~I'm back! :D There will be action in the next chapter, I promise.
For now, let's get right to the Bismuth at hand. . . Yeah, I know. But she'd say it.~
It all starts so innocently.
This is the point where Shego, certified teacher that she is, would be telling Drakken what a cliché that is, but Drakken begs to differ. Most of the debacles in his life have begun with malice, with a plan for world domination cooking over the butane flame of hate. (He commits that almost-rhyme to memory, in case he ever decides to write another song.)
The crisis of this Friday afternoon, by contrast, begins with the best of intentions: to visit Lapis over the weekend.
He even calls her on Steven's cell beforehand, like the good boyfriend he is. The connection seems staticky when Steven passes the phone to Lapis.
"Good afternoon, Lapis," Drakken says cordially. "And good news! I can come down to Beach City and spend the next couple days with you…you know, if you'd like."
There is a pause, as awkward as the jutting elbows Drakken has never known what to do with. At last Lapis says, "Actually, I don't think that'll work right now."
This is not a better-not-for-convenience "no;" she is bidding him not to come.
Drakken scratches his head, which frustratingly brings no answers, just a few flakes of dandruff. "Why not?"
"There's another Gem who just came to stay at the temple, and things have gotten pretty crazy," Lapis says.
Drakken realizes the static was not in the connection after all; it was in her. She sounds younger than usual, and for a being who doesn't need to breathe, she's sure giving the impression of needing to stop and pant for a good minute or two.
"Another Gem, huh?" Drakken says. "Who is she?"
"Bismuth."
The name doesn't mean anything to him. The quaver in Lapis's voice does.
"Lapis?" Drakken hedges, curling his fingers around the edge of his coffee table.
"She's one of the Crystal Gems' old buddies. From the war. I never met her." Lapis's words are packed together, impenetrable.
Well, the reminder of war could explain that, quite easily. Yet Drakken is struck by that feeling again: that feeling that he is standing on the wrong side of one-way glass and attempting to see through it, see into a world that is blocked off from outsiders.
"Whew. Quite an addition," Drakken says. "I bet that's taken some getting used to."
Then Lapis delivers the final blow:
"I'm fine."
It's automatic, curt, a preprogrammed response. The hairs on the back of his neck stir.
Drakken isn't aware how the conversation ends. He says good-bye – in Chinese, for all he knows – and then he is standing there staring at his phone, his ears filled with the whine of hummingbird wings long after the dial tone has faded.
When Drakken attempts to shove his cell phone back into his pocket, he catches sight of his hands, each finger in the throes of its own individual seizure. What in the name of Michael Tesla am I supposed to do now?
He has always respected what Lapis has asked from him. Always. A unprecedented feat for him, a record he is not eager to break, especially not with the sense of disregarding…ment… that has been hers ever since the war. But if she's lying –
Wait, there's no "if" about it. She was lying. She's not fine. She's come up against something that she can't water-punch away, and if he isn't there to support her, how will he ever forgive himself?
Drakken paces, his hands clenched behind his back, his head down and his jaw thrust forward. His fitful middle will not allow him to remain still.
Or, apparently, to remain in Middleton – because after his sixth or seventh cycle around the hallway, Drakken goes ahead and buckles his sleeping bag into the passenger seat of the hovercraft and takes off.
The ride down to Beach City passes in a worry-flurry. Thoughts zing off the walls of Drakken's head, as blurred as the landscape whizzing by below him. All he can decipher are dozens of exclamation points and the sight of Lapis's strong, timid face.
Hang in there, Lapis. I'm coming, dissolves into a crackle of electricity.
Several hours later, Drakken sets the hovercraft down at a harried angle on the beach, directly across from the carving of the woman with her plethora of hands, two of which cusp the temple. Where the Crystal Gems live. Where this new Gem is staying. He will go up and knock on the door and ask for an explanation in context, because context is king. You can't start a chemistry experiment on step seven and still achieve the desired results, now, can you?
Drakken skids across the sand to the porch and hops up the stairs two at a time. He hums under his breath so that the hand that bangs the door will be calm enough to not bruise it or something.
Pearl opens it immediately, and she glides into a smile when she sees him. "Oh, Dr. Drakken. What a lovely surprise." Her musical voice is as warm as ever, though a tad jittery.
"Yes, good evening, Pearl," Drakken says. "I heard there was a new Gem in town, and I'd like to meet –"
Drakken follows Pearl for a good ten paces as he talks before coming to a halt. Actually, it's more like he careens off the road entirely and skids into a ditch where the airbags deploy directly into his sternum.
Garnet and Amethyst stand by the couch, and all the space in between them is filled with the hulking shoulders of a Gem easily the size of his cousin Eddy. Her skin is a vague grayish-blue, just a few shades off Drakken's own, rather than the muddy brown Lapis described for him. But her rainbow dreadlocks, stringing down like multicolored snakes – and the concavity of her gem, a strange Aztec-style square –
It can be no one else.
For a second, Drakken is sure she has coiled up one of those mammoth-sized hands and punched him in the gut, too. No matter how hard he tries, he can barely gather oxygen, and the few molecules that do take pity on his lungs are as cold as a walk-in freezer.
That's when the hatred finds him again – very quickly and easily, as if he left it a forwarding address. Clawing its way up his throat, tightening his fists in front of him, dousing his muscles in kerosene.
"You!" Drakken blurts. He waffles as his legs have a bitter argument underneath him – the quadriceps wanting to lunge toward her, the ankles certain that they would collapse if they tried.
He wants to pick up the couch and throw it at her. He wants to grab her stupid little depression of a gem and rip it straight out of her chest. The fact he's incapable of doing either only further cripples his breathing.
That's when he feels his vine coil in his neck, just a sliver away from biting through the skin, as angry and raw as he is. Drakken has held weapons in his time, most without pull-triggers – his taste tended more toward compact lasers and enormous Rube Goldberg machines – but this has got to be how it feels to have your fingers curled around a trigger.
Bismuth stands there between Garnet and Amethyst, as though her destructive body belongs in the midst of their acceptance. Drakken wants her to be in pain, in agony.
Wants to watch her pay for what she did during the war…and never answered for.
And it frightens him. He's not supposed to feel this way anymore.
