Sky Blue, Ocean Blue

by purplegirl761

When a reformed mad scientist befriends a stranger to Earth who's also haunted by the past, neither of them suspects that their blossoming relationship will carry them through everything from ice cream to intergalactic warfare. Welcome aboard a little ship I like to call Drakkis.

60. Mending

~What is this, I live? Yeah! Sorry for such a long wait, guys. I got sick (managed to avoid The Dreaded Virus, but not a garden-variety cold XD), and then the holidays happened, so. . . yeah. Hoping to try to get the next chapter up much quicker. Hope you all enjoy...~

Steven says, "I'm sorry."

Over and over again he says it, through great tremulous heaves of air until your gem aches, and you look at him and wonder if it was this painful for him four years ago to watch you and listen to your repeated apologies. You and the rest of his family take turns stroking back his curls and pressing yourselves closer to him, though your bodies can provide him with no warmth. The ocean, ever nurturing, sways against the Cluster's hand and laps onto the open palm like it wishes it could rock him to sleep as it does for the otters that bed down in its seaweed. Beside you, Dr. Drakken squirms, and you know he too is uncomfortable, but he will not complain, will not leave Steven now.

Steven folds his fists into Greg's shirt and sobs. Occasionally he will sniffle and start to move, only to lock eyes with you or Connie or Garnet and begin to cry anew. It does no harm to your feelings; you are not the one to make him cry. He is crying with every emotion accessible to a conscious being, because there is nothing else left to do. He is crying because he can.

At one point, he turns his head and stares between the Diamonds at the hole in the lighthouse's hill, gouged there by the monster's furious claws. Lines writhe on his chin and a fresh tide of tears rush down his face, a face that wants so badly to be clean again.

"Did I hurt anybody?" he asks.

"No, Steven," Connie says, her voice clear and strong but rippling. "No, you didn't. Everyone's fine."

You wait for the relief to spring to Steven's eyes, yet they remain tight at the corners. "Jasper…"

The word is little more than a frog's croak, but your wings still jump at the sound of her name; they likely always will.

It is Amethyst who answers him now, twirling the unruliest strand of her hair around her finger to keep both eyes in view. "Don't worry, bro. Jasper's okay." She grunts, the sound thick and wet. "As okay as Jasper ever is."

Steven does not smile; he only nods. His gaze drifts to the backs of his hands and stays there, ashamed at the power they hold, at what he has done with it.

You reach for him, her fingers stopping a centimeter shy of his. "Actually, she's decided she worships you now," you say. "So have fun with that."

For a fraction of a moment, the light is back in his eyes, aflicker, and then it is gone, doused by guilt. Greg pulls Steven into his lap even though they are close to the same height now, and Steven tightens his arms around his father's neck.

You don't know how long all of you stay there, strangely safe in the Diamonds' shadows and the Cluster's hand. Dr. Drakken tugs off one glove and plays with the ocean's surface, and the beach fills with your neighbors from Little Homeworld, whose curiosity and concern you can sense even from this distance. Finally Steven lifts his head and takes a breath of the sea breeze, swiping at his swollen face.

"Thanks, guys," he says.

Drakken puts his glove back on, seemingly unaware of how it twists around his wrist as he crawls over to Steven. You briefly expect him to remain with his weight distributed amongst all four limbs, looming over Steven and grinning, but he sits back on his heels and his jaw protrudes thoughtfully.

"Steven…I've broken people, too," he says. "I wasn't trying to, but I wasn't trying not to either." His tone is almost soft, with none of his typical overblown confidence. "I was just throwing my power around, trying to scare everybody, and didn't realize what I was doing until it was too late. And I couldn't put them back together."

You think of machines with glowing teeth and fire-spewing arms and you bite your lip.

Steven squints at Drakken. "You have? Then…how? How can you keep going?"

"Because I have a borderline-obsessive desire to improve myself that it is actually a fairly healthy and effective method of coping with my overwhelming guilt and regret." Drakken recites the words with precision, and they almost startle a giggle from you. "At least, that's what my shrink says. Oh! And speaking of my shrink, he's really helped me a lot! In fact, I think…" He stands up and begins to pat his pockets. "Nngglle… does anyone have a pen and paper?"

Pearl produces both from her gemstone and hands them to him, her movements graceful even as she trembles. Drakken accepts them and grumbles something that you think is an expression of gratitude. "I'll give you his number," he tells Steven, and you watch as he sketches straggling numerals across the page. "You should give him a call. And since he's my shrink, he's already used to hearing a lot of bizarre stuff!"

He passes the paper to Steven, and they look at each other for a moment, still the two most beautiful men you have ever seen.

Steven sticks the paper in his pocket, and Drakken bends down with a sigh to tap the Cluster's palm. "Hello, good women of the Cluster," he says. "Um, not to bug you or anything, but would you mind bringing me back to shore? It's been a long time since I…used the facilities," he adds, blushing.

Amethyst bursts out laughing.

Whether or not the Cluster understands, you could not say, but the arm extends toward shore, and Drakken leaps off and sprints up the steps of the beach house. Still clinging to his father's arm, Steven steps to the ground, his shoes scarcely disturbing the sand that has resettled after his tail sent it flying. You position yourself in front of him, between Garnet and Peridot, and you don't move.

You don't move even when you hear someone bellow, "My Diamond!"

In a crowd of Quartzes and some Gems that are even larger, you almost missed her until now, but there she stands, her arms crossed behind her back. You try not to imagine her imperial red cape flapping in the wind currents created by her ship's advanced engines, or the hot glow in her small amber eyes as she ran them across the Crystal Gems before they stopped in confusion on Steven.

Now, the same eyes study him with uncertainty again, and yet it is nothing like the night she dragged you back to Earth, for her eyes don't demand to know who Steven is. That, she believes she has finally figured out. It is herself she doubts this time. In all the time you spent fused, you inside her inside you, you cannot ever remember feeling that in her.

"Oh," Steven says. "Hi, Jasper." His voice barely scrapes out of his mouth, but it carries no malice, only exhaustion.

"I heard cries of distress," Jasper says. "I came to make sure you were all right, My Diamond. What happened?"

Steven does not answer. Greg wraps his arm around his son's shoulders and sends Jasper a look as sharp as he can form. "We'll explain it to you sometime later, Jasper," Greg says. "Right now, he is absolutely beat, and he needs his rest."

"Of course." Jasper bends to one knee and shapes the Diamond salute with her arms. "How can I best protect you?"

A hard laugh bubbles within your gem, but you don't let it out. "The best thing you can do for him right now," you tell her, "is to go somewhere else and let him recover."

Jasper, her eyes never faltering from Steven, doesn't so much as glance at you. "Is that true, My Diamond?"

"Yeah," Steven says with a nod. "I'm…I'm not ready to live around you yet. And I'm not my mom. But I don't mind if you think of me as your Diamond."

Pain flares in Jasper's eyes, and you marvel at how terrible she must feel to allow that to show. "Then where am I supposed to go? Tell me!"

The choice should be hers, you think, but as you have never known Jasper to make a wise decision, you keep quiet and let Steven respond.

"How about back to Homeworld?" he says. "I know there are a lot of other Jaspers from your Kindergarten who live there now. You know, the ones you couldn't hang out with because you were 'perfect' and they weren't? Well, you're not anymore."

You grip the ocean, waiting for Jasper's fist to swing forward in rage. Instead she nods. She still sees someone else when she looks at Steven, but if this is what it takes to assuage her hatred for Earth, you will take it.

