~Short and sweet. Got to do some more writing for Peridot - she's such a kick. :)

Steven comes back tomorrow! Prayers and/or crossed fingers for a massive turnaround are appreciated. So are all of you. Take care, guys. Happy early 4th to my American friends, and happy summer to everyone else!~

Peridot forms the words along with the moving sketch on the television screen: "Color War can either tear us apart, Paulette…or – it can bring us back together!"

Why does she like this show so much?

"Then there's only one thing to do!" Paulette says. "We must march – boldly – into the den of our enemies!"

Why do you like this show so much?

The characters lurch from one location to the next, their clothing flickering between several different tints of red as they do so. Each of them has a thick, clogged voice, and their words either clip off before they are supposed to or extend far beyond where they should. You don't even know for sure where the show is supposed to take place. You suspect the characters call Earth home, as you do now, because you recognize the trees that grow quills in green like sea urchins, but there are no other humans around for lightyears.

You and Peridot have speculated on that before, why the rest of humanity stranded these six in the wilderness. To Peridot, such a thought is lonely; to you, it verges on lovely. While you know Earth is filled with many wonderful landmarks and life-forms that you have yet to see, you would be perfectly content if the world were narrowed to consist of only you, Peridot, Steven, Pumpkin, Drakken, and Mama Lipsky.

"No!" Peridot gasps. She throws herself to her knees and clutches both sides of the screen, her narrow arms hardly long enough to reach all the way around. "Don't go, Paulette! IT'S A TRAP!"

Maybe that's why I like this show so much.

You snicker to yourself and lean back in the hub of the truck, your legs pressed against metal, your shoulders against the barn's wood. Daylight grows more fleeting every few days, yet no matter how meager the amount, the barn's comfortable crooked paneling continues to absorb it and can be depended upon to share the warmth at a touch.

Earth has discarded its summer body and is now rebuilding itself into a form that Steven calls "autumn." The planet's thin atmosphere has a piercing freshness to it, the air pushing back against the flapping of your wings with more spirit than it did over the summer. The leaves, one brilliantly saturated meepmorp just a few days ago, are now dull brown clumps that crumble in even the most delicate of holds. Steven has assured you this is both normal and temporary.

Yet green remains in the garden Peridot planted behind the barn in hopes of amassing an army. You suspected it would not work – if most Earth-plants were self-aware and obedient, there would be nothing noteworthy about Steven's and Drakken's superpowers. Peridot looked at you with excitement prancing across her face, though, and you couldn't find anything in you willing to discourage her. You kept the plants hydrated while poring through a heavy book left behind in the barn; there has been enough discouragement in your lives.

As Paulette now launches into her monologue on not judging one another by the color of the armbands they wear, you hear dried autumn grass crunching like eggshells under a foot: two crunches, three. Someone else is here.

Your vision scrambles Paulette. For an instant, you fear that the off-color Greg, his face hardened where a Greg's should be soft, has changed his mind and returned, wanting his barn back, wearing his outer garment with the top split open and the animal-skin straps that clamp his mirror-lenses to the top of the head, where they can't be of any use. You mash the button tagged "STOP" with a shaking finger.

"Hey!" Peridot whines. "Lap-pis! You stopped it!"

"Shh," you say. "Someone's here."

Peridot plumps out her lower lip. "But this is one of the best episodes…"

"Yeah, which means we've already seen it like forty times." You crouch into the ridges that stripe the floor of the truck. Power journeys from your back to settle in the coils of your fingerprints. Even as your mind remembers that water-punching the Off-Color Greg to the North Lands is not the answer, some quieter, more commanding facet of yourself tenses the smaller-than-average lake, prepares it.

"Only thirty-six –" Peridot protests.

You ignore her and peer over the truck's side. Far below, a black ponytail lifts joyously off a set of synthetic shoulders, the only falsehood on the human swinging himself out of his hovercraft.

The lake relaxes in your fingers. "Drakken's here," you report.

"It's Drakken?" Peridot tosses aside the television remote, snatches the remote control of her own invention, and charges straight out the truck's other door. You catch the back of her uniform just in time and find your wings, which deliver the two of you to the ground at Drakken's feet.

"Drakken, Drakken, Drakken, Drakken!" Peridot babbles, her hands wheeling back and forth in front of his face.