The assailant stares at him, her eyebrows crunched, before she stuns Drakken completely by throwing back her head and chuckling. Drakken expects to hear thunder and breaking glass and the threat of death, but her laugh is rich and thick as a cascade of maple syrup. She rocks her head back and forth a few times before squinting her eyes at Drakken – her not-unkind eyes.
"Who is this guy?" she says, still grinning. "Who's this crazy blue man?"
Drakken can't answer her. He is too busy picking his jaw up and dusting it off. Maybe he has the wrong Gem. A case of mistaken iGemity?
"This is Dr. Drakken, and he was just leaving." Pearl's skinny fingers dig into Drakken's shoulder pads with surprising strength, swivel him around, and shove him out the doorway. Drakken sags against the doorframe and his feet root around under him, searching for ground to trust.
Pearl follows him outside and drags him to the side of the house. Drakken zeroes in on her ballet-style shoes pirouetting across the wood to keep himself from hurling a wicker chair through one of the windows.
"So that's Bismuth," Pearl says. Her laugh sounds like a bag of popcorn being shaken. "We haven't introduced her to Lapis and Peridot yet because she's not exactly fond of Homeworld Gems."
This is the point where Shego would have something bitingly witty to say. Not Drakken. The words are there, somewhere – I know something you don't know! She's a menace! You could all be in very real danger! – but danged if he knows how to lift them to his mouth.
"We're just going to take it nice and slow," Pearl finishes. She gives Drakken's hand a soothing, if obligatory, pat and pivots back into the house.
Drakken stares after her, bracing himself against the porch's rail and blinking against molten contacts. After what can't be long but what feels like eternity, he crawls one foot at a time back to the front of the house and peers through the window.
Garnet is giving Bismuth a playful slug on the arm. Bismuth rears back, her hand coming forward, and Drakken can tell by the sparkle of her eyes that she is not really going to hit Garnet, not really going to hurt her.
At the exact moment its trajectory veers, though, Bismuth's arm begins to glow the color of a sunrise. It flares for a few endless moments until her hand is only visible in silhouette.
And then that silhouette no longer belongs to a hand. As Drakken practically gnaws on the windowsill, Bismuth's hand slowly begins to melt down and fix again in a T-shape. Her arm becomes one long handle tapering down to what Drakken initially mistakes for a shark's head. The blunt knob at the end is the only thing that tells him otherwise as Bismuth misses Garnet's arm by a considered half-inch.
She can turn her hands into hammers?
The next thought, the only natural next thought, is unthinkable. Yet it blinks into place anyway:
That – that must be what she did. To Lapis.
Probably tore a hole straight through her.
It's as though one of Bismuth's dreadlocks has noosed around his neck and another gotten a stranglehold on his belly. Drakken slaps both hands over his mouth and charges blindly across the porch, down the stairs, hits the sand and keeps going.
Only when the temple is a mere dot in the distance and Lapis's ocean drowns out all other noises – only then does Drakken stop, double over, and throw up on the beach.
Drakken straightens, gasping, still gripped by one of his least favorite sensations on this planet or any other. Massages his torso in stripes until it calms enough to assure him that there will not be an instant replay. Picks up a handful of sand and sprinkles it over the little puddle left behind. The tide will take care of the rest.
I'll be all right. I'm not dying. I'll be just fine. It's the same little pep talk Drakken gives himself every time he ends up vomiting, and it has worked just fine for the past four decades. Still, he can't help wishing he had some Pepto-Bis –
Oh.
Drakken grimaces. Yeesh. Talk about the hair of the dog that bit you.
He stalks back to the hovercraft and plots a course for the barn. He needs to have a serious talk with the girlfriend who "never met" Bismuth.
Just because Steven and Peridot's newfound closeness no longer threatens to rupture you doesn't mean you have adjusted to it entirely.
Steven plays songs for Peridot on her tablet, the one you almost smashed one day. You sit a tolerant distance away from them, reminding yourself every few moments that there is no Sapphire trapped inside, singing away in her captivity. There are only the bars of a song Steven called the Hokey-Pokey – an Earth term so obscure even he doesn't have a definition for it.
"You put your right foot in you, you put your right foot out," Peridot reads from the screen. "In and out of what? And how? I can't detach my gravity connectors anymore!"
You turn your head away and roll your eyes. There must be an alternate meaning. No one and nothing on Earth, as far as you have seen, is able to detach their appendages.
Brittle grass snaps under feet, and the body heat of a native Earthling approaches from the open field beyond the barn. You glance over in time to see Dr. Drakken appear on the horizon like a plume of smoke. His fists are constricted into stones at his sides, his bag-for-sleep jammed under one arm. His shadow is cast in front of him, out-sizing him and turning his short, harried strides into something longer, fiercer.
Your own inherent chill grows suddenly uncomfortable.
"Lapis!" Drakken calls as he approaches. "May…I…have….a…word?"
His voice, lashing from his lips, tells you he wants more than one, and none of them will be happy.
"Uh – Peridot – how 'bout we listen to the rest over here?" Steven says. He wraps one plump fist around Peridot's arm and drags her around the corner of the barn, deliberately avoiding eye contact with both you and Drakken.
Peridot, by contrast, transmits gawking looks back at you until she disappears from sight.
Drakken looks even worse up close. The Rose flares on his cheeks nearly match the inflamed tendrils in the white parts of his eyes. You can see in them that his anger is not selfish, and that makes it infinitely more dangerous.
It also tells you it can have only one source.
"You saw Bismuth," you say. The statement is flat; it cannot be anything else.
"Ohhh-ho-ho, I saw her, all right!" There is no flatness in the way Drakken speaks, and no hint of the buoys in which you have grown to take comfort. He is loud, so loud you wish you could stop hearing him, and harsh in a way he has never been before. An odor, filthy and only faintly familiar, blasts your nose as he says, "And you've got some explaining to do!" He nurses a hand over the splitting skin around his lips.
A thin line of panic pinches down your back. "Why are you even here?" you ask Drakken. "I told you not to come."
Drakken swats his hand around, as if your words have no more force than the fading drone of Earth's small insects. "I knew something was wrong," he says.
"But nothing is wrong," you say. "Not right now. Bismuth's not causing any trouble. She doesn't even know I'm here. You didn't need to come." You take a step toward him and recognize the stench that comes forward to meet you. "And you're sick!"
"Sick?" Drakken stares.
"I can smell it. On your breath. Your food got knocked out again." You take another step, your hand out, ready to help him through this process which caused him such fear last time.