"You can come back with us, right now," Yellow Diamond offers. Pity terraforms her face, replacing the harsh lines beside her mouth with gentler creases. You had almost forgotten that Jasper was once her most treasured soldier.

Jasper steps to the side, her eyes glinting on Steven. "And…"

"And I can see you when I come to visit them, okay?" Steven says.

"All right," Jasper says, her shark teeth cutting the words to shreds.

She steps into Yellow Diamond's hand, and you turn your head away to watch Peridot instead as the Diamonds straighten up and turn back to their ship, wishing everyone well and telling Steven to call if he needs their help. Your best friend looks at you with a question on her face, and you shrug.

You have no faith left in Jasper. But you do believe the words you said to Drakken at Kim and Ron's rehearsal dinner – If forgiveness was only for good people, there wouldn't be anything amazing about it.

You hear the ship tear free of gravity as its long pink legs break into a run. The sound of its flight dwindles, and they are gone. The ensuing silence swings in front of you like a shield, the jagged edges of her speech inside you silenced.

As Greg and Pearl help Steven up the steps, you glance at Garnet. "Will I ever see her again?" you whisper.

Garnet does not hesitate this time. "No."

---

"Lapis. Time for your shift."

Amethyst appears at the top of the stairs that lead to Steven's room, her voice bright and her eyes clear, despite the tears you can see gathered at their corners. She makes her way toward you and steps over Lion, lying at the foot of the stairs equidistant from Steven and from Connie, who sits beside the closet across from the stairs.

You rise from the end of the sofa. All through the day you and the others have been turning like the tides, spending time with Steven as he rests or cries or heals.

Below you, Dr. Drakken snores on, his gangling body sprawled across the sofa cushions, one arm folded beneath him and the other dangling to the floor, saliva drizzling from the side of his mouth. He is a rare picture of relaxation, not a piece of him stiff or prepared for whatever may come next. Even his eyebrow has loosened with sleep, and it slouches over eyes like caverns, his eyelids every bit as black as the half-moon circles they lower to touch.

Peridot scrambles across the kitchen, where Greg sits on one of the stools leaning against Pearl for support. "How is the patient doing?" Peridot says, and you recognize the voice she once used in an interrogation room galaxies away.

Amethyst shrugs. "Well, he's not a giant pink rage-monster anymore, so that can only be an improvement, right?" She glances at Peridot, who looks ready to bounce in place, her knees bent, and crooks a smile at her. "You do know that when you go in and take your shift with him, you're gonna need to be calm?"

Peridot blinks.

"You do know what 'calm' means, right?"

Peridot straightens her body and holds a hand firmly to her chin. "Calm, adjective. Possessing or giving off a sense of peace and tranquility, often characterized by the absence of –"

"Ahh! Nerd alert! Nerd alert!" Amethyst rushes for Peridot and flings Peridot over her shoulder. Peridot shrieks with delight and beats her fists against Amethyst's back. Neither of them seem calm to you.

You grin back at them as you climb the stairs. You have only been in Steven's bedroom a few times, but it seems every bit as warm and comfortable as you remember it, sunlight slanting across the timepiece shaped like a cat's head that awakens him each morning and gleaming off the blank television screen where he and Peridot watched the disastrous Camp Pining Hearts reboot. The doors to his deck are shut against the day's noise, and yet you can still feel the ocean singing to the sand; you wish Steven could feel it, too, the cadence and friendship of what covers most of his planet.

Steven lies curled on his side, a thin sheet halfway across his legs, his hair a tumble on his head, his small chubby lips parted, his face puffy and pure. He looks like a little boy.

But he isn't anymore.

You walk to him, accidentally kicking one of the pretend animals that sticks out from under his bed, and settle on the edge of the mattress, the springs scarcely squeaking beneath you. You imagine a scene you were not awake to witness: yourself, limp on a scattered pile of hay in the barn, Steven racing in every few minutes to check on you. In that moment, you feel that you understand, the way the two of you have always fit into each other's lives, even when the edges were jagged and unwelcoming.

Steven rolls over when he feels you sit down. His eyes open; something flickers through them that you know is the closest thing he can find to a smile for now, and you feel honored to have received it. "Oh," he says. "Hey, Lapis."

"It's good to see you, Steven," you say. "How are you doing? And don't say 'fine,' because that's the oldest lie out there. I ought to know; I invented it."

Steven sighs. "Well, in that case…I guess I've been better."

Warmth and pain cascade down your back at the honesty in that statement. You find yourself swallowing even though there is nothing in your throat.

"Do you want to talk about it?" you ask. "I mean, you totally don't have to, but…"

Steven shakes his head. "No, I actually kind of want to. I've spent such a long time not talking about it that maybe talking about it'll help."

"Or at least be a relief," you say, remembering the words Dr. Drakken gave you when you finally confessed why you had first been sent to Earth. "Like throwing up."

"Yeah." Steven pushes his weight onto one elbow with what seems to be a great deal of difficulty. At the day's dawn you saw how powerful he was, his clawed feet tearing holes in the land, but now the sun is centered in the sky and he breathes harshly as if his powers are heavy, as if they press on his chest. "Okay. So – here's the thing.

"I've been feeling weird for a long time now. Like, a long time. After we saved Earth, I thought the only thing left to do was to live happily ever after. But that didn't end up happening, and I knew from what Spinel said that there was still a threat out there. And I almost wanted there to be, because I wanted to go back to what I had before. Isn't that weird? I mean, of course I'm really happy that we healed the Corruptions and made friends with the Diamonds, but I just feel –"

"Like you'd been sent to terraform a planet that ends up not having any water on it," you supply for him. "Like you didn't have a Purpose anymore."

"Exactly. And nothing else was the same in Beach City, either. Dad was off touring with the band instead of running the car wash. All the kids I remember hanging out with are growing up now – except for Onion, because I think he might be a baby warlock –"

You laugh.

" – and the Pizza twins and Sour Cream and Buck Dewey are getting ready to leave. Lars is talking about going back into space, and I don't know how that's going to work out for him and Sadie. Everybody seemed to have some idea what they were doing. Everybody but me. I'd changed too much to go back and not enough to go forward.

"So I thought maybe some evil Gems would invade and I'd get to save the world again, and then at least something would go back to normal…ish." Steven stares hard at his hands. "But as soon as Bluebird showed up, I knew it wasn't like before. Not like when I wanted to help turn people good and didn't really know how my powers worked and thought Mom was the nicest Gem who ever existed. I saw too much since then. I learned too much since then. And that made me stronger for a while, but now it didn't work like that anymore.

"I gave Bluebird the benefit of the doubt because I knew that was what the old me, the real me, would have done, but inside I just hated her. I couldn't wait for her to drop the act so I could kick her butt.

"And I knew it wasn't just that things had changed. Something was wrong with me, and it wasn't just my powers going nutso again. It was like that part of me that tried to help everyone – like I just lost it. Like it was over. Like it was gone." He rubs his fist under his eyes. "And then when Connie started talking about college even though it'll be years before she's ready to go…I just couldn't take it anymore. I asked her to marry me so we could live together as Stevonnie forever."

"Oh." It is your turn to blink. "Well, that's…an idea."

"It was a stupid idea. It freaked Connie out so bad, and of course she didn't say, 'Yeah, of course, let's do that.' So I turned pink and blew a crater in the ground, because that's what my powers like to do these days, and that weekend when you guys were on the field trip?"

You nod.

