back into the cavern-bottom of the machine when the player fails. Another ball will be triggered, unless you have reached the machine's limit. And, without Jasper, that is what you were: that last ball left knocking around in a zone too large to occupy alone.
"And I'm so angry all the time now," you continue. "I don't know what to do with it – I was never supposed to feel it – and Steven and the Crystal Gems are all too nice to understand. Even Peridot is nicer than I am now!"
Drakken snaps a small noise of disagreement. It reaches you as though from afar, as though you are still down there: marooned in a trench, wrapped in chains of your own design, surrendered to a cold you had never known existed. The fact that you came so close to resuming that position has a presence of its own, brutal and unsatisfied, more intimidating than Jasper herself.
"But Jasper – she knew what it was like to be angry." Your voice is stagnant water, spoiled and without motion. "And when I was with her, I could at least use my anger in a way that kept everyone else safe. We'd started to understand each other, and she said this time it would be better. She wouldn't fight me, so I wouldn't have to hold her down. There wouldn't be that struggle for control this time…things were different now."
From somewhere deep in his throat, Dr. Drakken begins to count curious numbers: "One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, four…"
You watch one of Earth's small insects peddle her many legs at the base of the wall, her body encased in glossed, black plates of armor. "And even if it wasn't, we kind of deserved each other."
Dr. Drakken's jaw is working; you can hear it clack up and down behind you.
The insect disappears into a crack in the brick, and your eyes remain frozen on that spot, afraid to roam. "But most of all…I knew how to be with Jasper. In a way I don't know how to be with any other Gem. I knew her rules. We were inside each other for so long, and now that we're apart, I'm alone in myself and I don't know what to do with it.
"Is that ever a thing that happens?" you pose. "Is it normal to want to stay with a person you understand, even if they'll never be good to you?"
There is a heavy pause. You can tell Drakken is being careful not to scorn your lack of discernment, an approach that makes you feel more a refugee than ever. His next words are faultlessly crafted, and they thrum along like the engine of a modern battleship. "What you're describing sounds like an abusive relationship, which is characterized by one party harming the other at regular intervals, often by exerting power over them. Typically, the abuser will attempt to convince the abused that they deserve to be treated in such a fashion, and the abused will feel trapped in the relationship even if they have not been explicitly threate –"
"I know you're reading that off somewhere," you say without turning around.
An embarrassed chuckle rises from near your shoulder. You glance back in time to see Drakken folding his phone shut, sticking it behind his back, and giving you a large, tooth-laden grin. "Yes, well, be that as it may…." He coughs in that manner that has nothing to do with sickness and threads his fingers through the air. "It's true. It's a thing that happens. After a long time, you can get attached to someone, no matter what they've done to you. And if you don't know where else to go…"
You tilt your head to one side. The sight seems to crack Drakken's smile; his tongue splits it the down the middle, the ends falling. "That's kind of how it was with me and Shego. Not exactly, of course, but…she did some really awful things to me when she was upset. A lot of times I didn't know what would upset her until she had me suspended in midair, getting ready to throw me."
"She gave you a black eye," you recall. The memory of the dark puffy flesh around Steven's eye curls inside your hollow parts and weights them, cutting them off from your wings.
"More than once," Drakken says with a nod. "I knew that she was being mean to me, but I had no idea how to function without her. So I stayed and I kept her employed and I hoped that things would get better, because the thought of trying to survive on my own was scarier than the thought of her temper!"
He places a hand near yours again, its pose tender through the black gloves. What he has described resounds with familiarity. Inside your gem, it mixes with the rasp in someone else's heated demands: "Lapis! Fuse with me! Fuse with me again! When we were Malachite, we were stronger than either one of us is alone! Please, Lapis!" – the word "please" as foreign on her lips as your gossamer skirt would be on her warrior's frame.
"But you and Shego are still friends," you say. You picture Shego's angled face and the wily Emerald eyes that let everything in and nothing out, and even with her trickery she does not belong in Jasper's class.
"Yes, we are." A bittersweet smile tinges Drakken's reply. "I was lucky. Shego really did change. She didn't waste time standing around telling me she'd changed – she just showed it. And, to be fair, there were, err, just a couple of things I needed to change to help us out, too." You feel his hand slip closer to yours; even the speckles of ice cream on it cannot make it as cold as Jasper's is. "But, Lapis, if it's straight-up abuse, you can't change the person. Because the problem is with them."
You tighten your eyes shut. Abuse seems the proper word for the rough way Jasper tore your wings from your gem, the way she bent and mangled your powers to her will. Yet Malachite's reflection is kept in a different storage unit than all others, where it is not so much stored as embedded: long-legged and torn, face a dark grin you can't remember which one of you designed for her.
"Jasper said I'd changed her," you repeat. You hear the slender quiver in your voice as you open your eyes. "And I wondered if that were really true. I guess that was stupid of me."
"To think someone could change from knowing you?" Dr. Drakken's gentle tone touches each ember of Jasper left inside you, extinguishing it. "I've heard stupider things. But people who have changed don't body-slam you." He blinks. "I mean, unless you're about to be hit by a truck or something."
You shake your head. "I wasn't. We were on a boat."
Drakken drops a look to the area on your wrist that was bruised earlier. He scoots forward closer, and his hands work at the air, a series of flickers and clasps that appear to help forge his next words. "Now, Jasper might be redeemable. But you aren't going to help her any by fusing with her again. That'd only reinforce her belief that she gets what she wants when she does this." He glances to the right. "Which – yes, I was quoting that last bit, but it's also true!"