To your surprise, Drakken squirms away. "Oh, that," he says. "No. I just threw up when I saw her, that's all." His voice has his mother's shrillness, underscored with his own boom, and he points it at you, blaming you.
Panic goes away, replaced by another common visitor: anger. "Look, I'm sorry that made you sick, but it's not my fault," you say. "I told you things were fine – you should have listened – and if you had –"
"Lapis, really!" Drakken lets out a gust of air, more Nova-blaster than sigh. "You'd say things were 'fine' if you were being chased by a pack of dingoes!"
You search yourself for warmth, and you find none. You are nothing more than a small blue projection of light, manipulated into a form, kept together only by the gem anchored between your shoulders, so nothing goes into your reply. "You mean – you don't trust me?" It comes out without the hint of a quiver.
"How can I?" Drakken says. His arms come out from his sides as if on springs, and he talks in a squeak that is not yours or even Peridot's. "'I never met her.'"
All you can smell is the reek on Drakken's breath. You feel coated in it, unclean and murky. "I – I wasn't – I mean – we were never introduced," you say.
"Oh, but you knew her!" Drakken says. "You met her! Just long enough for her to – for her to –" He cuts himself off with a gurgle, the sound of water simmering on a newly landed meteor.
His face is the hard, wasted land on Failed Base 1, a planet too stiff for even the most skilled Lapis to terraform. It is the face Blue Diamond wears when she talks about Rose Quartz. It is all the evidence you need that you were right.
"I couldn't tell you," you snap at him. "I couldn't tell you because I knew you'd do something awful to her!"
Something breaks behind Drakken's eyes, and you watch the pieces fall. "Honestly? You were afraid of that?" he thunders, the hurt thicker than you imagined it would be.
You hurt, too, for him, yet your wings have turned to ice and filtered down to your arms and legs. Moving toward him is now impossible. You cannot call the words back; you can only try to soften them with your intent. "I just…I don't want you to go back to prison," you say.
Predictably, Drakken's big round chin hikes. For the first time, you allow yourself to recognize it as arrogance.
"For what?" he says. "She's not even a citizen of Earth!"
You take another step, this time backward, away from the tied-back hair dancing manically as Drakken's head whips, away from the shrunken little finger that wags at you.
"Neither am I," you say. Your words are at their absolute quietest, the volume that back on Homeworld was reserved for when you found yourself the target of an Agate's wrath. No one and nothing can reach them now.
The pink dribbles out of Drakken's sharp, brittle cheekbones. For an instant, he looks every bit as lost, scared, and gentle as the man you first encountered on the beach that day. His chubby jawline trembles.
"I'm just trying to protect you," he says, also as quietly as he is capable.
"I can protect myself," you say, and it's true. You can. Wasn't it, in fact, the prospect of your self-protection that frightened you into calling upon your wings instead when Bismuth's fingers crashed together around your arm?
The world seems to pitch beneath you at the memory. Unlike the waves, you have no control over this. You can only fasten your body into place and tip your face up to meet Dr. Drakken's. His pink blotches have returned.
"I'm fin –" You clamp your lips shut, dismantling the word, but not quickly enough.
"You see what I mean?" Drakken's hands splay; you see both triumph and disillusionment. "You're 'fine'! Everything's 'fine'! Fine, fine, fine! Give me one reason why I should believe you now."
None comes. There is none, and you know it. You stare straight ahead. The story, the secret, your secret, the one with which you entrusted this man, has been unraveled and reknit into the type of banner that one flies above a battlefield. "I never should have told you," you say.
There's no explosion as the words leave you – in fact, they are dull and numb on their way out – yet they are a missile whose course cannot be altered.
Anger pours on Dr. Drakken, in a rush to be the first to overtake him. His arms rise until his elbows are above his head and then curl there. "Indeed!" he says. "Ohhh, I see how it is now!" Your back shivers with the feeling that he doesn't know quite what he is saying.
"Look, you're not always going to be able to protect me," you say.
"Says who?" Drakken lobs back. His blinks are rapid, his buoy-voice waterlogged.
"Says logic." You drill your heels into the grass. "I mean, think about it. What if something happens here, and you're back in Middleton on some really important mission for work? What do you plan to do then?"
"I! Don't! Know!" Drakken's fingernails drag down the riled, bunching skin, printing frustration on it.
"Well, maybe you better figure that out," you say.
"FINE!" Drakken says.
"FINE!" You aren't aware your pitch is rising until this word – the word responsible for starting the entire argument in the first place – bursts from you. Your throat, unaccustomed to shouting, burns as though Bismuth has razed a molten crafting down the length of it.
"Can I still sleep in the barn?" Drakken snaps.
"Sure!" you reply.
The bag for sleeping has long since been dropped on the ground. Drakken retrieves it, sticks it under his arm, and picks his way to the barn, a crab among driftwood. At the doorway, he turns and glances at you in a way you recognize: it is that involuntary look of having to descend a great distance to be level with someone, the one a Gem gives to everyone beneath her when she is sectioned away in a corner of the imperial palanquin.
It is the look you are probably giving him now.
You wrench away from him and stare down at your bare toes. A disturbance, like the kind that sometimes flickers across Peridot's television, runs between your shoulder blades. Your body is nothing more than a cavity.
"Lapis?"
You turn to see Steven peeking out from behind the barn's far wall. A gaping and momentarily silent Peridot stands beside him. Above them, the sun has hunkered low, close to the earth's curve, for one last meeting before it bids this hemisphere good night and journeys to the next.
Steven lets go of Peridot's hand and jogs up to you. "Did you guys just break up?" he asks. The eyes he turns on you are heavy.
You shake your head, the fringe of hair on your forehead jerking impatiently. "Nobody's broken," you huff. "We're just mad right now."
With that, you flounce your way into the barn to keep an eye on Dr. Drakken.
Your orbits do not cross for the rest of the evening. Peridot insists on showing you her five favorite episodes of Camp Pining Hearts on DVD, which Drakken also watches sullenly from his shelf. Steven warps home to go to bed, and finally Drakken does the same, flinging a curt "Good night" your way before he collapses into his sleeping bag.
Otherwise, the silence between the two of you is complete and so cold that you suspect your wings are ice, and you keep away from Peridot's beloved smaller-than-average lake lest you freeze it over, too. You don't need one more thing to worry about.