"She called to check on me and saw me swelling up and turning pink and made me go see her mom at the hospital. I'd never seen a doctor before, Lapis!"

"Did she figure out what was wrong?" you say.

Steven lets out another sigh. "Kind of. Lapis…do you know what hormones are?"

You think for a moment. You have heard the term banded about on Camp Pining Hearts and spotted it in some of the books you have read. "I think so. They're what take little kids and make them tall and weird and kissy."

Laughter and tears erupt from Steven in one blaring noise. Two streams of moisture trickle from his nose and then flood, and you swipe them away with the corner of the sheet. It takes him a moment to steady himself against his pillow and continue.

"Right. Those. Dr. Maheswaran said they also do other stuff to our emotions, like there's one called adrenaline that basically controls fear and what you do with it. She guessed that I'd had so many scary things happen to me when I was little –"

The image of him gasping for oxygen inside a bubble of your making sinks deep into your mind, your gem, and every hollow place in between.

You open your mouth, and Steven stares directly into your eyes. "Which is NOT your fault, Lapis, so don't even go there," he says. "But because of all of that, my adrenaline was all wonky and it saw everything I didn't like as something that was out to kill me, so it was trying to get me ready to fight all. The. Time. She had a name for it, too – she called it 'PTSD.'"

"I know those letters," you say. "Drakken says I have them."

Steven's swollen eyes fix on your face even as they seem to shake in their sockets. "You?"

"Yeah, me," you say with a snort. "In case you didn't notice, Steven, I'm kind of a mess. Maybe not as much recently, but that's only because –"

"Of course, that makes sense," Steven says and though his words layer over yours, you do not feel interrupted. "You've been through a heck of a lot, too." His voice drops. "So I guess there's not…is there any way to go back?"

You know how much it must hurt, like a wound cutting into the innermost portion of his gem, to look back on the boy he once was. It is painful for you to look back at yourself, and his vision is clearer than yours was; his past self was actually good, yours merely complacent.

"It's different for me," you say carefully, "because I don't want to go back. I don't miss the person I used to be much at all. But…I'm so sorry for you, Steven, because I don't think there is a way back."

Steven does not move, does not speak. He merely exhales, as if he knew that were the answer he would have to face eventually.

"But sometimes – sometimes Homeworld manages to patch itself back up again," you say. "Even if it isn't your home anymore."

He does not ask you what those words mean, and you are glad, for you do not quite know yourself, only that they rose to meet your thoughts the way water rises to meet your powers.

Steven passes his hand across his eyes. His fingers squeeze as if trying to wring something genuine from his own flesh. "When I went home, I didn't want Dr. Maheswaran to be right, so I pretended she wasn't right.

"Then when Dad came back, he took me on a road trip. And I thought maybe that would fix things, because the old me, the real me, always loved that, you know? Instead I found out that he had a whole family I never met because his mom and dad were too strict with him when he was kid and now none of them ever talk anymore. I don't think they even know about me! I got mad at my dad, and I don't think that's something I've done before. And I ended up crashing the van. That's why Bismuth had to fix it when you guys got back.

"And when you got back, I still just couldn't stand it anymore. All of it, any of it. So I ran away off into the woods where I couldn't hurt anyone. That's when I found Jasper's spaceship crashed. I don't think she's very good at flying them without Peridot's help. Anyway, she was looking for a fight –"

"And it felt good to take everything out on her," you say. It is not a question. It is a certainty. "Only you took it too far and shattered her by accident."

Steven's eyes widen. "Did she tell you it was an accident?"

"No," you say. "You're just still Steven."

He begins to sob in earnest then, the sounds deep, climbing, and crashing. No Wailing Stone could cry like this, you realize, with the messy, ragged pattern of organic pain.

You curve yourself over him, and when you see that his head no longer fits into the space between your cheek and your neck, you leave it there anyway. You remember how he stood on the beach in bewilderment as you formed, the mirror lying lifeless and already forgotten on the sand. You remember him steadying you with his hands, the first time in centuries anyone had touched you, how surprisingly warm his fingers were, and how unlike all else that differed from Homeworld, this foreignness did not frighten you. His tears hit your shoulders and roll down your bare arms, and they, too, are warm.

"Still Steven," he finally says. His words have a weight to them that they don't usually carry. "I don't think I know who Steven is anymore."

You almost tell him. You almost open your mouth and inform him that your healing began with him, that every part of yourself that is better now than it was before wells out from the way he chose to treat you, but you do not know if he can believe you now. You don't know if he can believe anyone now.

You pull back and look into his eyes. "Then we'll help you figure it out again."

Steven falls on you and holds on to you as though you are a lifeboat, and you understand in that moment how alone he has been for the past several months. Guilt of that nature, you remember, separates a person from others; it carves a chasm that tries to warn them away. He continues to tell the story, coming to the parts you know about: his flight to Homeworld, the Diamonds' unsettling kindness, the revenge he almost took on White Diamond, the night he spent at Little Homeschool trying to pretend he could still be the boy he never meant to leave behind. Only the sight of him safe across from you and the feeling of his soft body against you keeps you from shivering as he recounts his arrival at the Beach House and how he tried to convince Greg, Connie, Garnet and the others that he was all right, then lost control of his own lies and called himself a monster. That was what you heard right before your connection severed.

He thought himself a monster, and so he became one.

You rest one hand on the back of his head. "Thanks. For talking to me."

"Thanks for listening." He sniffs. His nose is leaking against your top; you don't mention it.

"I'm sorry if I made things harder for you," you say instead.

Steven gives you such a puzzled look that he might well be standing on the beach again that first night, dusted silver like fish scales in your cracked sight. "You? No, Lapis, you've been fine. And that 'fine' I really do mean!"

"Then how come…I saw you standing in front of my meepmorp studio last night after you got back from Homeworld. And before I could say anything, you took off running like you were scared or something." Your voice squeaks in a way it rarely does anymore. "I don't ever want you to be scared of me."

Steven almost looks like he would laugh if he had the strength. "Scared? Lapis, it wasn't you I was scared of. It was me." That is not much better, but you nod him on, and he continues. "I was all screwed up then. You were like the literal only person I hadn't had a fight with yet, and I'd have hated myself even more if we'd gotten into one. I didn't want to hurt you."

You press your side against the wall and let what he has said seep in, moistening your dry burning eyes. He ran because he did not want to jeopardize what you are to him.

It is a better explanation than any you allowed yourself to consider.

"That is super sweet of you, Steven," you say. "But I don't want you to worry about that anymore. I came here to kill your planet, remember? There are whole species that are extinct because of me. Nothing you can do would be bad enough to scare me off."

All vestiges of laughter disappear, and melancholy drapes him like Blue Diamond's cloak. His mouth wrenches to one side, tears streaming across it and dropping onto the sheet. For a time that would not have seemed long before you came to Earth, all you hear is him sobbing.

At last, he says, "I want to be better than this."

"I know you do," you tell him. "And I know you can."

You put your arms around him as a promise, and he clings back.

---

This is how it works as the day progresses, as the planet spins and the clouds drift. Someone will climb to Steven's room and sit with him for a time, then descend the steps and nod to the next person. It reminds you of Gem soldiers pacing before the Diamonds' palanquins during the War, yet their job almost seems easy in comparison, for the threat you and your family are fighting is already inside. Sometimes various retellings, often shorter, of the explanation he gives you filters down from above, and at other times you hear only lengthy stretches of silence.