With every drop in the ocean, you hope it is.
The breeze is lighter now, homier, the salt on it eager to reconnect with you. It sets Drakken's tied-back hair to romping playfully around his head and steals the Diamond-hardness you saw on him before. His expression puckers like a fingerprint.
"I wish I had been there to help you," he says.
You remember the stinging wind as it pushed you toward Jasper, awaiting the moment when you would keel as so many ships have. "But you were," you say.
Drakken frowns. "I don't recall that."
"I mean, you weren't really there," you say. "But your words were. I remembered what you said about letting go of – of hate for people because you don't want to be like them. I knew if I gave in to that, I'd be just like Jasper."
A muffled squeal ekes from Drakken's throat.
"So I looked her right in the eye" – you hike your chin to demonstrate, though Drakken's height is hardly comparable to Jasper's – "and I told her no. I said that what we had wasn't healthy. That I never wanted to feel the way I'd felt with her again, ever."
Drakken scoops what survives of his cone back into his grip and laps happily at it. "So you refused," he says, and a grunt charges into the sentence before it's even completed. "I mean – no, bad choice of words! Obviously, you didn't re-fuse. In fact, you refused to re-fuse. Or – well – anyway – you told her no!"
His bumbling voice empowers yours to stay whole when you say, "And that's when she grabbed me."
You glance down at your wrist, too, and then quickly away. You cannot dwell on icy fingers closing around it, a strength that far exceeds your own propelling you backward, or the hard intent on her face as she rushed you forward again. The details of what Jasper was doing, what she was trying to do, are unclear, not to be spoken of, unprecedented. Not even the Crystal Gems, who fuse and stay fused so needlessly, have ever approached fusion with their fists readied.
Drakken grumbles under his breath.
"Steven came running at her, though. He yelled, 'She said no!' and he knocked her away with his shield," you continue.
"Oh, thank you, Steven," Drakken says, as if there is any chance Steven can hear him from this distance.
"Then Jasper decided this whole thing was Steven's fault. She said she would shatter him." You grip the sides of the brick until a flake peels between your fingers.
Drakken swallows his last bite of ice cream. "And that's when you water-punched her?" he says with complete confidence.
"Yeah, that's when I water-punched her." The smallest of smiles balances on your lips.
"Ah!" Drakken's fingers snap. "Love that smile! It's like…something…good…"
You know what his smile is, though. It is the sun, peeking from behind the clouds it is about to scatter away so it can spangle your sea, make it shine again.
Drakken leans his head to one side and studies you, his hands wrapped and tucked into the hollows beneath his elbows. "Can I just say again how proud of you I am?"
Now you blink at him. "You just did."
Deep down, however, you are not sure he should be proud of you at all. You were limp and weak when you rebuffed Jasper. The strength in your gem came not from the army of water surrounding you that you were too afraid to touch, but from an ice cream cone like this one, from the beauty of an orange leaf and from the shock of Rose Quartz's infamous shield drawn to protect you.
You pause for a moment and hear the perky voice that seems to come directly through Peridot's nose, see her clumsy attempts at empathy, sense the earnestness that peaks like the triangle rise of her hair. "It was really nice of Peridot to contact you," you say quietly.
Dr. Drakken's face warms. "Now, Peridot – I think she's the real deal. She really has changed." His tongue trips over his lips, collecting the last few speckles of ice cream. "I know she's not very good at it, but she does care about you."
For a few Earth-seconds, you are assaulted by images of Peridot – now that she isn't shuttered away behind her screen, all of her expressions are open and quick, like the bare wiring of her ship exposed when its panels fell. She has passed through an estuary, a place where the tide meets the river current, where you still flail. It is a difficult thing to harbor a grudge against someone who acts as though the stars shine on your behalf, a difficult thing on which you cannot afford to waste any more effort.
Your shoulders lift. "She's not that bad compared to Jasper."
Drakken's legs shudder, the scrape of one boot against the shale disturbingly similar to the sound of Jasper's plea. "Nobody's that bad compared to Jasper."
While he does not intend to swing his words at you like a whip, a lash that can be attributed to poor aim still stings. You are strong enough to remain turned toward Drakken. For a moment, though, you can't keep your head up, and you glance briefly at your lap.
His eyes snatch it up right away. "Uh-oh," he says, his sigh more flustered than truly impatient. "What did I say now?"
You move your glance to the plants again, the slender stalks with the bristled tops. They are no longer foreign specimens to you; there is a certain safety and friendliness to them, knowing Dr. Drakken's connection with them. You pretend it is them you are telling when you say, "Jasper called me a monster."
Drakken does the last thing you would expect him to do: He laughs, five surprised spurts, saliva taking flight to rain down on the plants. You don't see how he can possibly meet what you just said with laughter – even laughter than rings with a Sapphire's freezing breath.
"Jasper called…you… a monster?" Drakken tilts his head to one side, the hang of his hair even and flat in questioning. "Was she joking?"
"I don't think Jasper knows how to joke," you say. In the depths of your gem, you seize your physical form and draw it inward so it will not sway, it will not buck under the end of the storm.
"No, she probably doesn't, the big sourpuss," Drakken says. His soft jaw is clenched as tightly as a clam's mouth. "It's just so…ridiculous. What does Jasper know?"
"Everything."