Dr. Drakken bends low on his ankles so that his eyes are level with her visor. "What is it, little friend?"

Peridot gives the remote control another couple of shakes before smacking her thumb into its large red button. "I made attack drones!" she cries as a swarm of tiny gray spheres rise from the ground.

"Ooohh, they're amazing! My compliments to the inventor!" Drakken runs an appreciative gaze over the tiny pieces of tech that fascinate both him and Peridot so.

You like the sound of the drones better than the sight of them. The sight reminds you of the patrol robots that came to Homeworld while you were away, but the sound is closer to the songs the Earth insects played with their legs on those summer evenings when Steven visited. He would bring a thin book filled with spooky stories about wandering souls, bits of humans that stayed behind after their bodies were destroyed; you would read them aloud, deepening your voice at the most chillingly written parts, until Steven had to promise Peridot through chattering teeth that these stories probably weren't true.

After Drakken and Peridot squeal a few minutes longer over the drones, you slip your arms around Drakken's waist. "Hi to you, too," you say dryly.

"Oh, Lapis!" Drakken wraps you in a hug that always feels more substantial than his gangly body would dictate it should. "Wonderful to see you! How have you been?"

You shrug. "Pretty all right."

Pumpkin races out of the barn then on her four stumping legs, her vine of a tail bristled straight like a stick behind her. She lifts her round head, sniffs to pick Drakken's scent, and aims a wave of barking, capped with the occasional growl, his direction.

"Wait – what am I hearing?" Drakken tilts his head to one side and wiggles it the way he did on the beach when sand stuck in his ear. "Do you guys have a guard dog now or something? Because that would be a great idea, out here by yourse –

"Oh," he interrupts himself upon getting a good look at Pumpkin. "Or a gourd dog. That works, too."

Drakken's laughter folds him down the middle and your own flies out to join it, even though you can't find the source of his amusement.

Peridot, too, collapses in giggles. Where the noise was once so reminiscent of a seagull's call, you can now hear the enthusiasm cycling through it, making it sweeter. "I love it!" she says. "What's a gourd?"

"The type of plant that a pumpkin is," Drakken replies.

Oh. Now you get it.

Hearing her name, Pumpkin prances away from Drakken, clicking her mouth at him. You know what she fears as she confronts him: the reappearance of the off-color Greg, his sullen words thrusting out like the firing of Nova blasters, claiming your home as his own, pronouncing further banishment upon you. You had nearly forgotten how hideous human beings are when their upper lips scroll backward like that.

Rather than allow yourself to shudder at the memory, you wrap your arms around Dr. Drakken's chest. He hugs you back with only one arm, careful not to enclose you completely. Today he smells of Global Justice – of the dull turkey, the intriguing punched fruit, and the heat of many humans grouped together.

A series of happy yips rises from beneath you, too straight and smooth a line to be Peridot's. You glance down to find Pumpkin has propped herself up on her back legs, freeing her front pair to toy with Drakken's coat-of-labs. Her tongue wiggles happily. For a moment, you envy her the shallow nature of her fear.

"Well, I guess I'm a friend now," Drakken says. "Umm…who is this, anyway?"

"Pumpkin," Peridot declares.

The way Drakken's eyebrow clumps tells you this is not very helpful. You add, "She's our pet. Like your little commodore wolf."

"Ohhh." Drakken squats down to get on Pumpkin's level, and you see the beginnings of affection wave through his eyes. "Well, she's awfully cute for a vegetable. I should bring Commodore Puddles over and have them get acquainted. Of course" – his fingertips converge below his jaw – "he might pee on her."

"Pee?" You frown. You know this sound as a letter or another vegetable, not as a verb.

"Pee. You know…" Drakken circles one hand around the other. "Go to the bathroom."

"Oh," you say, thinking of Global Justice once more. "I did that once."

Peridot gazes up at you as if you should take your place among the Diamonds. "Really? What was it like?" You remember her divulging to you recently that she had lived with the Crystal Gems in Steven's bathroom before their voyage to the barn, which helps you understand her curiosity on these matters.

You let your eyelids and your voice fall: "Indescribable."