On Peridot's first shift, she trips over the top step and sprawls into Steven's room, and you hear him greet her with fragile amusement in his voice. You do not mean to listen in on them, but you cannot help it; every word of hers gushes down into the room below, a torrent with no vegetation to hold it back. When she informs him that she has cleared the greenhouse of the glass fragments from the window he broke, he begins to protest, and you can imagine her hands flying to her hips as she exclaims, "Steven, I would still be the living equivalent of a Homeworld drone if not for your interference! So if I want to clean up your messes sometimes, I'm going to do that and you can't stop me!"

Dr. Drakken wakes when the sun has begun to lower in the sky, while Bismuth is with Steven, and Peridot and Amethyst play a card game with Greg in the corner of the kitchen. His eyes search the area before him for a minute and then reorient as they land on you and a smile stumbles across his long thin lips, still sticky at the edges. "Hello, all," he says around a yawn. "I just had the weirdest dream. Steven had turned into a pink Godzilla monster, and I was trying to get him to sing karaoke in order to save him."

You surprise even yourself when you giggle. "You're right about the weird, but wrong about the dream. That actually happened."

"It did? Well….I suppose that explains why I've been sleeping on this couch – in his house – in the middle of the afternoon." Drakken pushes himself to a sitting position; his back squeaks along with the cushions. "Gaaah, that did not feel good. But – was the happy ending real, too? The part where Steven came back?"

"Yeah, he came back." You frown. "But I don't know if it's a happy ending yet. He's going to need a lot of help."

Drakken nods. "Well, good thing he's got us, then! We are one bon-diggety bunch of helpers!"

Amethyst grunts a laugh from the other side of the room. "'Bon-diggety'? What even is that?"

Drakken's grin fades, his stare deepening until it appears to invert like Bismuth's gemstone, and you know he is no longer seeing the chairs in his immediate line of vision. "I…don't know. It's just something Kim Possible's husband says a lot. I always thought it sounded so hip…" He trails off for a moment, cradling a couch pillow to his stomach. "Ahhh. This is a nice couch."

You smile as you settle near his feet. Your wings have turned light and limp inside your gem, and there is a faint weakness in your limbs that you are glad to feel as the storm of the last day and night finally tapers off, its turbulent waters slowing.

"Hey, guys."

Every head in the house turns toward the voice. Steven stands with eyes almost shy at the foot of the stairs, tiny again beside Bismuth, who cups his hands in hers. Amethyst has to lock her arms around Peridot's chest to keep Peridot from launching herself at him.

"Steven!" Pearl flits to his side with strides that scarcely seem to touch the floor. "Are you feeling any better?" She chuckles, a strained sweet note. "Not that you need to be."

"Maybe thiiiiiis much." Steven holds his longest finger and his thumb so close together that you see no distance between them from where you sit.

Dr. Drakken leaps to his feet and staggers; his knee strikes the edge of the rounded, glass-topped table, and you veer to catch him before he collapses. Garbled sounds fall from his mouth as he struggles to regain his balance, yet he nods at Steven and beckons him toward the couch with the hand that is not trying to rub the pain from his knee. Everyone human and Gem alike moves with caution, their footsteps quiet and hesitant as they part to open a channel from the stairs to the couch.

Steven crosses the channel and sits on the couch, drawing his legs up beside him. Greg moves to kneel at his side and his hand floats to Steven's forehead, gentle as a leaf onto water. "Hey, Schtewball," he says. "How are ya, kiddo?"

"Kinda hungry, actually," Steven says. A sheepish look overtakes his face. "I don't remember the last time I ate."

Greg starts to stand, but Drakken shakes his head at him. "Have no fear! I know just what to do!"

You laugh a little, imagining how Shego would moan in alarm at those words, and watch him skitter into the kitchen, his boots punching the floorboards. Pans clang and he occasionally yelps as he rummages through the cabinets and mutters to himself.

Within minutes, you smell a mild odor similar to the meat Ron likes to cook yet thinner and more delicate, and you hear the delighted shrieking and frothing of water being heated. Other sounds work their way across the kitchen as well: Drakken humming at a pitch that slides around gleefully, the steady carving of a blade through a food that crunches when cut.

You sit at the end of the couch once more and glance at Steven as he leans into its padding. He no longer looks quite so boyish, the ends of coarse hairs sprouting from his jaw and bruising circles to rival Drakken's beneath his eyes, the weariness in them making him at once old and young. His arm drops across the same pillow Drakken was hugging earlier, and his hand turns upward, the pink fingers outstretched. You remember their comforting feel but do not take them in yours; he has had enough decisions stolen from him that you must leave this one for him to make.

He breathes and Connie comes around his other side, matching her breaths to his. The sound is such a comfort that you consider shapeshifting a pair of lungs to join it. Somehow, though, you suspect this is a moment only the two of them inhabit, and you know how much he needs that.

You don't know how much time has passed when Dr. Drakken bustles out of the kitchen, holding a steaming metallic pot in one hand and an empty bowl in the other, an oversized spoon balanced between his shoulder and his ear. The spoon wobbles with his steps and he reaches to steady it, tipping the bowl end over end; he barely manages to catch it with a vine.

"Chicken noodle soup!" he proclaims, like one of the specialized human cooks you have seen on television. You imagine him in a white clothing-shield smock and a matching hat tall as Peridot's hair, and the light that makes up your body feels a tint brighter. He sets the bowl on the coffee table and tips the pot over it, his legs vibrating as he works to fill the bowl, to keep its hot moist contents from landing on him. "The closest thing to a cure-all I know!"

Steven glances at the bowl and then back to Drakken, his forehead puckering and his lips drawing down. It is an expression you recognize not by the look of it, but from the memories of how many times you have felt it weighing on your face.

You stand over him so that your words can reach him. "And don't even start with that 'I don't deserve this' stuff, okay? That's not what this is about."

Steven's gaze slides up to meet yours, and you can almost feel the tightness around his chest, the strictures of guilt that part just enough to let one breath through at a time. He does not say anything, but he opens the pink hands and accepts the bowl from Dr. Drakken; he waits patiently while Drakken skitters back into the kitchen for the smaller spoon he forgot to bring.

Connie crosses in front of the couch and crouches next to Steven, her cheek almost brushing his. Her normally smooth hair stands out in several different directions as though electricity runs through it. You watch him relax without her giving him any words; the proximity of her face is enough. Although it is hard to move away from him, you edge aside to give them some more space.

Steven lifts his spoon and swallows, and you imagine the heat sliding down his throat and settling in the system that fills his midsection, a system that will instinctually know what to do with it. A flat, limp string of grain catches between his teeth, and when he pries it loose and guides it to the back of his mouth, your gemstone pinches as you remember how he and Amethyst would cover those strings with red edible paste and compete to see who could use their mouths as suctions to pull in the longest strand. You glance into the bowl and see several more of those strands, a liquid the color of wet sand that your powers tell you is mostly water, and almost-white chunks of meat, sprinkled with bits of orange vegetables.

Drakken watches with his arms clasped behind his back, his toes supporting his body weight and looking ready to spring at any moment. Steven draws his legs in closer, leaving a vacant place on the couch that Drakken drops into without grace.

Steven takes another spoonful and looks at Drakken with eyes that want to be grateful. "This is really good."

"Well, of course it is!" Drakken says. "It's my mother's recipe, so it ought to be! It was always good for whatever ailed you – whether you'd caught a cold or had your wisdom teeth out or woken up in the middle of the ocean with no memory of the past thirty-six hours –" his eyes dart from you to the others who watch him, the skin beneath folding up –"…which, if I'm reading the room correctly, has never happened to anybody else here."