You feel your lower lip shiver. It is the only thing on your body not locked into place.
"Say wha?" Drakken's eyes are identical moons, his eyebrow floating above them as though unencumbered by gravity.
"We were fused," you remind him. "Jasper could read my thoughts. She could feel my feelings. She could see – everything. I gave her everything. And she looked at all of it…and decided I was a monster."
Your voice breaks, squeezed into powder by Jasper's grip, and yet you are not anywhere close to tears. Perhaps it would be less concerning if you were. Instead, your insides form a profound trench, and even you, a Gem Purposed for curiosity, does not want to know how deep it reaches.
Drakken's cracked cheek bunches until it brushes his lower eyelid, and he makes the most pitiful noise you have ever heard from him: an airy whimper scampering for an escape. "Oh – Lapis – that's awful. I – gee – can I hug you?"
His long arms unfold and wade hopefully toward yours. As soon as you nod, they encircle you, padded with fabric and cozy with a body heat you will never produce. It does not take away the trench, but it grounds it, gives it a floor, proving it is not boundless after all. He holds you close; you can feel the rods that walk his chest down to his stomach – you think they might be called "ribs."
"Thanks," you say into his coat of labs.
You feel Dr. Drakken nod. "Would you like me to spend the night here?" he asks. "I mean, not here, but back at the barn with you?"
Peace laps at the edges of your gem, carrying away the numbness. You pull back and knock a hand against a sugared cone you had forgotten was there. A milky liquid, still rife with the scent of happier times, runs over its brim, and you rediscover the weightlessness of a giggle.
"Sure," you say. You pick up the cone and give him a casual glance from over the melted cream. "I mean, if you're okay with that, it'd be great."
Drakken breathes out so heavily that you see his chest shrink. "All righty, then," he says, fingers panning behind him until he finds his phone. "Let me just call Mother so she won't worry and Dr. Director so she'll know I'll be a little late for work tomorrow."
You take a slurp of the white cream. Lukewarm against your tastebuds, it glides down your throat, kindly accommodating the lump still hovering there. "Okay," you say.
Drakken straightens noisily, flips open his phone, and begins pecking the buttons. Its ringing is dull, as though underwater, still several eons removed from a Wailing Stone's shriek. Soon Drakken chirps, "Dr. Director! Hello!"
He turns away from you ever so slightly. You stare down at your fingerprints, the whorls and spirals subtly grafted into your skin, and begin to phase into the realization that you did not sacrifice them to Jasper this time.
Drakken bubbles things such as, "…will be a little late coming in to work tomorrow…" and "Oh, thank you for understanding."
The storm has died down, yet water vapor remains heavy in the air. It presses against your skin, offering its congratulations. You don't feel the sigh building in you; you only feel the moment it is freed.
Dr. Drakken's voice has shifted now. The proper, professional inflection is gone. This is a wheedling voice, the kind in which Zirconium lawyers address Diamonds.
It's Mama Lipsky on the other end this time. You hear her shrillness from the phone, and you picture her swab of hair, her hands like small cushions. This picture has scarcely taken form in your head before Drakken's words tear through, a tousled line of buoys about to be uprooted from its supports:
"…left a bruise on her! You should have seen it, Mother!"
There is a dense silence before Mama Lipsky speaks again. "If I ever get my hands on the woman who did that to my daughter…" she shrieks.
It is as if a sluice has opened in your gem, allowing the tension to drain away and the knotted wings to untangle.
The final bite of your cone crunches between your teeth. Soon afterward, Drakken returns – he skitters up to you so quickly that he forfeits his balance and wheels crazily on one foot. You rush over, grab one of the churning arms, and plant your bare feet to steady him.
"Errr. Yes. Many thanks." Drakken gives a chuckle that reminds you of an embarrassed seal. "You doing okay?"
"Yeah," you respond instinctively, adding "All things considered," when a scowl threatens on Drakken's brow. You give your head a jerk, snapping away the droplets of ice cream that didn't make it to your mouth. "How about you?"
"Oh, I'll be all right." Drakken brackets his hands in the air on either side of you – protecting you, you have no doubt he thinks. He peers into the face between them. "Lapis…you're not a monster. Not even close. That was just one more lie Jasper told you to get you to fuse again."
In your mind, he takes Jasper's words and begins to strip them of their vitality, the way you used to help strip planets of theirs. Within moments, they are barren and the parings lie at the base in a pile of ash.
The huff Dr. Drakken releases does not scatter them, however. You suspect you are the only one with the authority to do that.
And you have not had much success with authority.
The thought is suddenly wearisome, and you let your head rest on Drakken's arm. "Can we go back to the barn?" you ask in as bright a tone as you can manage. "Steven said he'd come by and check on me later, and I don't want him to worry."
Drakken's eyes are also heavy with water vapor. He loosens the arm from under you so he can loop it around your shoulders and cup you to his side. "Then to the barn we shall go!" he proclaims.
Steven is already there when you return, his chubby legs crossed in front of him as Peridot bounces around him, blathering about Camp Pining Hearts, that television show she loves so much. At the sight of you, he holds up a hand to her and comes running toward you.
"Lapis!" Steven cries. He throws his arms around you; they meet with ease behind your back.
Your waist clenches beneath his embrace. War and imprisonment have robbed you of your experience with hugs, and you have yet to shake the wariness that comes from the touch of others. Yet now you are content to hug Steven back, to lean over him and breathe in his smell – that kelp-like scent humans give off when it is warm out and the tangy smell that must come from his shampoo. His warm fingers against your uncovered midriff is every bit as striking as his black curls against the antiquated red of the barn.