"Well! Yes! At any rate!" Dr. Drakken's buoyant laugh swings broadly in an entirely different direction. "Where did this little one come from?" He indicates Pumpkin with his thumb. "Did I make her when I was asleep or something, because I have no memory of –"

"No." You shake your head and grin. "Steven brought her to life. He has plant powers, too."

The centers of Peridot's eyes expand and glisten green. "Too? Do you have plant powers?" She lunges toward where Drakken still stoops to greet Pumpkin and positions her hands on his temples, as though she can catch his thoughts before they come out. "How? My experience on Earth had taught me that humans didn't possess powers! Tell me your secrets!"

You can't help but snort. "Peridot, you didn't even know you had powers."

"That wasn't my fault!" Peridot replies with the anticipated squawk. "Anyway – what are the details, Drakken?"

Drakken maneuvers Peridot's hands from his head and answers, "Well, you were right, sort of. Most humans don't have powers. I'm what's known as a 'mutant.' That's a creature whose body undergoes a fundamental change following an exposure to some element that isn't part of their natural habitat."

His context places the term alongside "Corruption." His tone, resplendent with pride, says it is anything but, damming up any worry before it can even start to flow. A shadow of his earlier arrogance finds his face, yet there is no room for it to stay there once the petals bloom from his neck.

"That. Is. Amazing!" Peridot rocks forward and examines Drakken as though inspecting for cracks in the tense aftermath of a battle. "How did it happen to you?"

Drakken gives one of his petals a tug. "Well, I happened to fall face-first into a puddle of Hydro-Pollinator fluid that I invented in order to create an entire army of plants to do my bidding! I got a little more authority over them than I bargained for, though. That fluid suffused my bloodstream and altered my genetic makeup so that I essentially became part plant! The exact percentage I haven't managed to calculate yet …a half, a quarter? At any rate, I now have a telepathic connection with plants." The petal flicks free and Drakken extends it to Peridot. "Also, these things grow out of my neck at really embarrassing times, but I guess you can't have it all."

Peridot droops behind her visor, and you can guess what she is thinking.

Gems have the understructure of a bloodstream that will dribble its contents if the skin above it is disturbed. Yet it lacks the constant motion and the deep reserve of human blood; it will not rush the site of a serious injury, the sort that will unravel the entire physical form in a matter of minutes. Superficial and impervious to other chemicals, it cannot possibly be mutated.

Drakken's ankles sway beneath him, and he drops to a sitting position and folds them together. The loose spread of fabric across his legs draws into the shape of the instrument he called a tambourine. "Now, tell me – how does Steven have plant powers?"

"Rose Quartz did." You are surprised by the unforced neutrality that carries her name. "She could bring plants to life and get them to fight for her. Now Steven has that."

It is better off in Steven's hands; his plants are diplomats first, protectors second, warriors last of all.

"Ah," Drakken says. "So it was in the genes?"

"Jeans?" you repeat. You picture Steven's denim shorts and cannot remember having ever seen Rose Quartz in anything other than her full, rich, milk-white gown.

"G-E-N-E-S," Drakken says. "Not like pants. Genes are…well, they're like the schematics for us Earthlings. They determine all sorts of things – how tall we're going to get, what color our hair and eyes will be, whether our teeth will grow straight or crooked, even what our voices and our laughter will sound like."

"Where do they come from?" you ask, and then stop yourself, turning your palm upward. "Never mind. If Steven has Rose's genes, then they must –"

"Be built by the previous generation to be instilled in the next!" Peridot bursts out.

" – come from parents," you finish much more softly.

The corners of Drakken's eyes lift with his smile. "Ten points to both of you! And this is where it gets really complicated: when Earth creatures are first being made, they're working with a set of genes from each parent. And it gets even more complicated because the parents are themselves carrying two sets of genes from their parents." He stops smiling. "It almost gets too complicated to understand. DNAmy could explain it to you bett – well, it would be more her forte.

"But I can tell you there are dominant genes and recessive genes. When a dominant gene gets selected, it's the automatic winner. If a recessive gene comes out to challenge it, it just gets gobbled up immediately. Only when you have a pair of recessives and there aren't any dominants in sight are they able to seize control from their oppressors!" Drakken's fingers spring apart as though they have attempted to hold the cosmos and failed.

Peridot scrutinizes him again, scratching Pumpkin behind her stem. "So…how do these 'genes' get 'selected'? I would think the recessives would have rebelled against this system that is so heavily weighted against them!"