You shrug. "I mean, the ocean and I have been through a lot together, but never that." Your back grows cold and your throat hot at the idea that your ocean has ever been a threat to him.

"Now, Steven." Drakken leans closer to him, his eyebrow yanked into a straight line. "I don't want you to make the same mistake I did."

"You mean, becoming a supervillain?" There is no incredulity in Steven's voice; he considers himself capable of that now.

"Well, yes, that was the biggest mistake, but there was something else that led up to it! Why, when I was a small child…" Drakken stops and turns his face away, but not before you see it contort. "Oh, stop it, Drakken. This isn't about you."

You look at him with something that falls short of surprise. You have seen before what it looks like when Dr. Drakken shows kindness solely because he knows it is the right thing to do, how his conscience hauls his intentions behind it like heavy freight. That is not what you see now. His eyes are black like space and bright like stars, a knot cinched into the brow above them, and his arms spread wide as though in welcome. He is more than organic; he is authentic.

"Ahem!" With two playing cards still dangling from her fingers, Peridot steps up and appraises Drakken from behind her visor. "If what you have gone through is relevant to what Steven is going through now, I believe it would be appropriate to discuss yourself for a short time."

"Yeah," Amethyst says. "If Lapis starts snoring, you'll know you've been talking too long."

Peridot must have told her. You feel your cheeks flush, but Drakken smiles as if snoring is the most endearing thing you could do. His teeth flash as he says, "All right, Steven, all supervillains are practically required to have a twisted childhood. But mine was worse than anyone else's. Okay –" his pause is abrupt and reluctant – "maybe not, but it feels like it to me! My father had taken off when I was a little kid, and school was a nightmare for me."

You are the one who swallows now. You are glad that he is the person he is now, the person those experiences shaped him to be, but you hate the thought of his suffering. For all the actions he now regrets, though, there was still a part of him good enough to stand against the Lowardians, just as there remained a part of Steven that picked up Jasper's pieces, never considering that he could leave them there and be free of her.

"School was? Really?" Steven says.

"Oh, yes! The other kids were terrible to me. I want to think it was because they were jealous of my intellect, but it probably also had something to do with the fact that I was almost always the smallest kid in the class and always for certain the least athletic. Always the kid picked last for gym class. Gym class…that was a terror all its own. The dodgeballs being hurled at me, the tetherballs aimed to smack me right in the noses, the fore-square balls I could never reach and they knew it…

"Not to mention the locker room. Which I won't. Mention it, that is. Not in with ladies present." Drakken rubs the back of his neck.

Amethyst nudges Peridot. "Dude, he just called us ladies."

"One day, when I was in fourth grade, I'd had enough, so I built a machine that could control rubber. From that day onward, no one could beat me at four-square, or tetherball, or dodgeball, but it didn't make the other kids like me any more than they did before. The teachers all declared I was mad – not mad-angry, mad-crazy – and the kids believed them."

"Wait." Greg raises his hand. "You're tellin' me that you made some kind of rubber-controller in fourth grade? Drakken, I was still counting on my fingers to do multiplication tables in fourth grade!"

Drakken's lips slam together, yet you still see them tremble. The kindness pains him, you realize; he is still that unaccustomed to it. "Like I said, I want to believe they were jealous of my intellect, but that intellect wasn't very well known at that time. I understood every science concept in the book, but I couldn't read very well. Could hardly spell. And sometimes even my math papers came back all marked wrong because I'd get the problem right but write the numbers down in the wrong order!"

You frown. "Wasn't that just because you have dyslexia, though?"

Drakken turns to you, the skin below his eyes creeping upward again. "Lapis, nobody in my corner of the world knew what dyslexia was back then! I only found out when I went to work for Global Justice. When I was a kid, they just decided I was 'slow'."

You know from the hurt in his eyes that the word has nothing to do with his speed. The contours of your gem ripple.

"But I wasn't! I knew I was smart, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it! How could I not be smart? But I couldn't prove it! And sometimes I even started to doubt myself."

Drakken draws air through his nose in a wheeze. "I never told my mother about any of it."

Steven nods as if that makes perfect sense. It is Peridot, naturally, who demands, "Why not?"

"Because I didn't want to worry her!" Drakken says. "And, boy, is she is a worrier. She was so stressed out already, trying to raise me up all by herself, and I couldn't tell her that I was getting beaten up, or that I'd made plans to stink-bomb their gym clothes, or that I was daydreaming of doing things that were worse. I didn't want to drive her away! I thought I'd already done that with my father."

Your hand tightens against the floorboards.

"So I didn't tell. I let it build and build and build, and then one day when I was in college, three people who I thought were my friends made fun of one of my inventions, and I just snapped. Erupted. Like a volcano." Drakken's voice, already expansive, grows wider still, pressing against the walls as though seeking a way out. "And came out of it convinced that I was going to take over the whole dang world and then everyone who'd ever mocked me would be sorry!

"I stayed a volcano, too. After that, I told everyone everything. All the details of every plan I had. Lots of background on the reasons I was doing it. One time, I even put Shego under mind control just to get her to stop sassing long enough to listen to tales of my twisted childhood." He holds up one hand. "Don't do that, by the way. It's fun at first, but it will always come back to bite you in extremely painful places.

"I couldn't stop telling," Drakken says, his breath finally slowing. "All because I never told. So don't keep that in, Steven. Or it'll…it'll…it'll volcano-fy you, too!" He lets out a tempestuous sigh. "Blast, and I was on such a roll, too!"

"'Volcano-fy' sounds good to me," Bismuth says.

Steven doesn't answer her. He is leaning on his elbows, studying Drakken's scarred face with its remnants of an angry pink heat. "You're not kidding. You really were like that."

"For a long time. Hero's honor." Drakken drags his finger down and then across his chest in the shape of a cross. "What do you think of that?"

He tries to say it as though the question does not require an answer, and yet you see the flicker of expectation in his eyes. He still wants so badly to be affirmed.

A sigh rises from Steven like steam off the soup. "I think I better go meet your shrink," he says.

The relief is so great that you begin to laugh, and to your amazement, Steven joins in. Tears still shimmer in his eyes, but you know they are the way he heals.

---

Steven cries again when night darkens the sky and he stands up to answer a knock at the door. Topaz and Lisa stand on his porch, bearing an enormous piece of bright hard paper. The words Feel Better Soon, Steven! scrawl across it, and on every other piece of its surface each of the Gems from Little Homeworld has signed her name. He lowers his head and lets Topaz engulf him in a hug while Lisa, her face uncertain, raises a hand to rest on his shoulder.

After that, your family's worlds begin to grow back together as water freezes when left to its own devices, not hurried along by a Lapis or Sapphire: in tattered patches, ragged and shallow, often unsafe to put weight on but steadily thickening.

Steven calls the number on the card Drakken gave him and arranges an appointment for next week. The entire time, Connie's fingers are laced through his. Pearl tidies the furnishings that Steven must have knocked askew during his transformation, humming to herself as Bismuth estimates the damage done to the rest of the house.

Peridot sweeps the remaining glass shards from the greenhouse and turns her attention to Bismuth's anvil, her hands pushing its halves together and her eyes crushing shut. It takes her a few attempts – she is used to working with much smaller objects – but the halves eventually rejoin, leaving only a thin mark down the center that reminds you of both the scar on Dr. Drakken's cheek and an empty riverbank seen from far above.