It is enough, what you already carry: the inkling that Drakken, if given the chance, might shatter Bismuth. Kill you know is the human term for it, a word that sounds rather short and nondescript compared with the unarguable finality of shatter.
Yet what you call it hardly matters. He could find it in himself to do it, and this peace will fall apart like the unstable fusion of refugee and renegade Gems it is.
For hours, you crouch in the barn's rafters, observing Drakken. He puffs and twitches his way to sleep, yet you still watch him to make sure he will not wake and sneak away, taking it as his duty to punish Bismuth. Bismuth is strong and brutal and quicker than she should be, but Dr. Drakken is clever and supported by his plants. You don't know who would win a fight between them; either outcome lands inside you as terror.
Midway through the night, something changes in Drakken's sleep. His middle begins to cave, right where the black strip of cloth divides it, and his eyes stutter quickly behind their lids. You watch a nightmare seize him and shake him as a storm at sea will do to a ship. It is as though it shakes you, too, your back stinging with how you imagine the strike of a wave would feel; having never been hit by one yourself, you can't say for sure.
More unintelligible noises issue from Drakken. These, however, do not froth with rage as did the ones he shot at you earlier in the evening. Instead, they tuck and curl under at the edges, attempting to retreat to safety.
You fly down from the rafters and kneel on the planks beside the shelf. Slowly, slowly, your hand reaches out and cradles Drakken's, thumb rubbing over the tops of his gloves. The other hand goes to the area where his elbow bends in and rests there. You press yourself as close to Drakken as your mutual skittishness will allow.
Drakken's body jerks away, his sleep broken. Fogging, morose eyes open and meet yours, and his voice matches them when he says, "Lapis?"
You nod. "I'm here."
Drakken scratches at his startled-looking hair. "Why?" he asks, although he doesn't sound unhappy.
"You were having a bad dream," you say. "I didn't want you to be alone with that."
In answer, Drakken lets out another new sound: a strange fusion of chuckle and sob that harmonizes far better than you and Jasper ever did. You don't need to inquire what the dream was about. After Malachite split, you encountered several distorted versions of Bismuth as well – one where she was nothing more than a reflective outline, one where she opened her mouth and swallowed you whole, one where she was made of glass that separated into individual shards and pelted you from above – all of which you were helpless to correct.
"Well, thank you," Drakken says. Although the buoy-words are still bogged down, they begin a lazy rustle.
You nod again.
Drakken shakes his head, the way you have seen Peridot shake disobedient machinery. "Lapis, we need to talk," he says.
You glance up at him sharply, but his face is soft and spongy, any residue of arrogance like a prior physical form cast aside after a regenerative redesign.
"Okay," you say, leaning back casually on one arm.
Drakken kicks at the inside of his sleeping bag until he tumbles free and rolls off the shelf. Both of you wince when he crashes to the floor on his chest.
"Ow, ow, ow, ow, that hurt, that hurt, that hurt, that hurt, I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay," Drakken says, perhaps more to himself than to you. He pushes himself up onto tentative palms, straightens his spine with a click, and finally accomplishes a sit, his legs hugging each other. "All right. Mind if I start?"
"No. Go ahead."
"Much obliged," Drakken says. "Well, I'm not going to apologize for trying to protect you –" the assertion doesn't have time to fully harden before it is tempered – "but I'm sorry I made you feel like I couldn't trust you.
"I don't think of you as a liar – honest, I don't – heh – little bit of irony there. It's just that sometimes you…sometimes you…" Drakken trails off.
"Sometimes I what?" you prompt him.
Drakken's fists gather and fall, gather and fall, several times before he speaks again. "Sometimes you tell us things are fine – when they're very much not fine."
You say nothing because there is nothing to say. What he has said is as true as the tides – and unlike the tides, you can't contest it. You do not have enough experience with arguing to try to do so now.
"I know it's because you don't want us to worry," Drakken says. His voice creaks sleepily, reminding you of the songs insects played on their legs earlier in the season. "Which is actually pretty darn noble of you. But who cares if I'm worried? I just want to be able to HELP you!"
You nudge your fingerprints closer to your face. "I don't want to be a burden," you say into them. "Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl – they only –"
"I'm not Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl!" Drakken exclaims. His eyes drift inward again. "Err, make that Garnet, Amethyst, or Pearl. Otherwise, I'd be one heck of a fusion."
It almost stirs you to laugh before you recall the enormous pink creature: the shaded glass over her eyes, the dimensions of her mouths – all images imported from Malachite's untrustworthy memory.
"Anyway! Point being!" Drakken coughs. "I'm not any of them. And you are not a burden! A burden is when someone has to move a stolen Sub-Atomic Nuclear Reactor Ray from one evil lair to another, and none of that has anything to do with you. You're my friend. If you're upset about something, I want to know, and if you keep it from me, it's going to upset me more, and then where would we be?!"
"On Earth," you say. "Hopefully." A facet of you that has been dimming for a long time finally goes dark and still. "Oh – is that a speech figure?"
"Absolutely, yes." Drakken's head bobs like the orb on Greg's fishing stick. "If you don't tell me when I need to worry, then I'm going to worry all the time by default! Not fun! So please let me know when I need to actually be worried, and we can figure it out from there. Okay?"
His fingertips settle in yours, and your gem taps to the pattern of his heartbeat. You know he is waiting for you to agree, just like you know he truly does believe it is that simple. The plaintive smile that looks back at you has known guilt, and it has known hate, but not the type that has its roots in privilege. Secrecy is no more familiar to it than the rays of Homeworld's sun.
Right now, you owe it the truth you have tried to spare it.
You allow your mouth to move yet instruct everything else on your face to remain steady, inflexible. "It wasn't that I didn't want you to worry – wasn't just that I didn't want you to worry," you say, stumbling in your search for truthfulness. "I knew that if you saw Bismuth, and you recognized her, you would do something awful to her."
The moonlight seeping in through the barn's window silvers Dr. Drakken's skin. He is a creature made of frost, except for the wild, painful-looking vibrations of his entire body. The knob in his throat jerks, and you wish you had said "thought" instead of "knew."
"Lapis! I – I – Do you think I want to go back to prison?" Drakken sputters. The buoy-words are twisted, lumped.
"No!" You snap your head back and forth. "Nobody wants to be a prisoner again!" You hear yourself soften the smallest measure as you continue. "But I know you care about me enough that you'd risk it."