"Hi, Steven. It's good to see you again," you say, with a laugh that does not need to be faked. "After – what? Four whole hours without you?"
Steven pulls back to examine your face. "How are you doing?" he says.
"Fine," you say.
Steven's nod is pensive. He cranes his neck around and looks at Drakken. "How is she really?" he says.
"A little shaken up." Drakken's fingertips knock at one another. "A lot in need of a pep talk. I almost wish Kim Possible were here – she'd organize you a whole pep rally!" This last comment is directed to you.
"Is it because Jasper –" Steven begins.
" – called her a monster?" Drakken finishes for him. "Yes."
In spite of everything, the edges of your lips creep upward. "Guys, I'm right here!"
"Sorry, Lapis." Steven immediately refolds into the position, leaning over his intersected ankles to slap the grass beside him. "C'mon, sit down. If you want."
There is such an allowance in his voice that you sink down immediately. Your legs are significantly longer than Steven's and poke out at harried angles when you attempt to arrange them in the same pose.
"Would'ja take a look at that rainbow?" Steven makes a clicking sound with his tongue, as though he is one of Homeworld's great thinkers. "You did it again, sky."
You giggle and follow the point of his finger upward. It's only the second rainbow you've seen, and you are left awestruck once more that such beauty can be wrung out of Earth's unimpressive atmosphere by cold, almost painful, drops of rain. The colors are even more vivid this time, the red atop nearly blending with the changing leaves, the purple below saturated with water like a flower newly washed.
"Orange and blue are different colors," you say out loud.
Drakken squirms as he, too, drops to the grass. "Of course you remember all the stupid things I say, too…"
You shake your head at him. "It actually helps a little."
"Not stupid if it helps," Steven chimes in.
Sunlight spreads from Drakken's expression once again. He rubs his gloved fingers against his coat of labs as if polishing them. "Well, in that case, I'll go ahead and add that orange and blue aren't just different. They're complete opposites on the color wheel!"
Color Wheel. You have never heard of such an artifact – it must belong to an ancient culture the scouting Gems never encountered – yet you are in this moment grateful that it gives humans a notion of difference, however fabricated, between you and Jasper.
Steven sits up and leans forward, squinting his bright eyes at you. The confusion within only serves to burnish them further. "What I don't get," he says, "is why you'd listen to what Jasper says in the first place. I mean, no offense to her, but she usually doesn't know what she's talking about."
The look he gives you is as pure as the light of a new star, reaching toward you in complete faith that yours will match it. His words attach to Drakken's in near perfection; they require no dance to combine.
"Because of our fusion, Steven," you say. Your words are a level platform, suspended by cords of tension in the corners. "Jasper – Jasper was inside me in a way no one else has ever been before. There's no hiding from someone when you're fused. They see into every little crack and cave that's there in your soul. She called me a monster after she'd looked into me for so many tides."
"That's not true," Steven says.
His proclamation is solemn. A curt type of pride swims through your gem, though you know better than to trust it. "Of course you'd say that, Steven," you say. "And it's really sweet of you –"
"No, I mean it's not true that Jasper's the only one who's been inside you," Steven says. "There was this time that I talked to you. In a dream. When you were – when you were –"
"When I was her," you finish for him. "I think…I think I might remember that." It is hard to retrieve the reflection, for not everything Malachite saw and heard was real. When someone called your name down there in the deep – not hers, but yours – you planted her feet in the mire and waited for it to pass.
That was when Steven appeared: Somehow breathing as though bubbled and safe, he was the first sweetness, the first light, you had seen in so long, and to keep him that way, you had to turn away from him. When he spoke, it resonated through the gem on her back, not the one on her nose, his cries of your name curtaining Jasper's presence.
"You and I," you say. "We – we –"
"Yeah, I don't know if there's a Gem-word for that," Steven says cheerily. "But we connected, and I saw inside you, too."
Even now, your wings shiver, and you slip marginally away from him. There are so many things he could see – hatred, cowardice, selfishness, the last few shreds of entitlement.
"I did see some things I didn't like very much." Steven wedges stumpy fingertips together. "But mostly that just made me really sad for you."
"Why?" you ask.
"Be-cau-uuse – you're my friend!" Steven wails as though in exasperation. "But I saw other stuff, too. I saw how much you cared about me and how bad you wanted to protect me, and how hard you were trying to do the right thing if you could only figure out what it was." Steven gives you the kind of close, knowing look you thought only existed in the fusionscape. "That was the biggest thing about you."
Steven's eyes, those starry black eyes that meet yours without a shard of dishonesty, begin to mist over. He cannot lie, not even with his gestures, and neither can Dr. Drakken. Quartzes are blunt and battering, not ones for subterfuge, yet Jasper wielded the truth clumsily, the way one would a burrowed weapon she has never been trained to use.
With that, Steven builds up a sandbar that even your waves cannot overcome. They are blown backward, softening and loosening the granite that you felt setting around your gem.
You glance back at Drakken. He has been abnormally quiet for the last several moments, his hands fidgeting in his lap. His shoulders float up self-consciously when he sees you looking at him. "Wow. . . that's a whole lot more beautiful than anything I came up with," Drakken says. "I was just going to say that Jasper should mind her own beeswax."
Ever so slightly, you smile.