Drakken collects the plant monsters, which have shrunken and adjusted to the dried-clay pots Peridot has painted for them, though spines still poke from their flesh and they mutter whenever anyone other than Drakken comes near them. "I'm probably the most qualified to give them a good home," he brags. "I just hope they get along with Commodore Puddles."

You hope so too. Pumpkin does, but Pumpkin was created from feelings of nurturing and love, nothing like what Steven must have been feeling after destroying and reassembling his greatest enemy.

Greg is never far from Steven, and his guitar is never far from his reach. You hear it at odd hours of the night and into the next day, vibrant sharp-edged notes cutting the air, free to move about without worry or limitations, and your back aches as you realize you cannot recall the last time you heard Steven play his own smaller instrument, the one he calls a ukelele. He is muttering, too, the music caught and tangled in the depths of him like a fish in a net.

It is several days before he tells you the full story of his fight with Jasper, everyone gathered around him on the porch while Greg cooks meat on a circular metal grate above a small fire. Steven does not have Drakken's proclivity toward exaggeration; in neat wavering words he recounts all of it as it happened. You flinch with the description of every blow, whether it was landed against him or her. She waited to the end of him, she expended him, and even as she broke to pieces, she overpowered him.

You expect your powers to foam white and wild as you listen, but they do not move with anything as distinct as anger. Rather, they keen silently within you and wander from one side of your gem to the next, almost restless, not quite wistful. You glance at Garnet, who stands just outside the doorway with her face placid as ever, and you wonder what it would be like to dance with someone who doesn't watch you with the dark hunger in her eyes. You will never know now. You are not sure whether Jasper took that from you or if you surrendered it too quickly, but the path to it has been washed out, damaged beyond repair.

Steven weeps then, too, slumped against the wall with sand between his bare toes. "When did I get to be such a mean person?" he says.

"Probably like the tenth time she kicked you in the face," you say. Your voice is hard but not as hard as it could be.

"But I let her get to me," he says. "I got so mad at her, and I didn't care about her, I didn't care about anything except getting that out on someone. That makes me not any better than her!"

Garnet frowns. "Don't believe those lies, Steven."

"Lies?" Steven turns to her, his eyes unconvinced, and you know where he now resides: a place where others sail to him on rickety boats that will not hold him, extending ropes that always fall a centimeter short of reaching him, building bridges for him that will unravel like braided kelp. It is a place you have drifted away from sometime in the past few years, and yet you remember all too well the feeling of its confines and can still speak from it.

You take his hand, and a facet of you mourns the time when you could cover it with yours. "Your guilt isn't a lie, Steven," you say. "But the idea that you can never be anything else apart from it – that is."

Steven turns to look at you. The reflection of your face is suspended in his tears, and when he lets out a brittle breath, you hear his desire to believe you. An instant later, he puts his other hand on top of yours and begins to tremble.

"No such thing as happily ever after, huh?" he says.

"I guess not," you say. You wish it were not true, for Steven of all people has certainly earned himself one. You are about to tell him that, and then it occurs to you that is part of the problem; in all the commendation he received for saving Earth and restructuring Homeworld, he has come to believe he is hollow beneath it, a trick of the light with only his mother's gem to anchor him to reality. "But, Steven, you taught me that Earth changes all the time, remember?" You think of the leaf he dangled before you and how the blue parts of your eyes almost touched as it came into focus, and you smile. "Just at the point where it looks like everything's dead, it all comes back to life again."

"Oversimplified but correct," Peridot says. "Carbon-based lifeforms have proven to possess an amazing resilience." She runs a hand over Steven's head with the same motion she will use to pet Pumpkin, and the angles of her face soften. "You more so than most."

Steven's mouth turns up, the smile weak and small but honest. "Thanks, guys."

Amethyst pretends to punch his arm. "We're here for ya, bro!"

"Always," Connie repeats. She leans in on her hands and knees and kisses Steven's cheek.

"Ohhhh, now I like this!" Dr. Drakken exclaims, his fingers forming starbursts. "All this love and support…it makes me want to sing!" His eyes dart to the radio which lies tipped over at the corner of the porch, the voice-amplifying stick sprouting from its side like the petals from his neck. "Would anyone mind if I did karaoke now?"

Steven closes his eyes, but the muscles around them smooth. "Knock yourself out," he says.

Drakken nearly does, as far as you can tell. He sings with the same blaring unsubtle energy with which he does everything else, but he finds a tune about friends leaning on one another when they cannot walk by themselves and respects it, even as he drags and stretches it. His head tilts back and he points the voice-amplifier at the sky, his arms flailing along. When he is finished at last, you applaud not just for the quality of his voice, but for the strength of his joy and his natural impulse to share it.

The arrogant swagger in his voice fades when he sees you clapping for him. A grin kindles on his face, leaping from spread lips to comical pricking ears, to the upturned ends of his hair. You tuck your feet under him and study him for another moment, and you see again the man who keeps going when everything seems lost and all of his plans have failed, who still wakes up every day and determines to be better than the day before. It is not just the petals ringing his head that speak of restored life.

You hope Steven can see it, too.

---

It is well more than a week later when someone knocks on your house's front door, and you open it to find Dr. Drakken beaming down at you. "Hey, Lapis!" he says with a wave. Behind him, you catch a glimpse of Peridot's smug grin before she scampers off; she must have been the one who rode the warp pad to bring him in.

You tuck your fingers between the pages of the book you hold to keep your place as Pumpkin comes up to sniff his boots. "Hi."

"This has been a heck of a week, and I think we need a break," Drakken says. "So I would like to take you on a date!"

"A date?" you repeat.

"Yes, you know. When two people who love each other go and do something fun together, and they try not to worry so much about everything, but if they are worried they talk to each other about it and help each other, and they don't say they're fine unless they really are, and they just get to enjoy one another's company…" He pauses and takes a breath substantial enough to make up for the ones he has skipped. His eyes dart to your book. "Oh. Sorry. Is this a bad time?"

You shake your head, smiling. "It's a pretty good one, actually."

"Oh! That's great. So where would you like to go? Heh – look at me, asking a question. You know, as I've grown older, I think I've become more flexible." Drakken puts one hand on his lower back and gives a smile that is also a grimace. "Not physically, of course – I'm no Spinel –"

"No, I get it." You lay your hand on his arm. "I'd love to go somewhere with you. Somewhere around here, though. I…I kind of want to stay close to Steven."

Steven still spends most of his time resting, talking, or crying. You visit him every day, and though his face always lightens when he sees you, the weariness is still embedded in him like a sword meant to drive him back into his gem.

"That poor kid," Drakken says. "How's he doing these days?"

"Better, I think," you say. "Not good, not really, but a little better. I still feel like he needs protecting, but I guess it's from himself now." The thought expands in your gem like ice. While you do not miss battling Jasper or Leslie or Bluebird, you at least knew how to keep them from reaching Steven.

"Oooh, we could call in Kim Possible, then! She's great at saving people from themselves."

His tone is light, but his eyes are black tunnels, entrances to a place he does not want to remember. You give his arm a gentle nudge to call him back.

"Right," Drakken says. "Somewhere around here. How about the beach?" You shake your head and when you cannot find the words, he finds them for you. "Too soon? After the monster-Steven-in-the-water thing?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Hmmm. How about the amusement park?"

"Funland?" you say, and he nods. "Nah. They've mostly got roller coasters there, and I already know I don't like roller coasters."

"Oh." Drakken blinks at you, his lower lip hanging. "Is that…metaphorical? For how crazy things have been for us lately?"