The frost on Drakken thaws, as though at the touch of an uncommonly gentle Ruby. "Can you honestly say you don't want something horrible to happen to Bismuth?"
You can see the waves, your waves, wrapping around Drakken, entangling him, taking away his needed oxygen, forcing him down into that merciless place.
The despised grip on your arm is almost tangible, but not quite, the memories of a past body. "No," you say. "But I don't want you to be the one to do it to her."
Drakken's fingers bounce off each other in his lap, quarreling for position. There is a question in the movement – a "Wha?" with the T lost in puzzlement. Once he finds the means to express it, he will drown you out, so you hurry your explanation:
"You're just learning how to not hate people," you say. "I don't want to drag you back down into it." Your voice is all jagged corners and white-capped breaks. "I don't want to bring hate back into your life."
Drakken's mouth collapses around the beginning of a sob. A green vine emerges from his neck, makes a distant circle around you, and the tiny lavender flower at the end of it rests its petals against your bare shoulder. The edges have all been rounded off, a strange comfort.
"Miss Lazuli, you have done anything but brought hate into my life," Drakken says. You were wrong about him drowning you out; though he speaks as loudly as ever, you are reminded of a foghorn, working to lead you safely ashore, away from the destruction of the rocks below. "You've basically overloaded my circuits with love. The only reason I even do hate Bismuth is because I love you so much."
Your gem tightens, confiscating all feeling from the rest of your back. "See? That's my point!"
"No, that's my point, Lapis!" Drakken's arms fold in a link as tangled and messy at the ends of his hair, and you can't help but smile at the sight. "The way I feel about you is far more important than the way I feel about Bismuth. I love you doubly as much as I hate her! Triply! Quadruply! Infinity!"
You look at him, at the anger and the sadness and the concern and the hope all juxtaposed in his eyes. You think about how quickly his numbers escalated, and the powers that were readied within you release and sink back into the place where humans have muscle and bone.
"Honestly, I think I'll leave the hating to Bismuth," Drakken says. He shakes his head. "She's pretty good at it."
It is a strangely knowledgeable thing for him to state, and you wonder just what he saw when he stood in the Temple and faced down the Gem whose cruel smile was the last thing you saw before your world became glass. "Did they tell you that?" you ask. It seems the kind of thing Amethyst would let slip, or that Pearl would point out in her mission to educate.
Drakken shrugs. "Sort of. Pearl said Bismuth didn't like Gems from Homeworld, which –" his bottom lip shifts sideways, towing the lower part of his face with it – "doesn't exactly makes gobs and gobs of sense. I mean, that'd be like me hating humans from Earth."
"Bismuths weren't really considered that important on Homeworld," you tell him. You hate how you sound; you could be any other Lapis. "I mean, they had important jobs," you correct yourself, "but no one ever bothered to stop them and say, 'Hey, Bismuth. Nice weapons you forged today.'"
"She forged weapons?!" Drakken says.
You nod. "And she hated anyone who was better off than her."
If the Diamond insignia on your skirt and shirt didn't brand you, the wings you frantically summoned would.
"Ohhhhh," Drakken says. "Well, that is… a very common supervillain motivation." He rolls a palm outward. "Heck, it was sort of my motivation."
"Then do you see?" you say. "You see why I can't let you hurt her?"
"Yes." Drakken gives a sigh that is almost equal to one of Yellow Diamond's. "But it just…it isn't right for her to get away with it."
"I know." You would be lying if you said that those same thoughts haven't washed through your mind, all the possibilities coursed through you: slapping Bismuth back into space with a mighty hand of water; creating a liquid clone so that she could experience the thrust of the hammer into her own gut; turning droplets into ice shards, something you have not willingly done since that first demonstration of your perfect Emergence condition, and driving them into her –
Encapsulating her in a water bubble, levitating her far above this planet's thin atmosphere, and demanding to know if she even remembers you.
"Believe me," you say, "I know."
Drakken scoots his backside across the barn floor, lifts a hand to his sleeping-shelf, and comes back down with his teddy bear – Sir Fuzzymuffin the Second – nested in his lap. Without a word, you glide over to the corner where you have hidden Plastic Lazuli away from Peridot's intrusive little fingers and rest her in your own lap.
"We need to make promises," Dr. Drakken says. "To each other. I need to make a promise to you, and you need to make a promise to me. And if I can't make the first promise you want me to make, or vice versa, we have to keep amending it until we've found a promise we can both live with. Neither one of us is leaving this barn until we've agreed on promises!
"Errr, is that quite all right?" Drakken asks. His cheeks spring up pink. "I – I've had a little more experience with taking hostages than settling negotiations."
"It's fine." You giggle for the first time since Bismuth's reappearance. "And I'm not just saying that." It is calming in the area between your shoulder blades, and that is the only area where those sensations are of any importance.
Dr. Drakken's body, which has been as tight as a wire racked between two poles, relaxes, and you watch the wobbling, comical ears level. "Can I go first?"
"Sure," you say.
Drakken clears his throat. The moon's sunlight prances in around him, and his shadow spreads toward you once more, in reconciliation this time. "I want you to promise that you'll let someone know when you're not fine," he says.
You frown.
It does not go unnoticed by Drakken. The peninsula of his lower lip tucks in on itself and works back and forth; it is not hard to imagine the thoughts rolling and spinning in whatever space they occupy in a human's head. "Okay, amending that," he says. "I want you to promise you'll let someone know when you're really, REALLY not fine! Like when the new Gem in town turns out to be one so full of hate that she will attack – that she has attacked – someone like you without batting an eye."
There is an edge of hysteria to it, as thin and sharp as a Pearl's nose. You wish to nod at it, help it to retreat, and yet the stirring of your neck feels as dishonest as your claim to have never met Bismuth. "I don't think I know how to," you say.
Drakken blinks several times. "Pick up Peridot's tablet and call me. Or just go up to someone, take them aside, and say, 'I need help.' Scream and stomp your feet if you have to!"
You trip over the image of yourself yelling at the Crystal Gems, and you can tell by the mischievous way Dr. Drakken smiles that he is attempting to picture it as well. "That doesn't sound like a very good idea," you say.
"Uh. Heh. Normally, it isn't," Drakken says. "But when you need someone that badly – desperate times call for desperate measures."