"Helium!" Drakken exclaims.
You tilt your head at him. "What about helium?" Your knowledge of helium centers around it constituting half of the last atmosphere Homeworld shattered before turning its attention to Earth. You peer up at the rainbow, its rich colors lightening as the air dries, until the memory smears away.
"Your smile works like helium!" Drakken declares. "In that it turns everything light enough to float away, not that it makes my voice squeaky, although sometimes –" He coughs to clean his throat, one fist pressed to its bump – "it does that too."
Steven throws his arms around your waist and loops his head under your arm. "We love you, Lapis!" he says. "I do. . . Drakken does. . . Peridot does. . ."
You feel your expression twisting as you glance toward Drakken, and his chuckle confirms it. "Figure THAT one out, right?" he says, in a tone every bit as merry as Steven's.
Neither one of them looks at you as if you are just one step up from corruption. You know that if you were to peek around the barn, you would see nothing of the sort on Peridot's face either. It is so odd, and yet you no longer doubt that this smaller adaptation of the cold, callous Peridot you knew has come to care for you.
Drakken plays with the thornlike ends of his hair. "Believe me, Lapis, I know what evil is. I've seen it right up close and personal: in my coworkers, in my rivals, in my mir – in myself. I don't see it in you. Even though you have all the right ingredients, which makes it even more impressive. No matter how much you hate Jasper, you didn't choose hate today." He raises his hand, fingers in sharp sticks, and you blink at it for only an instant before realizing he wants to high-five and clapping your palm triumphantly to his. "You keep doing that, and you'll never be a monster."
You close your eyes briefly and let your elbows descend to your knees. Jasper's brazen words haven't been muted yet, but they have been reduced to a muffled cacophony, no more than the harsh caw of shorebirds desperately seeking a meal.
Steven gives your other hand a squeeze. At the merciful touch of your first true friend, the first bridge between your disparate worlds, your insides are no longer a yawning cavern. They link to a gem where the perimeters are once again definite, where your wings are content to reside. The mandate to distance yourself from him grows colder and more foreign than even the worst of Earth's weather has ever been.
"Thank you," you whisper. The rainbow has nearly faded from view by now, and you nod at Dr. Drakken. "Is it okay if I talk to Steven for a while? Just the two of us? I want to spend some time with him before it gets dark and he gets tired."
You are still somewhat amazed by the fact that human bodies synchronize so naturally with the Earth's axis. Blue Diamond scoffed at it, calling it a weakness, but for a race that needs sleep to function, it seems rather advantageous to you.
Drakken's upper lip unrolls to huddle with the lower. "Sure, I guess. You still want me to stay the night?"
You nod again and fix your eyes on Steven. Kindness swoops straight from his fingerprints into yours. With one swift internal jerk, you shapeshift a heart so that you can feel in your chest what Steven feels in his.
Drakken skids off across wet grass into the barn, where you know Peridot still plays with her spoon; you hear her squeal of delight when he walks in. Her voice still has the sound of sword hitting shield, and yet her hue is one that keeps yours and Jasper's apart in the rainbow above.
Steven settles back, his legs sticking out straight, the pink folds of him still radiant with sweat and seawater. He holds the silence for a moment, cradles it with affection, before he says, "You know, I think my dad really likes you."
Your shapeshifted heart fades away. There is still so much for which you must atone. "Really?" you say. "Even after his leg and everything?"
No matter how sharply you turn your head, the images insist on coming ashore as they always have: the van bearing down upon you, grotesque gray in your silvered vision; the furious wave that threw it skyward; the groan of the door as it opened and Greg spilled out, his face taut and shrunken with pain.
Your fault. Even as nothing more than outlines, Jasper's words have spined, dangerous corners.
"Yeah. It wasn't broken for very long anyway." Steven speaks with such loud deliberation, as if he perceives the words too and knows he must drown them out. "I fixed him right on up, if you know what I mean." His tongue protrudes through his grin, and he points to it. "And even if I hadn't, I think he'd have forgiven you. I mean, he forgave Peridot for throwing him off the roof."
"She threw him off the roof?" you say, feeling your jaw dangle. "Why?"
"I think she wanted to see if he could fly," Steven says. "But we talked to her about that, and now she knows that's not how we do things."
Your drop your head into your lap and release your first genuine piece of laughter since Greg's fish-capturing pole was yanked from your hands. On Homeworld, Blue Diamond or one of her Agates would have scolded you for impertinence, and you wonder just how freely you ever lived. Beside you, Steven becomes a fountain of giggles.
"Did you heal him from that, too?" you ask.
"Didn't need to," Steven says. "Garnet showed up and caught him."
"Hooray for Garnet," you catch yourself saying, with only a thin measure of sarcasm. While you are not sure if you will ever fully trust her, at this moment you are grateful for the teaming of Sapphire's foresight and Ruby's quick instincts. You do not wish any more pain on Greg.
"So, yeah, Dad forgave you," Steven says with a shrug. "It helps that you saved my life a ton. He tends to like people who do that."
The very light of which you are comprised slumps. Greg's planet hasn't completed a full cycle around the sun since the night you cracked his leg, and he has already forgiven you. You, however, have had several thousand years of opportunity, and you just took the first step toward forgiveness today.
You pick up one of the leaves that today's storm has spirited to the ground and twirl it between your fingers. It doesn't have the stunning orange of your leaf, like a sky alive with sunset just before nightfall, nor the contrast in the Peridot-green threads that travel through it, but its texture is crisp and calming in your clutch. "I wish I were as good at forgiving as he is," you venture to Steven.