You listen, glad to take the overwhelming sentences individually and try to sift through them. It is far preferable to dwelling on concepts like oppressors and system.

"It's kind of like a random number generator," Drakken says. His words fix in place, as they always do when he explains something of this type. "If you come up with a number higher than this, you get one answer. If the number is lower, you get the other answer. So every gene theoretically gets a fair shot."

"I know about RNGs!" Peridot cries. Her fists soar high above her triangular hair. "We used them! Back on Homeworld, when we needed to pick who would be the one to tell the commander that something had gone wrong!" She turns to you. "Did you guys ever do that – you know, with Blue Diamond or the Agates?"

It takes you a disoriented moment to grasp what she means by "we" and "you guys." You have not thought of Peridot as one of many since before the plant-seeds went in the ground, have not craved the company of another Lapis since colors began to cycle in the leaves.

Pain passes across your back and you evaporate it before it can get any farther. "Not really," you say. "We would say, 'Who's got to tell?' and then whoever put her wings out last was the one who had to."

Drakken lets out a splash of laughter. The sound of it cools your gem, relaxes its supports.

"Very interesting." Peridot leans forward, consuming the knowledge the way primitive space vessels burn through fuel. "Drakken – you tried to grow a plant army, too?"

"Oh, yes. One of many ingenious but unsuccessful plots to conquer the world! I used to be evil, you know," Drakken informs Peridot. "Until I saved the Earth."

Peridot brightens. "Me too, sort of! Only I didn't even know it…"

Drakken continues to speak, and as much as you love to hear the story of his ascendance from darkness, you let it fade behind you this time. He will recount it with many uses of the word "alien," and you know you will only be able to hear the off-color Greg, bringing the term into a tight coil, striking at you with it. He might come from the same class of humans as Steven does, but you don't see how any of his genes could exist inside Steven – or inside Greg, for that matter.

Peridot cuts in before long, though. "Well, in addition to these attack droids" – she presses the remote's button again, and the silver canisters slide back to their rest on the ground – "I've also created a new meepmorp! Come see, come see!"

She wraps her hand around Drakken's and tugs him through the barn doors. The look he gives you over Peridot's head is crinkled with amusement. You follow them, marveling at their newly hewn connection – one of several you have discovered in the last few days.

Inside the barn, Peridot drags Drakken into a niche along the south wall and wiggles her finger at an old paint can, reclined on its side as sprinkles of soil spill onto the wood around it. "I called it Can of Worms," she says. "That is an 'expression' I learned from Steven's 'dad'. But eventually all of the worms got out and crawled away, so now I just call it Can of Dirt."

You roll your eyes from behind her. There was a period of time when you took to flying around the barn because the floor was awash in worms; you knew their squirming little bodies were harmless, and you did not want to stamp on anymore of Earth's life. Worms seem miserably lowly creatures – but so did humans once.

The way Drakken tilts his head, ponytail dipping to one side as he studies Peridot's meepmorp, is a kindness after your earlier encounter with the off-color Greg. He stormed into the barn and inventoried it with careless fury, glaring at meepmorps you wanted to hide from his narrow, maligning eyes. You hated the hiss of his oxygen-breathing and the caverns it formed from his nostrils.

"Well…it's a can of dirt," Drakken says agreeably. "Not a lot I can say about it, but – ooh! I bet Andy Warhol would love to paint it!"

The rounding strength of Warhol sounds like it belongs in Rose Quartz's arsenal of axes and maces. Andy is a word you had never heard until a few days ago when Greg spoke to his off-color relation. A coldness momentarily scours your gem before you remember that Steven has made a friend of him, listening to him, winning him over with his friendliness – the one magical talent that flowed down from Steven's dad.

"Who?" Peridot says. The question drops with the clumsiness of a blunt rock into water, rippling her voice, and you snicker in spite of your stiffness.

"Andy Warhol. He was an Earth painter. Famous a few decades back," Drakken tells the two of you.

"What did he paint?" Peridot says. "Barns? Spaceships? Palace walls?"

"He painted pictures, Peridot," you say, glancing to Drakken for confirmation.

Peridot's forehead twists. "Why would you bother painting over a 'picture'? It already has its own design!"