You run your finger down the soft curve of Plastic Lazuli's arm. She is warmer than you, as if Mama Lipsky managed to stitch humanity into the bear as she crafted her. Drakken's buoyant words lock in combat with the hard loud voices of the Agates, and with the subdued voice of your Diamond, a voice like a river current, almost undetectable yet impossible to swim against – You are a Lapis. Of course you're fine.
None of them would say "I love you" any more than you would wind up and scream at the Crystal Gems.
You open your eyes and raise them to Drakken's dark, earnest ones, bright where the lights polish them. You want to see the joy shimmer in them when you say it – "I promise."
A magical grin bursts onto Drakken's face. "Oh, thank you, Lapis," he bubbles. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!"
"My turn," you say uncomfortably. The duck of his head speaks only of politeness, not subservience, but your wings still clutch at the sight. "I want you to promise that you won't hurt Bismuth."
It is Drakken's turn to frown. He strokes the mending on his cheek and then the smaller replica on his bear's. Several grunts are uttered, probably without him knowing it.
"All right. I guess I have to amend, too," you say, and there are no white caps in your voice anymore; it is steady and calm. "How about this? I want you to promise not to hurt Bismuth unless you absolutely have to – to keep her from hurting somebody else."
The term is deliberately encompassing. You saw it in Bismuth that day on the battlefield: not the darkness you saw in Jasper, but a glow warped and wrinkled until it blinded its owner. She can no longer see any action as beneath her.
Drakken nods at you. "Yes," he says. "That I can promise."
You take a slow sip of Earth's air. It is thin and dark, nothing like the sunny Homeworld you remember –yet also nothing like the husk to which you returned, shrouded in its own misery. Somewhere on your back, you register the feeling of safe port.
"What's a dingo, anyway?" you say.
Drakken glances up from making his bear walk across the floor. "Whaaaa – oh. It's a wild dog."
"Like a wolf?"
"Yes, mostly. They're a little smaller than wolves. Lighter fur color. And then live on a land mass all the way diagonally across the world." Drakken's knowledge is a delighted thunderclap as he shares it with you. "But basically, same concept as wolves."
"Do they fly?" you ask.
"No."
"Then I would be fine if I were being chased by a pack of them," you say.
There is another volley of blinks from Dr. Drakken. "Well – yes – poor analogy on my part, then." He snickers, sputters, takes Sir Fuzzymuffin by the tips of his arms and gives the bear a twirl. "But – just in case – in case you get yourself into a different sort of scrape – I can definitely teach you how to throw a tantrum."
"Is that like throwing a baseball?" you say. You rearrange your legs, which are too long to fold into a delicate little gate the way Drakken's do. "Because I know how to do that now."
Drakken chuckles. "No, tantrum is just the collective word for when you scream and thrash and cry and kick."
"Oh." From lightyears away, you can feel Blue Diamond's heavy gaze upon you, and you nearly shudder. "I thought maybe it was one of your tech tools, a big one that'd get you a lot of attention if you threw it."
"That makes sense," Drakken says kindly. "I don't know why they call it throwing a tantrum. Well, some people call it that – like Shego. Hissy fits is also used…"
That is much more descriptive. You shrug. "Doesn't really sound like my style."
"No, it doesn't," Drakken agrees. "But if you could ever use some pointers…" he thumbs himself in the chest.
"I'll keep that in mind," you say.
Drakken's mouth springs open into a laugh, and then you are laughing, too. Your bears hug. You discover one of Peridot's Camp Pining Heart DVDs – she never can remember to keep her garbage in her corner – and do a melodramatic reading of the back cover. Drakken stands up and explores every inch of the barn that is now your home, running his fingers over Peridot's tin-can foot-boosters, tweaking the antenna on the old television box, lying on his belly to observe an armored bug making its way into a knothole. He doesn't smell like reused food anymore.
Sometime in the midst of that, the rays coming through the window turn golden and direct, rather than the pale reflections bouncing off the moon. Not long after that, the clear spangled sound of the warp pad announces the arrival of another Gem – hopefully Steven.
You and Drakken exit the barn connected at the hands.
It is Steven, and he seems pleased to see the two of you. "Oh, good, you guys made up!" he says. "I hate it when friends fight!"
He smiles, without its usual effervescence. His eyes are ringed in pink like one of Drakken's blossoms, and there is something in them that has never been there before. It does not do away with his innocence, but layers itself translucently over it; still, the new presence is jarring. His curls lie limp and flat, and he balances awkwardly, missing one of the pink shoes with the ridged bottoms and the opened tops.
Your gem gives a quick, hard twist. "What's wrong, Steven?" you say.
Steven sighs, shoulders caving. "Bismuth had to leave. . . actually, I sorta had to poof her."
It never occurred to him to lie; he is not like you.
You immediately sit down, form a lap with your skirt, and pull Steven onto it. Your arms wrap him, determined to give him even a small portion of the comfort he has given you over the last year.
"How is he not squishing you?" Dr. Drakken says from behind you.
You turn your most pleasant expression toward Drakken. "Shut up, please," you say politely.
He doesn't entirely – you think perhaps he is choking on a laugh – but he does stop distracting you with his words.
You rest your chin atop Steven's head. "It's okay," you murmur to him. "You didn't have a choice."
"How do you know that?" Steven demands. "I haven't even told you what happened yet!"
Steven's words wither and fold in on themselves, like plants taken by the Kindergarten. All the pain you have ever known compresses into the stone that gives you life, cinching away your breath, which is fine; you don't need it.
"But I know you," you say fiercely. "And you never would have done it if she had given you even half a choice." You tighten your grip, bring him closer. "You're a healer; you always have been."
You glance down at his huge round tears, which Steven drags a wrist across, smearing them from puddles to rivers. You see him in so many different ways – as the winsome face that first peeked into the mirror's circle, as the hand that stretched out in forgiveness and cured the silvern scales from your eyes, as the shield that reached out to widen the distance between you and Jasper. He should be shielded in return.
"It turns out Bismuth had made this weapon," Steven says. "Not recently. This was back during the war."
Bony, clumsy fingers curl around your shoulders from behind.
"It was called the Breaking Point." Steven nears a whimper. "And she made it to shatter Gems."
A rancid certainty blows over you as the smell of Drakken's sickness did: If Bismuth had had the breaking point that day on the battlefield, she would have done it; she would have shattered you without hesitation.
You couldn't move now if you wanted to.