Steven edges closer."You'll get there. In the meantime, you're better at flying. Like Peridot found out, am I right?" He makes a clumsy attempt at a wink that leaves one eye looking sluggish and bruised.
Every sly look you have ever seen is parodied on his face. Your smile doesn't need to be mustered.
You nudge your feet below the grass, into the soil turned soft and pliable by the rain. "He didn't seem mad about the boat," you say.
"Nah, he wasn't." Steven spreads himself flat on his back, hands locked together behind his head. "Dad doesn't worry much about that stuff. Especially not since he's a millionaire now."
"What does he have a million of?" you say. It's certainly not boats – Beach City's harbor couldn't hold a fleet that size.
"Dollars!" Steven exclaims. "Dollars are what you use to buy stuff. And he has five million of them, to be exact. Well, not exact, 'cause he's already spent a few of them."
You frown. A conversation you had with Drakken at his mall – in a pocket-store surprisingly cool and moist despite the white burn of its walls – soars through your recall. "I thought money was what you used to buy stuff."
"It is!" Steven's head seems to bounce on his shoulders. "Dollars are the type of money used around here. Some other places use different kinds of money, but it's all money. Kind of like how all Gems are Gems, but they come in Ruby and Pearl and –" he pokes you gently with his elbow – "Lapis."
Dirt sifts between your toes. You think back to the stiff, uncompromising ground on Homeworld, scored and punctured with emergence holes now crusted with age. Your beautiful, beautiful home, and even the land itself did not deign to welcome you back –
You paddle away from that particular wave. For now, you are simply happy to be here with Steven, your friend in spite of all you've done, and listen to his wonderful explanations of Earth life. Nearly all things make sense when they come out of his mouth, and the few that don't can drift right back out with the tide. Even Peridot's gleeful babble is pleasant, at least when it is interspersed with exclamations from Drakken.
"Yeah, Dad struck it rich a little while ago," Steven says as you uncurl your legs and lie down next to him. "Turns out he'd written this song before I was even born – "
In the course of the story Steven tells, the rainbow ebbs away and the sky begins to darken. He interrupts himself at various points to describe what a commercial is – "Like a really short movie that's trying to convince you to buy something" – and a check – "That's a special piece of paper that you use for money. You get to decide how much it's worth. You can write any number you want on it, but they're gonna hold you responsible for paying it, so don't write any more than you have, or you could get in big trouble."
He has just finished regaling you with the definition of a bank – apparently a zoo of sorts, where the money-cages are only accessible through the codes and scanning systems humans are still busy discovering – when Dr. Drakken wanders back out from the barn and approaches you. "You holding up okay?" he asks.
You are not holding up anything except yourself, and the compassion in his eyes makes it clear this is what he was referencing. "Yeah."
Drakken's long stalk of a body plunks down beside you, humanity in all its inconveniences and vulnerabilities and dearth of coordination. Your other companion, the unprecedented hybrid who embodies the finest qualities of both species, rustles grass as he stirs. Jasper might be Homeworld's most refined warrior, but she will never be superior to either of them.
"Do you think we'll be seeing Jasper again?" Drakken says to Steven. His lips roll back the way they did before his body kicked his food up again.
Steven frowns – a thing that falls so rarely between those substantial cheeks, it is as though it takes all of his shapeshifting energy to conjure it. "I hope not," he says. "Besides, Lapis hit her so good, it might've even blasted her right back into space."
His admiration is as clean as Jasper's was ravenous. You bow your head, your hair flitting across your face. "Well, probably not that good," you mutter.
You are back on the boat, hidden in Jasper's darkness as she towers above you; you are lifted and unchained by the only thing that can be stronger than your fear and anger. The gleam in her eyes was like the gleam of grease on the pizza, as if she still has a hand inside your Gem rooting around, and you knew that if you were to submerge yourself in Malachite's waters, you would never emerge from them again.
Jasper will be back, you know. From the moment they begin to absorb a planet's life-force, Quartz warriors are constructed to be untiring soldiers – "beasts of war," as Holly Blue Agate derisively referred to them, and you squirm to think you probably nodded with her – soldiers who will not back down until their every goal is accomplished. As the only Gem from her Kindergarten not to emerge malformed, Jasper feels that pressure even more acutely than most, and she will follow that pressure unless given a direct order to do otherwise. On Homeworld, you were thought better than her, yet it's highly unlikely she would ever listen to a Gem who wasn't involved in the militia.
I thought I was a brute. But you – you're a monster. The harsh outlines of Jasper's accusations prod at you, desperate and brittle, ash heaped beneath them.
She will be back.
"Yeah-huh, that good," Steven says. "It was amazing! You were like a superhero or something today."
You glance back at Dr. Drakken, remembering the day you first heard the words super and villain fused. It's not hard to figure out that this must be its counterpoint.
Drakken grins right along with Steven, each of his teeth a polished stone. "This child speaks the truth. I'm going to get my sleeping bag set up. I'm bushed." A yellow blossom springs from the top of his head, and he sighs. "If you'll pardon the expression," he says to it.
You have never heard bush used to mean anything other than a plant, but as you watch Drakken, a yawn digs his chin deeply into his neck. "Tired?" you guess.
"Ding-ding-ding! We have a winner!" Drakken says, as though you have climbed out of an arena with your opponent's gem cradled in your hands.