So painting pictures is yet another thing Homeworld abandoned sometime between your departure and Peridot's making. You would pity her if not for the wonder that lights her face as she absorbs the concept.

"Ah, yes. Culture gap again." Drakken straightens and nods with wisdom. "Painting a picture means you create a picture out of paint. You paint it on something that's blank – paper, canvas, that sort of thing. Or something you can't stand to look at, like a photo of your worst enemy." He chuckles to himself. "I scribbled many a mustache on Kim Possible's face back in the day."

It is your turn to question something: "Mustache?"

"Hair. A lot of it. Here." Drakken sticks his finger between his nose and upper lip. "Women don't generally have them, which is probably why you've never heard of them."

You touch your own top lip. There is only a wispy line of hair skimming its surface, but you can't imagine why painting on a thicker layer could be perceived as an insult. Earth is still so strange sometimes.

"I see. Most interesting." Peridot taps her cheek. In the space it takes a human to blink, she switches from the pillar of perfectionism that Homeworld instilled in her to the wiry mass of enthusiasm she acquired down here, the facet that you personally prefer. "Now I wanna see if we have anything to paint on! I could paint Pumpkin – or Steven – or our corn army protecting the planet from the tyranny of…"

The rest of her ramblings disappear as she dashes for the pile of miscellany that has yet to find rePurpose as meepmorps, clanking tin scraps together and rifling through boxes of that flimsy wood that Steven calls cardboard. You trail behind her at a slower pace, the sailboat to her modern motorboat.

Drakken's attention moves on to the sheet of fabric that pouches down from the ceiling in the shape of his smile. "This one's new, too. What is it?"

"My hammock." You twist the loose weave of it between your fingers, almost shyly. It has been so long since you dared call anything your own – long enough, you hope, for the stream of Elitism that once ran in you to have dried up. "It's where I sleep."

Drakken's eyes widen, and you know he is remembering the night you lay on his mother's couch and he stood over you, sang you the lullaby, his body a hurriedly constructed tent doing its best to keep you and the night apart. Back then, sleep was nothing but a cruel stasis, riddled with your worst fears, punishment for misappropriating fusion. He was not there when Mama Lipsky changed everything; her hand on your back guided you through unconsciousness, as Steven once led you around Beach City inside the mirror, his grip gentle even when he thought you to be an object. There is a powering-down in sleep that you can't achieve when you are awake, an opportunity to escape the meteor shower of bombarding thoughts. You can stop and drift away, and most often you are carried to a harbor where it is safe to dock for a few hours.

"You sleep now?" Drakken says.

You nod, feeling pride irrigate the spot between your shoulder blades. "Sometimes."

"And she snores like a tractor!" Peridot chimes in, suddenly beside you.

Her obnoxiousness lands on you harder than it usually does. You know dark patches have blotted your face, and you shake your bob forward to hide them.

"Hey, me too! High-five!" Dr. Drakken cries, his buoy-words more vivacious than ever. You glance through your bangs to see that he holds one hand at his chest level, the palm facing outward so that the fingers stand like sticks, barely able to remain still as they anticipate the correct response.

You deliver. It is hard to stay embarrassed around him.

"Oh, and I brought some food for you guys to sample! You know, if you want to." Drakken points a thumb backward at himself. "I invented some insulated food-transport sacks. Well, I didn't invent the concept, but I perfected it. Well, okay, it's not perfect – sometimes a little moisture seeps through the outside, but –"

His babbling is the gush of a brook, full and healthy after a rainstorm, capable of grabbing someone and carrying them away, though not to anyplace dangerous. You allow yourself to wade through it a moment more before you say, "Why'd you bring us food?"

Dr. Drakken's face glows. "It's a special occasion! Err, yesterday was a special occasion. Yesterday it was Thanksgiving!"

"What's that?" you ask.

Peridot perks forward immediately. "Is that like 'Wow, thanks'?"

"Sure, I suppose," Drakken says. "Once a year, human beings get together to – well, to say 'Wow, thanks!' for whatever they have and wherever they are and whoever helped them get there. Then they show their gratitude by eating a lot. Let's see, we have some leftover turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, pie…" His buoyant voice quiets to a mutter. "Suddenly I'm glad I brought the pecan."