"No," you say with a giggle. "It means Steven already took me on an actual roller coaster once, and it was terrifying."

"Well, we don't want that, then!" Drakken says. You meet his gaze when it lowers to yours; you love to watch the thoughts and emotions rushing through his eyes. There are a myriad of them, all of them lakes: clear yet too deep to see to the bottoms. "You've had enough terrifyingness for about twelve lifetimes!"

"Human lifetimes or Gem lifetimes?"

"Either. Both." Drakken speaks with authority, and for a moment you wonder if this is the voice he planned to use as the world's ruler and whether anyone would have taken it seriously. You are so glad neither of you will ever find out.

You run one hand back through the fringe of hair on your forehead. "How about we just walk around on the boardwalk until we find something that looks interesting?"

Drakken's face lights again. "That sounds great."

"First-class flight." You grab him by his wrists and fly him away from Little Homeworld and into town, and he squeals and kicks his legs below you.

You set him down at one end of the boardwalk, the creaking of the wooden walkway beneath your shoes as soft as the lapping of the ocean in the distance. A sea breeze, mild and meek today, runs across your exposed skin, unable to outmatch the warmth of the sun on your face and of Dr. Drakken's hand in yours. The first time you made this journey Steven carried your mirror, and though you could not feel his sweaty gentle hands from inside, you were aware of a silent intangible sliver of security that you had not known in five thousand years.

Drakken meanders down the boardwalk, stopping to grunt with excitement and point out the places you have been together: the toy shop where you first held a teddy bear, the barbershop where he charmed a worker into giving you each a piece of candy, the home-decorations shop where he set a mirror aside to quell your panic and where you told him, on the back steps, what about it frightened you so. This is a place that saw you begin to trust again.

Before you come to the ice cream stand, Drakken stops in his tracks and stabs a finger toward another opening in the wall of shops. "Oooh, look, the arcade! I haven't been to an arcade since I was a kid! Well…no, there was that one time I went in one to steal Felix's wheelchair, but I don't like to dwell on that."

You say nothing and let him blink away his guilt. An arcade, you know, is a room wide and usually darkened and filled with challenging games, some physical and many virtual.

"How…how do you do with the arcade?" Drakken asks. "Does it bother you?"

"Steven took me there once," you say. "It was pretty loud and flashy, but not in a bad way or anything. I don't mind it."

"Then…then do you think maybe that could be the first stop on our date?" Drakken says. "After the last few days, I think it would feel really good to play a game and win. And if I don't win…well, it won't be such a big deal, because I'll be with you."

He does not thrust his chest forward as he does when he tries to impress someone, and his eyes are round as two satellites. You like to believe he saves his truest face for you.

"Sure," you say. "Let's go there."

You step into the arcade and large, red lights swivel to greet you, slamming on and off in a pattern like a human heartbeat. The music coming from the ceiling slides smoothly under the sounds of gaming machinery: the clanking as it processes the coins humans insert; the beeping as they wrestle with its controls; and the churning as it dispenses lines of tickets, longer when their performance is better. A new sound comes from the game that makes people dance for tickets, too steady to be mere noise yet almost too cacophonous to be a tune. You feel it grinding into the floor, traveling beneath your feet. The place is welcome and chaos, and Dr. Drakken fits in perfectly.

"You okay with this?" he says. The arcade is loud, but he is louder, and you smile and nod. "Good! And if you're ever not –"

" – I'll come tell you we need to go," you finish for him.

"Right." Drakken tilts his head. "I was thinking more like ripping the water fountain out of the wall and using it to send an SOS, but that works too."

You snicker as the two of you head deeper into the arcade. Your boyfriend tends to see the complex before he sees the simple, and after four years together you still are not sure whether that is intelligence or foolishness.

"Oh, look at that!" Drakken gestures toward a gaming machine while his other arm circles like a windmill. You follow his pointing finger to a flat, wide screen mounted at about Peridot's height off the floor, a hard-molded chair attached across from it. Rather than the intricate array of sticks and buttons that have always reminded you of primitive spacecraft controls, this machine looks more like a human car, with a directional wheel in its center and two flashing silver pedals at its base, which if you remember correctly allow them to speed up or stop. "Road Killer!"

"Is that the one where the object is to crash into as much as you can?" you say. You walk toward the game, your footsteps scarcely registering among the beats of the dancing game's music.

"Yep! Which makes it pretty much the opposite of the object of real driving." Drakken chuckles. "Unless you're my cousin Eddy."

"This must be his favorite game, then," you say carefully. You have not seen Eddy since the day they held a memorial service for Greg's mullet, and you are not especially eager to see him again.

"Always has been. Always will be." Drakken gives the game's side an affectionate pat and then turns to you. "Um. You can go first if you want."

You hear the strained ecstatic whimper behind his words and shake your head at him. "Nah. I think you're more excited about it than I am."

Drakken grins. "Many thanks, madam." He fumbles a coin into the flashing slot and drops himself into the chair. His eyes fix on the back end of a car and take on a glow that outdoes its lights, a dark glimmer that you can immediately identify: pain and glee and rage. It is the remnant of the life he gave up the night the Lowardians came to plunder Earth.

A commotion erupts from the machine, painful and yet somehow comforting.

A few minutes later, Drakken stands up and pushes the sweat from his forehead. "I've always said there's nothing like a game that's both fun and cathartic," he says, and though you have never heard him say this once, you nod for him to continue. "I like to see all of the stuff I run over as all of the people I hate. Although –" he pauses – "that list isn't nearly as long as it used to be, and I for one find that encouraging!"

You glance up at the hoping, believing tilt of his head and you have to ask: "Is Jasper on that list?"

"Indeed she is." A storm gathers in Drakken's lively eyes and then passes through, leaving them deep and deliberating. "But I've got to admit, after – everything –" he pauses again, his mouth stumbling on the word – "the thought of blasting her to bits isn't quite that appealing anymore.

"How about you? Do you still hate her?" It is a question, nothing but curiosity behind it.

You shrug. "Well, I felt awful when I found out she got shattered, so I guess not. Maybe she can be happy someday on Homeworld with the other Jaspers."

"And far away from you," Drakken says, his voice dark.

"And far away from me," you agree. It is all the consideration you are willing to give her. At even the briefest thought of Jasper, you can still feel the weights around her green wrists and the snarl beneath her skin, but the memory does not take up the space it once did; you are filled now with meepmorps and companionship and the sensation of polluted water healing under your fingerprints, and there is no gap wide enough for Jasper's shoulders.

Drakken bends at the waist and sweeps his arm toward the chair. "Go on. I don't want to hog all the fun and catharsis for myself."

You giggle and sit down in the chair, careful to keep your gem well away from its hardened ridges. Your fingers curl around the direction wheel and your foot tenses on the metal slab, and the car you are supposed to be driving tears into position on your screen, spewing a stream of flames behind it. You swerve and collide with trash cans, fire hydrants, and mailboxes, and you envision each pile of debris you create as Jasper or Leslie or Bluebird bumped to another galaxy, or Steven's long-hidden pain flattened into the pavement. Humanoid figures wander aimlessly across the road projected before you.

You steer around them every time.

When you are done, your score flashes in bright red numbers, and you rise with the center of your gem pooling calm and blue. Drakken retrieves the long string of tickets that has trickled onto the ground. After making several foundering attempts to fold them, he abandons the idea and plunges them into his pocket, the ends poking out in several directions like his hair.

A moment later, his face brightens and he exclaims, "Oh! And there's Punch Buddy!"