"Yeah, I'm bushed too," Steven says. "And I'd better get home before Pearl starts to worry or anything."
You snort. "Does she ever not worry?"
Steven's laughter is muted, unsure of its existence. His voice, however, isn't offended as he says, "Well, good night, Lapis. See you around, Drakken."
After Steven warps himself back to the Crystal Gems' fortress, you follow Dr. Drakken into the barn. Peridot is crouched in one corner, surrounded by the scraps of metal and technology that make up her Homeworld. You look hard at her, trying to see the Gem with the wide, ingenuous eyes as the one responsible for your inquisition, and you simply cannot. Her crimes are nothing more than steam on Earth's horizon. You surprise yourself by returning the brief hand-flap she gives you.
Drakken spreads his sleeping bag on the high shelf with great ceremony, making noises of annoyance as he attempts to smooth small mounds from the fabric. No sooner does he stamp one down than another rises to take its place elsewhere. Finally, he throws himself onto the bag and drags his arms up and down as though treading water; he rises again with a wrenching of static.
"Nngghk. . . good enough," Drakken proclaims. He looks at you and hops from foot to foot, seemingly doubtful that the earth can handle both at the same time. "Lapis – before I go to bed – would it be all right if I prayed for you?"
You nod in silence, though your powers sing inside you. No one has ever asked their god to protect you before.
Dr. Drakken crouches above the peeling wood of the barn floor and fastens his fingers around yours, scarcely covering them. His head slants over the curled fist the two of you create. He speaks at a lower pitch than usual, and under the weight of it his buoy-words swell, a submissive downturn at the end of each sentence.
"Amen," Drakken finishes as he opens his round, watering eyes.
You are released into a sudden clarity , as when you finally breach the layer of clouds that patrol Earth's lower atmosphere and you can see the size of it all: so great and so small all at once, so near and yet so far away, everything visible yet so little identifiable. You don't feel safe - a feeling that may well be unrecognizable anyway.
But you don't feel monstrous, either.
Drakken hitches into his sleeping bag, his throat grunting and his back clicking as he searches for a more comfortable position. "Good night. Promise you'll wake me up if anything happens?" he says in a hazed voice.
"Anything?" you say.
"Well, not anything." Drakken's warm, genuine fingers trace circles on the sleeping bag's blue-spangled surface. "Not if Peridot stubs her toe."
You hear yourself giggle, a sound that matches the shimmer you can feel in your stored-away wings.
"But if, you know, if Jasper shows up again. Or – ooh! – in case a meteor shower starts." There is an upswing to every one of Drakken's facets. "I've always wanted to see one of those! Promise?"
"I promise," you say with a smile. "Good night, Drakken."
Drakken relaxes, an action that appears to halve his height. You watch as his eyes close and his face coasts into sleep. It no longer frightens you, not after you made your own safe descent across Mama Lipsky's lap.
He breathes in a cycle, more disciplined than anything he does while conscious. You listen to it for an Earth-time that you forget to measure, peering up into the barn's rafters. The longer you listen, the more Jasper dims in your mind, until all is burned away but the feeble, bare framework of her growling.
You blow on the ashes and scatter them across the sea.
Dr. Drakken awakens the next morning to a kink somewhere in his lumbar region and the faintest filaments of light scattered through a barn window. For a moment, he is puzzled – he doesn't usually wake up in barns – before the events of the previous day come wiggling back in. Though his eyes are still fuzzy and gunked at the edges, his mind sees everything clearly, from Peridot's never-ending supply of capital letters to the way Lapis's gaze flitted away from his when she admitted to having considered Jasper's offer.
If you could label such a thing – part cajoling and part threat – as an "offer."
Drakken catches his upper lip curling at the corner, and he shakes it back down. His focus needs to be on Lapis and her safety. He cannot waste any energy fantasizing about introducing Jasper to the many Doomsday devices he built in his supervillain days. Especially since most of them have been disassembled by now.
They'd all be too good for her, anyway.
Outside, Lapis is perched on the edge of the mini-pond. When she sees Drakken come out, she skips a foot across the surface of the water, splashing him.
Okay – so she's feeling better.
The relief Drakken breathes couldn't be more profound if his back had popped, too. Wiping a few droplets from his belt, he sinks down beside Lapis and can't help checking her wrist for signs of damage. He can still see it, as he saw it in all his dreams last night – the giant thumbprint centered right where her pulse would pound if she had one.
But Lapis's skin is a smooth, unbroken sheet of sea-blue. Almost as if Jasper has never touched it.
"Good morning," Drakken says, clearing some dawn-roughness from his throat.
Lapis gives him the smile that makes everything else float away. "Good morning," she says. "Did you sleep all right?"
Drakken nods. "Did you…stay up all right?" he asks, and then grunts when he recognizes how supremely stupid that sounds. "Errr, that is to say – was it okay? Being awake? By yourself?"
"Well, I wasn't totally by myself." Lapis's shrug is so light and airy, Drakken half-expects the wings to make an appearance. "I mean…I had Peridot."
Drakken can feel his ponytail heading for a perk. "So…you two are getting along now?"
"Better," Lapis says. Another shrug. "I told her I didn't like being called Lazuli. She said she'd try to remember to call me Lapis."