"She took me down into the forge and gave it to me to use," Steven continues. "She said she gave it to my mom, too, a long time ago, but Mom wouldn't let her use it. I guess Bismuth was hoping I'd do something different."
There is only the briefest of pauses, yet in it a realization takes form within the heart of your gem – in some capsized, off-center way, you owe Rose Quartz your life.
You feel the steadying weight of the boy in your lap and give a rueful smile. Perhaps this is something you have already known for a while.
It almost drives you, strangely, to laugh. If the notorious criminal Rose Quartz was too compassionate to permit the Breaking Point's use, what hope did Bismuth think she had of winning Steven's favor?
"She said she wanted to shatter the Homeworld Gems," Steven says. "And – and all I could think was that that could have been you – or Peridot –"
He doesn't know just how close it was to being you.
" – so I told her no, too." The soft stomach cringes. "And that made her really, really mad. Like super-extra-mega-mad. She started yelling a lot, and then I think maybe she tried to kill me…I'm not sure…it all happened really fast."
Another shiver reaches for your innards, yet you know it will never come to be, just as the gasp between your lips will never be released. The word kill rattles through your head with no place to go.
It no longer sounds nondescript.
"So I-I was running away from her," Steven says, "and she came after me. Then she thought I really was my mom and I'd been lying about taking a new form…"
A snort of laughter does leap from you then, though you guide it ashore before it can become anything more. "Not that again," you say with a roll of your eyes.
Steven's sigh is the culmination of a thousand-year conflict, a sigh too old for him, perhaps one left behind for him by Rose. "Yeah, that again." He glances down at his feet. "Also, one of my shoes fell in the lava, so now I just have the one.
"I tried to run away, but she had me cornered. And I had my mom's sword, so I just – whoosh –" Steven gives his arm a blind swing. "And then the next thing I knew – she was – she was –"
You put your hand over his, which is still clenched tightly, and squeeze, letting him know he does not need to say the rest.
Behind you, Dr. Drakken makes a coarse noise as though he is the one who has been run through. How much more horrifying must it seem, you wonder, to a fully human construction, for whom such a thing would be the end?
"And I didn't mean to!" Steven says. Sweat and nose liquid dribble onto his palms as the sentences arrange themselves into a dirge. "I didn't want to! She – she played volleyball with us. And she cried when Pearl cried."
You don't know what volleyball is and make an unsuccessful attempt to imagine Bismuth crying.
"She cried right before she poofed, too," Steven says. "She said she felt like she hadn't mattered at all to my mom."
"Steven, I'm so sorry." It's the only thing you can possibly say.
Steven gulps and shifts in your lap. "What if she was right, though? Everybody's always said I'm so much like my mom…and I always thought that was supposed to be good."
This time you do not move your mouth at all.
"Now I find out my mom poofed and bubbled one of her best friends – and never told the others!" Steven says. "I'm glad she kept Bismuth from hurting people, but it sounds like she really hurt Bismuth's feelings." He curls his fingers around his toes and sniffles, this person who can still find it within him to care about the feelings of the Gem who nearly destroyed him. "What if me being like her isn't a good thing?"
A sympathetic type of growl rises from behind you. Drakken sinks onto his knees and leans forward so that your ribbon skims his cheek.
You are encased between two warm pillars of humanity, vowing that you will not speak until you can do so without insulting Rose Quartz.
"That's not why people say you remind them of your mom, though," Drakken says. He bends his head over yours to look Steven in the eye. "They're talking about all the best parts of her. The parts they want to keep around."
You glance up at Drakken. His face is as vulnerable as you have ever seen it, an open target, an unprotected gem. When he speaks again, his buoy-words are arranged into a soft, protective column.
"My father ran out on my mother and I when I was just a little kid," Drakken says. The upsweep of his hair takes a sharp turn downward, as does every other bend and angle on him. "I used to hate him so much and I'd hate myself if I was anything like him. But, you see, my mother told me that all the things about my father she'd fallen in love with, she could see in me. She said if it weren't for me, she wouldn't even remember what he looked like when he smiled."
He smiles now, a thing that could quaver off his mouth any moment, that is bright and brave nonetheless. "And I don't know who your mother is or what she did, but I'd be awfully surprised if she was worse than my father." You look at the black, tied-back bramble, compare it to Mama Lipsky's red fibrous pile of hair, and grasp the significance of its difference.
Steven sniffles again, wipes his fledging face once more, and brightens marginally.
You want more, so you bend over him. The honesty sits on your tongue like your tastebuds: capable of being shifted away at will. For now, though, you have had enough of lying.
"Look, Steven," you say, "I didn't like your mom very much. But I love you." You put an arm around each heaving little side, trying to imprint what even you know is the truth. "She cared about Earth and the humans – and now I can see that that was a good thing. But you – you do more than that. You care about the Homeworld Gems, too. Look at how you helped Peridot and me."
You think of the ocean you stole, stretching helplessly into the sky, trying to reach beyond the void. It could not link the two worlds. . . but perhaps Steven can.
"I don't know how all this parent stuff works, but I'm pretty sure you don't have to be your mom if you don't want to. You're your own person," you whisper into Steven's tiny seashell of an ear. You roll his fingers forward and tap the prints on the tips, and you hear Dr. Drakken wheeze behind you. "You can be whoever you want to be. I swear."
Steven's head stays lifted at the end of his nod. "You know what? That's almost exactly what Bismuth told me."
Surprise sprints down your back, and you seize control of it before it can transfer to Peridot's little lake and change it to a jumble of bubbles. You expect your voice to be a hard mass when you use it; instead, it is plumy and retiring. "Well," you say, "at least she was right about one thing."
A slim ray of light, the light that is uniquely Steven, begins in his swollen eyes. They look older than the ones that searched yours just last night, and if you'd bet if you could see the Crystal Gems now, so would theirs. Bismuth has a way of doing that.
You link another embrace around Steven's chest. "We love you, Steven!" you say.
How long you remain that way, you don't know, but the tears tracks on Steven's cheeks are dried, stiff deposits of salt by the time he stands up. He has hugs for you and for Drakken, whose instinctive panic quickly calms under such a loving and sincere touch. Steven waves at the two of you and walks back to the warp pad at perhaps slightly less of a slope than when he arrived.
The brilliant flash has barely faded before Drakken is bending beside you again, his hand foraging for yours. "Are you going to tell him that Bismuth was the one who – the one who –"
He still can't bring himself to say it.