"Well, we have a lot to be Wow, Thankful for. Don't we, Lapis?" Peridot says.

"I guess," you reply.

From a factual standpoint, you know you do: a new home, new allies, your discovery of meepmorp, your new pet Pumpkin, and mostly importantly, your freedom. There is no way to return to Homeworld, to reclaim your status, and you're not sure you would even if you could. Yet the thankfulness has a crack in it, a tiny chip that restrains its full potency. Perhaps it is watching Peridot's lively, painless exploration of her newfound emotions.

"That's really sweet, Drakken," you say. "But I don't know if I'm in the mood for food right now." You are still not entirely accustomed to the manifesting of a stomach. Sometimes it fortifies you to be solid inside; other times, it simply feels cumbersome.

"We ate some just yesterday. Sort of our own little celebration," you add.

"Because we had company!" Peridot exclaims.

"More like a trespasser." You toss your head back. "Only he thought we were the trespassers."

"Okay, you're going to have to explain that one to me," Drakken says.

Ordinarily there is very little you like less than explaining a dramatic day. The way Drakken looks at you, however – his eyebrow floating over his eyes and twisted at the ends – blunts the edges off the memories.

"I will. But outside. I want to watch the sunset." It is the pinnacle of Earth's beauty as far as you are concerned.

Drakken nods as he skips out. You follow, walking on the peaks of your toes across grass grown stiff and cutting in an attempt to mask how brittle it has become. A few tawny leaves still cling to the crowns of trees. Above them, the sky is much the same color, as though the entire planet has been preserved in amber.

"All right. So. An Earth-man showed up here yesterday and he was super mad. He said the barn belonged to him and that we'd better get lost." You allow your shoulders to shiver since Drakken is the only one looking. Even from a distance, the memory is sour with rot. You can hear the off-color Greg screeching a diatribe against "aliens," as if you and Peridot were Diamonds come to decimate the planet rather than a couple of displaced Gems who took refuge where it was available. He is far too young to remember the days when your people's armies roamed the Earth, yet he speaks as one who witnessed the War.

Drakken's spine straightens, one slender indentation at a time. "And obviously you didn't listen." You shake your head, and he grins. "Good for you!"

"I wasn't going to leave my home again." Your laugh is a rasping thing, almost a cough. "Although you'd think I'd be used to it by now."

"Some things you're not meant to get used to," Drakken says. "My chiropractor says so."

While you don't understand his second sentence, there is no denying the truth of the first. You felt one of those things when you flicked your hand through the air, raised the smaller-than-average lake and suspended the off-color Greg atop its churnings, pulled it back to deliver the blow. Your physical form was racked by something hard and fast, beyond stone, certainly beyond the relative softness of your gem; and your insides were definitely hollow then, hollow as a log. Where you were going to send the Greg, you neither knew nor cared.

Drakken's fingers and the captivated sounds in his throat scatter the silence. "So who was this lackwit?"

"Only Greg knew him. I guess he was part of Greg's – family."

The word flattens your lips, both exotic and strangely familiar, like a seed shot into the soil so it can absorb the planet's nutrients and finally emerge mature and Purposeful. You remember Garnet telling Steven yesterday that Gems did not have families before they came to Earth. She raised her arms, and you expected them to pull Amethyst, Pearl, and Steven into their cozy little huddle. Instead, she spread them wide enough to encompass every Gem in the vicinity, even Peridot.

Even you.

The lines were stripped away in the same sincere fashion that governs whatever Garnet does. You were not friends with the Crystal Gems; you did not have to be once it became clear that you were all rivers pouring into the same sea.

"Turns out the barn used to be his," you continue. "Way back before Steven was even born. The lackwit guy didn't know about Rose or anything." In the ageless span of the universe, the years it takes to have a child grow to Steven's age are no more than a Camping Pining Hearts episode, yet you know to humans it forms a long time. "And he kept talking about something he called 'DeMayo.' Ever heard of it?"

Drakken rubs a hand over his round jaw. "Well, it almost sounds like 'the mayo' with an accent. And 'mayo' is short for 'mayonnaise.' Mayonnaise is something you spread on a sandwich. Does that make any sense?"

You can't begin to picture anyone spreading Steven or Greg on a sandwich, so you shake your head. That is just something you will to have accept as more of that man's baloney.