Joy cartwheels through Drakken. "Lapis! Lapis, Lapis, Lapis, Lapis, Lapis," is all he can say, again and again, as if he's backing up Peridot. The noise of it startles a bird from a nearby tree, and as it flees it caws a scolding at Drakken, who couldn't possibly care less. "Lapis! That's amazing! I – Boy, I really feel like we should make badges or something. Something to commemorate all the progress you've made."
Drakken envisions a Girl Scouts sash swiping diagonally across Lapis's bare midriff, adorned with the I-Don't-Want-To-Hate-My-Enemies badge and the Risked-My-Life-To-Save-A-Friend badge and the Gave-Somebody-A-Second-Chance badge. It is a picture he wishes he could capture and download as a screensaver, because it is just so lovely.
Lapis's chin rises a modest notch-and-a-half. Drakken dips his own, much larger, down to meet it.
"Should I give you the chemical breakdown of exactly how jasper differs from lapis lazuli?" he begins.
Lapis giggles. Hers is a little girl's laugh, wispy yet rich, bouncing with both the sprightliness and the power of the ocean. "You're going to keep telling me that, aren't you?" she says.
"Yes, I am," Drakken says stubbornly. He recalls how Lapis's body slumped as she relayed Jasper's "monster" statement, and his chest is nearly split by sadness – sadness with a serrated edge of anger. "Because you need to believe it. You've been trying so hard to do the right thing. Jasper wouldn't know the right thing if it bit her on the left leg."
Lapis releases her delightfully unladylike snort. "Does the right thing usually bite people on the left leg?"
"Sometimes," Drakken says. "In my case, it rocketed me around the inside of my Alpine lair and then slammed me face-first into a puddle of Hydro-Pollinator goo, but everyone's experience is different."
Too late, Drakken realizes Lapis probably didn't understand several of the words in that sentence. But if she is baffled, she doesn't show it. She just dunks her feet back into the pond, and the water immediately swirls around them in a protective clutch. Drakken doesn't blame it.
"Over and over, until you believe it," he says again.
Lapis glances his way and does the thing that has grown even more meaningful since the Malachite incident: the thing where she lifts her face and peels the plaster back from it, inviting him to peer in on her secret little treasures. Drakken takes one look, and immediately his curiosity swamps him. He wants to know everything. Just how significant was an "Elite" on Homeworld? Who sent her to Earth, and why, and why didn't they keep closer tabs on her? What paints the shame on her when she talks about the war she wasn't part of? How do her wings hold their shape when they're so obviously liquid, and how does she still manage to manipulate them?
But he glances down at the top of her spry little hairdo and he swallows them, knowing that she is not ready to tell him yet. Drakken is familiar with the salt-in-the-wound feeling – much more familiar than he wants Lapis to ever be.
He's not used to being this unselfish. It's almost starting to scare him.
"I'm starting to," Lapis says. There is the faintest spark of hope in her voice – a voice that is like a summer picnic when it isn't heavy with worry.
Drakken goes ahead and breaks into a grin, even before he stands up and his back finally pops. "Well, starting is a good…start. Ngggh. I should have thought that sentence through better." He reaches a hand down to Lapis. "Will you be all right if I go back hom – back to Middleton now?"
Lapis's eyes flicker appreciation, and she nods slowly. "I think so." A shy navy blush scoots across her cheeks. "Thanks for coming. I'm sorry if it was any trouble."
"Oh – for the love of – enough apologizing, already! Honestly, Shego never apologizes to me; you never stop. Is there no happy medium?" Drakken props his hands on his hips. "Promise to call me if you need me?"
This time Lapis's nod is even slower and completely devoid of mischief. "I don't have a phone, though," she says. Apologetically.
She really needs to work on that.
"I have a tablet now," someone nasally pipes up.
Peridot comes around the corner of the barn, literally bright-eyed and figuratively bushy-tailed. She claps her hands behind her back and gazes up at Lapis in adoration.
"She has a tablet now," Lapis says to Drakken with a wry note. The words sound as though they are tiptoeing, and her smile is diluted rather than completely dissolved. He watches the tiny features bundle together – not unfriendly, they nevertheless appear too tight, as though the tiniest deviation from her now-bland expression will bust a seam somewhere.
For Drakken, however, Peridot's enthusiasm is contagious. He can't quite contain a chortle when she bobs forward on her toes and says, "I can help her contact you!"
"Marvelous, Peridot." Drakken tilts his head toward her. "All right, ladies. Here I go to spend another day utilizing my awesome brainpower for the good of humanity…and anyone else who needs it."
"Same here," Peridot says, and Drakken appreciates the science major's stiff but earnest and appropriate use of slang. She arches her neck wisely and sighs. "A Crystal Gem's work is never done."
Lapis's eyes sparkle and roll at the same time, something Drakken didn't know could be achieved. "'Bye, Drakken," she says, and then she steps forward and surprises him further with a hug. He returns it, careful to keep his fumbling fingers clear of her gem.
Her face is periwinkle in the rising sunlight, and she feels almost breakable inside his hug. Yet the twiggy little arms that latch behind him have a fierce strength to them, and Drakken makes a conscious effort to believe in it.
As the hovercraft takes flight, Drakken twists back one last time to wave over his shoulder. Peridot waves back with her whole arm, nearly toppling herself over, and Lapis politely twiddles her hand back and forth before sitting back down. Peridot settles in with her and tries to get her own legs, as small as a pair of mushroom stems, to dangle into the water too.
Lapis does not flinch away, and for a screensaver-worthy moment, that is the only thing that counts.