You glance upward at the clouds that have chosen to frame Earth's sun today rather than block it; you hear Steven's name in the rustle of the speckling leaves. "Yeah. I am. But not now."
Only then does it occur to you that Bismuth got what she deserved.
In the only scenario worse than Drakken's revenge would have been.
~And now for an alternate scene. It didn't fit into the timeline of this chapter, but I wanted to write it anyway. So. . . you get a bonus. :)~
Dr. Drakken continues to stare into the face of this – this Bismuth. Roughly his hue. Framed by dreadlocks in yogurt-pastels. Crinkled up in amusement at him with nary a trace of ugliness to betray it.
He would find nothing off-putting about her, were he meeting her for the first time. Well, technically he is meeting her for the first time, albeit with the knowledge that she poofed his Laps –
His mobility is waning, legs unreliable, vision saturated with pepper flecks. . .
Drakken is actually relieved when Pearl grasps his shoulders before he can thoroughly disintegrate. "Who, him?" she says. "Oh, oh, this is Dr. Drakken, one of our human friends!" Her fake laughter, while still pretty, is so high-pitched Drakken is surprised the window-glass doesn't splinter. "And he just came over for a visit. Didn't you?"
She gets nothing in response from Drakken. He is too busy grinding three years' worth of orthodontic work down to powder.
Fortunately, at that moment Steven bursts in through the front door, hefting a ball almost bigger than his hand over his head. "Okay, I got the volleyball!" he cries. "Who wants to come play?"
Bismuth shoots up her arm immediately. "Abso-lute-ly me," she says. "I gotta find out how this works." Every sliding-out syllable is incongruously warm.
Drakken's arm follows soon afterward.
He needs to keep an eye on her.
A rousing game of volleyball ensues. Well, it's actually more like sand-going-up-your-nose-ball for Drakken. Steven and Garnet, his teammates, don't appear to mind, though. Between Garnet's gauntlet-enhanced smacks and Steven's ability to meet the ball no matter how high it's lobbed, the two of them more than make up for Drakken's fumbles, misses, and ground-dives.
On the other side of the net, Pearl, Amethyst, and Bismuth seem to be having a good time as well. Pearl's movements – and comments – lilt over the dune grass like the breeze. Amethyst pumps her fist and bellows, "Ye-ah!" whenever her team scores and gives Steven a good-natured high-five whenever his team does.
And Bismuth?
She's right in there with all of them, laughing when they do, lifting Amethyst onto her shoulders so she can catch a high-flying shot, even cheering Steven on when Steven bounces the volleyball off a strange pink shield he appears to pull from his belly button. Yet there is something about her – something off: how high she jumps to launch the ball, how roughly her hand smacks it when it heads her way, the guttural grunts that accompany her heavy landings.
To say Drakken is confused is an understatement. His mind is one big knotted, frayed extension cord. One that stops about two inches short of the socket.
They troop back into the house, the six of them, Steven and Drakken sweaty and panting, Pearl cucumber-cool and smooth. Steven kindly whips up some microwave macaroni-and-cheese for himself and Drakken – and Amethyst, who, Drakken recalls Steven saying, eats just for the fun of it.
Amethyst has only eaten a few bites, though, before Garnet pulls her and Pearl aside to discuss something. It is Steven who keeps the conversation going, chattering to Bismuth about this series of books – oh, it's so good – called Unfamiliar Familiar, which his best friend Connie lent to him. Bismuth is as awed by the idea of fiction books as Lapis was, and there is a moment that Drakken should probably have anticipated where Steven bounds upstairs to bring the first book down and show it to her.
Then it is just Drakken, sitting across from the Gem who buried her fist in his girlfriend's gut five thousand years ago.
"So – errrr – you played volleyball really well," Drakken says, one leg clonking against the underside of the table. He can't make it stop. "How did you do that? I mean, I would presume you've never done it before…"
"Oh, but it's easy," Bismuth says. "I just pretended that we were whupping the Elite instead of you jokers."
The mac-and-cheese slides straight off Drakken's fork and lands with a ker-splat back in the tray.
Elite. Drakken hasn't lived forty-two years without having heard the word on a number of occasions – sometimes in snooty tones, sometimes in sarcastic ones, sometimes in bitter ones – and most recently, in a soft, delicate voice that held the term at arm's length, as though it were something to be ashamed of.
Drakken sticks another forkful into his mouth, and it takes him a good thirty seconds to remember what he's supposed to do with it from there. He chews, swallows, says, "Like in the good old days, huh?" It's about three keys higher than it should be, and he can't quite work out how to lower it.
Bismuth slaps her hand on the table, eyes dancing. "Yeah, you better believe it," she cackles, every bit as if they are reliving the time the family dog cornered a skunk during a backyard barbecue. That happened to Cousin Eddy's family once, Drakken remembers in an unblinking stupor.
"So…you poofed a lot of Elite during the war?" Drakken can't tell if he sounds as wholesome and lighthearted as he wants to or if his anger is bleeding through – his hearing, even with the benefit of his plant powers, is fading in and out. He'll be picking up foreign transmissions in a second, he's sure.
Bismuth slings an arm casually against the back of her chair. "I woulda done worse than that if Rose'd let me," she says with the type of chuckle that comes from everyone's favorite bus driver.
Drakken mashes his fork into the macaroni over and over and over again, searching for something he knows he will never be able to find. "So – hypothetically speaking – what would you – hypothetically – do if you saw, say, a…Lapis Lazuli?" he squeaks.
Armageddon passes over Bismuth's friendly face. Her eyes slit downward, and she jerks her head around so sharply all the dreadlocks come hissing forward. "Where's a Lapis?" she rumbles.
Oh snap.
Drakken isn't frozen anymore. He's boiling on one side, as cold as his skin would indicate on the other. He stands up from the table, knocking his chair down behind him, and his legs twist under him like a pair of used matches.
"Oh-okay-just-curious-it's-all-hypothetical-very-nice-to-meet-you-Bismuth-ciao!" Drakken blurts and stumbles from the room, nearly colliding with Amethyst on his way out.
Amethyst rolls her eyes at him. "Yeesh, who peed on your campfire?" she says.
Drakken doesn't know how to answer that question. How to answer any question, as a matter of fact. His brain is awash with liquid wings and a vulnerable bare midriff.
He has to find her and never let her out of his sight again.