"Even if it did, it wouldn't make enough sense to kick you two out of that barn!" Drakken says. He jerks as if anger has a tight hold on his joints. "You weren't hurting anything. Darn it, I wish I'd been there to help you fight him off!"

A ring of petals leaps from his neck. Your giggle does not surprise you, but your next words do.

"It might not have helped. I mean, fighting him with water didn't work, so I don't think it would've worked to fight him with plants either." You lift your eyes to the amber sky and trace the few bunched clouds that drift across it. "It turned out, he needed someone to be kind to him. And only Steven could do that."

Drakken frowns. "You mean, compared to Steven I'm not nice?"

"Compared to Steven, none of us are nice!" a busy little voice pipes up from the barn doors.

"Oh, I'm sorry, are you part of this conversation?" you call back over your shoulder.

"No," Peridot admits cheerily. "I am 'eavesdropping.'"

You roll your eyes. "If you're waiting for us to kiss, forget it; we're not going to do it in front of you.

"Sorry," you add to Dr. Drakken, whose face dawns pink in response. "She's watched way too much Camp Pining Hearts."

Drakken's gaze is already back on the horizon. "So, this…family member of Steven's," he says, gripping at the grass as if the idea disorientates him. "Do you think he's going to be any more trouble?"

You shake your head, and this time there is no tension in your neck to impede the motion. "No, I don't. Not now that he knows how much Steven loves him." Rose Quartz's healing power has been known to misfire; Steven's has not, even when he isn't using magic at all.

"You're safe, then?" Drakken asks.

Safe. The word tumbles over and over in your hollow places, which are beginning to feel more like interlocking tunnels and less like voids. For the longest time, safe was the most ridiculous thing you could imagine, rapidly displacing other ideas like "fusion at leisure" and "disobedient Pearl." Yet now things are different. You are galaxies away from the Diamond whose genuine calm could, in a wing's beat, turn to soft-spoken wrath. Jasper and Bismuth both lie unconscious in their bubble prisons. With a word and a glance from Garnet and no argument from the other two, the Crystal Gems have taken an oath in your defense.

Homesickness still dwells in deposits at the edges of your gem, but the other feeling, the one that permeated every crevice and lurked below the surface, tangled in your wings, has been a stranger recently.

"Yeah," you tell Drakken. You lift your face to meet the breeze as it passes. "Just maybe I am."

Drakken squeals aloud and throws his arms around you, pressing you clumsily against the smell of his coat-of-labs.

You, Dr. Drakken, and Peridot spend the rest of the evening in the barn watching Camp Pining Hearts. Peridot, as usual, recites the dialogue along with the characters until you give her a warning pinch. Drakken's head cocks to one side as he studies the screen as though it is a map whose every detail for terraforming the planet must be memorized.

"Are they kids or adults?" he finally says.

You fling your hands toward the ceiling. "Yes! Thank you!" you say. It has been stymieing you ever since the first episode you saw. The characters do not appear to be children, short and innocent like Steven, but neither are they responsible, Purposed adults, and they certainly don't exhibit the delightful hybridization of both ages that Dr. Drakken does. Rather, they drift somewhere in between, a state of matter neither liquid nor solid that will take the shape of whatever touches it first.

"What do you mean?" Peridot says.

"I mean…If they're adults, where are the kid campers? And if they're kids, where are the adult counselors?" Drakken glances toward the TV again. "Also, why are they kissing so much? Shouldn't there be some more adult supervision?"

"It's more fun if you just go with it," Peridot tells him, trying to fit the wisdom of a Sapphire into her nod.

"And accept that it makes no sense?" Drakken growls.

Peridot stiffens. The words rub against you the way Earth-insects would try to slip under a human's skin in the summertime, passing you up as they would any of the gemstones native to their planet. You clear your throat and say, "As opposed to that show about the dog solving mysteries? Because that made sense?"

Drakken frowns until sharp corners underline his lower lip. "Fair point," he says, as though you have held a spear to his throat to gain that admission. He slides down on the end of his spine, sullen, and his arms clamp over his chest.

You can't resist giggling, and after a few minutes, he ends up laughing with you.

"I do have one last question," Drakken says when the screen has ended its story and is giving credit to the people who put the episode together. "Why do their names all start with 'P'?"

You shrug, but Peridot's eyes grow even rounder than normal.

"Hey! My name starts with a 'P'!" she says. "So does Pumpkin's!" She gives the pet now slumbering between the two of you a happy pat. "We could go live at Camp Pining Hearts, too!

"Oh…but then Lapis would be all alone in the barn." Peridot's smile dissolves.

You grunt. "And that would just be a tragedy."

Peridot passes you a stricken look, and you tap your fingers on your knees, pretending to think deeply. "Well, I guess I'd miss Pumpkin," you say, and then you glance down at Peridot and wink.

The eyebrows you can barely see under Peridot's visor come unwoven and she glows, understanding.

You are polite enough later to try some of Drakken's leftover turkey. It has more moistness and flavor than the variety you sampled at Global Justice, though it's still not one of the best things you've allowed into your mouth. Peridot chews hers for several minutes straight and then yells with her mouth still full, "Now what do I do with it?"

"Push it down your throat," you say.

"Ewww! That can't be right!"

Peridot ends up disposing of her mouthful in the reeds behind the barn. Dr. Drakken's snickers reassure her that he is not offended.

The moon has upstaged the sun for quite awhile before Drakken begins to yawn and mutter about being sleepy. By that point, you are perched on the barn's shelf, gazing at the stars through the section of roof the silo shoved back when it became part of the barn. Their congregation is not the one you viewed from flat on the ground and behind glass for so many thousands of years: it is an expanse of light and dark, birth and death, each star content to be an impermanent loop in a chain of something that will outlive it.

"Penny for your thoughts," Dr. Drakken says, coming up behind you. He immediately slaps himself in the forehead. "No! Wait! Shouldn't have said that! 'Penny for your thoughts' could really sound like cheating, couldn't it, since you promise someone a penny you're not really planning to give them? Of course, on Earth it's not really cheating because pretty much everyone understands that 'penny for your thoughts' is just a way of asking what you're thinking about, but to a non –"

"Drakken," you cut him off. "Are you just asking what I'm thinking about?"

Drakken nods. His spikes of hair remind you of mischievous waves, exactly the size the ocean calls up when it begs to play.

"Well, first of all I'm thinking – what's a penny?" you say.

"It's a type of Earth money. Basically the smallest Earth money. Takes a hundred of them to make a dollar."

You lean back, trying to picture a robotic arm slicing one of Drakken's paper dollars into a hundred pieces. It would have to be done by machine to ensure the segments were of equal size, and even then you imagine they'd be so tiny as to fall from a pocket or be spirited away by the wind.

"Now what were you thinking when you looked at the stars?" Drakken says.

You glance upward again. "I was thinking how beautiful they are. And I wanted to always remember what they looked like, right here, tonight, when I might actually be safe."

In the starlight that falls over them, Drakken's eyes have a river's gloss. "Well, it's about time you got to do that!" His voice is a wet gush of enthusiasm.

Grinning, you flick a drop of his water from your cheek. It's then that you see he holds his sleeping bag under his arm, so you drift up into the barn's eaves to give him room to spread it out.

"Good night, Dr. Drakken," you say.

"Good night, Lapis!" Drakken yawns, his body bendable and gawky as it stretches in all directions, a sprawling of peace and ease. There is no fear to twitch him tonight.

You fly over to your corner of the barn and lower yourself into the hammock from above. The cloth still grabs your legs and twists them, as it has every time before, yet this time you don't fall or flip upside-down, even when Pumpkin jumps up beside you; you brace your arms on either side as it rocks like a boat and then mellows. You shift with caution until your head touches the top of the silken fold and your toes uncurl at the bottom.

Pumpkin burrows between your feet with a sigh. Her spherical side is cool and slick, the ebb and flow of her breaths a tiny tide against your ankles. You stroke her, and she doesn't appear to mind how awkward the movement feels.

You have a pet now.

Home no longer requires a rigid back. The Gems who hated you have defeated themselves. In their place, friends bloom like the petals around Dr. Drakken's neck. The privilege you knew as a Lapis Lazuli on Homeworld is nothing compared to what you know as Lapis Lazuli on Earth, and your friends insist you should have it regardless of whether you deserve it.

"Thank you," you whisper.

You're not sure who you are talking to, but you have the undeniable sensation that they hear you.