He turns and bounds to another game, this one with a pad laid out for the player's feet and no controls visible save for the leathered, layered gloves almost thick enough to hold Garnet's gauntlets. The object of this game, you know, is to fight with your fists, and you control the game by controlling the gloves.

"More catharsis?" you guess.

"And how!"

Drakken steps onto the pad and slips his hands into the gloves, his arms immersed almost to the elbows. "The crowd goes silent in horror as Drew Lipsky walks into the gym of his alma matter," he mutters to himself. "This is a rematch thirty years in the making."

You watch his long, thin back tighten and release as he throws punch after punch, untimed and undisciplined. Often a blow connects and the figures onscreen stumble back with their faces red and swelling; just as often he swings too wide and never touches the opponent. You do not cheer him or applaud for him. You simply stand and watch as he pretends to win against the people he feared so early in his life.

At the end of this game, a shorter string of tickets trails from the machine, and Drakken gives a disappointed grunt as he bends down to retrieve them. "Hmmph. I guess I'm better at driving than at punching," he says. "Of course, I'm better at a lot of things than I am at punching. Things like classifying sub-atomic particles by degrees of stability!"

"And whatever the heck that is," you say with a smile, "it sounds a whole lot cooler than punching."

Drakken grins, too, the forced arrogance vanishing from his lips and the harsh expression disappearing from his eyes. There is a darkness within him, but there is a light surrounding him that he always invites to come touch him. "Do you want a turn?" he asks.

You shake your head. "Nah. I already know I'm way too good at it." Your fight against your fellow Lapises is still a fresh wound inside you; you have no desire to relive any of its motions.

"Oh. I gotcha."

Dr. Drakken's round face softens until only the pointed cheekbones appear to hold it in place, and he reaches out to brush a strand of hair from your cheek. His fingers don't seem to know where to go, but they are like sun-warmed water against your inherent cold, and through them you can feel his heartbeat, which always seems so quick and eager, even at his most placid. Your mind puckers around the moment, trying to cling to it so you can reflect it later.

"How about Skee Ball?" he bursts out.

"Huh?"

"Skee Ball." He nods toward the row of games lined up on the opposite wall, none of which boast controls, only elongated carpeted ramps like runways for airplanes and, above and set back from that, a flat box filled with four concentric circles, each one wider than the one inside it and with a hole at its lowest curve. You recognize it from your first trip to the arcade. "There aren't any traumatic memories related to Skee Ball, are there?"

"Nope," you say. "Not even for me."

"Remember how to play?" Drakken asks.

"Um, I think you try to get the ball in one of the circles, and smaller circles means more points. And you have to stand behind the ramp and roll it, because if you drop it right in it's just cheating. At least that's what Steven said."

"That's it exactly. Steven knows what's up." Drakken beams at you, but the world around you seems to stiffen. Steven's fate may still be far from decided, and you are both comforted and embarrassed to have forgotten that for any length of time.

Drakken tucks his hand into yours and you start in the direction of the Skee Ball machine. Steven is at home, you remind yourself, with his father and Amethyst, and he is safe. He is sorting through the marks his life has left on him, and he does not want your constant worry any more than you had ever wanted his.

You pass the glass merchandise counter, and Drakken's hand jerks in yours as he comes to a stop. "Oooh! Let's see what they've got in the way of prizes!" he exclaims. "There's almost always something spectacular. We can figure out in advance how many tickets we'll need, and then we can make a plan from there." He rubs his palms together vigorously, then frowns. "Sorry. Did that look maniacal?"

"Not too much," you say. "It helps that you didn't do an evil laugh."

He smiles then, the smile that reminded you so much of Steven when you first saw it, and anything menacing about him is lost.

The arcade's owner, a man sturdier than Drakken with a bare dark brown scalp, watches you without the wariness you saw in his eyes your first trip here. His expression does not change when he sees Drakken. All of Beach City's citizens have grown accustomed to him.

Behind the owner hangs an array of oversized pretend animals, some easily identifiable as Earth creatures, other distorted versions of animals you have seen in books, and still others appearing to hail from planets you have never visited. One of the smaller toys, its legs brushing the man's shoulders, catches your attention. Its black eyes jut from a bulbous head, and for an instant you stand barefoot on the barn's plank floor, surrounded by its close warm air and by a shorebird's voice you were coming dangerously close to forgiving. Despite how much you love your new house, an ache blooms at the base of your spine and travels upward like steam from an undersea vent.

You remember how often Steven stopped by, how intent he was on convincing you his planet could be good, and you swallow and turn to Drakken. He is uncharacteristically still, his hands and jaw both hanging slack, his eyebrow high on a creased forehead. It is, you suspect, the look you wore the first time you saw a coral reef: something that seeped through your vision and soaked into your soul, its imprint permanent.

Something you would not let yourself gaze upon for long, lest it undermine your Purpose.

You follow his gaze to the smaller items beneath the counter, said to cost seventy-five tickets each, and you see nothing that appears life-changing: a thin wooden board to which a small rubber ball has been tethered; a whistle like the ones the lifeguards on Camp Pining Hearts wear, the metallic sphere inside looking sturdier than the translucent plastic that encases it; a yellowish ring made of the same flimsy plastic; a line of tiny pretend cars, both their front and back ends open on hinges; a sheaf of pictures that can be peeled from the plastic and attached to cloth. Yet you know Dr. Drakken's thoughts have more curves and contours than yours, and it is often hard to predict how he will interpret the things in front of him.

You watch the play of the overhead lights across his eyes for a minute, and then you touch his arm. He startles, his shoulders jerking, but his stance calms and the tension passes from his eyes when he sees you. "Did you find something you want to get?" you say.

Drakken nods with a confidence unsupported by what you see on his face.

"For seventy-five tickets?"

"Yes," Drakken says.

"Well, let's go win them, then." You nudge him with your shoulder. "The Scee Ball is that way, remember?"

He surges ahead, like a ship that has successfully navigated a troublesome current, smiling shakily.

The Skee Balls Drakken throws tend to fall into the largest circle, the one that awards the lowest amount of points. He wears a scowl that seems Extracted from concentration rather than frustration, broken only when he manages to throw a ball into one of the smaller, more rewarding circles or when he watches you aim, regardless of where your shot lands. When you toss one ball into the center circle, so narrow it is more of a tube, lights flash from the top of the machine and in Drakken's eyes. He bends to gather the tickets with one hand and holds up the other for a high five; you stoop to meet it with yours.

Behind the Skee Ball game and farther into a more shadowed corner of the arcade, Drakken finds another machine he recognizes, older than the others, its plastic casing pitted like the surface of a moon. It is, he explains, a game where you try to help a frog cross a series of roads and waterways, avoiding getting caught beneath vehicles which will destroy you. You wrinkle your nose at the thought, though Drakken is quick to reassure you the frog's shattering is never depicted with anything more than a sickly face and the words "Game Over."

"This is one of those games from way back in my childhood," he says, and you almost laugh – as though that is ancient, even by Earth standards. "Not to mention the only one I could beat Eddy at. And do you know why? Because I listened to my mother and looked both ways before I crossed the street!"

You do not miss the smugness steeping in his voice; there are still those he is desperate to outperform.

Drakken also knows the games that rest in a broken row next to it: one which involves playing as what looks like a wedge of pie, consuming dots and trying not to run into big-eyed creatures that look as innocent as Aquamarine; and one which features a construction ball that you must use to tear through decrepit buildings. Each of them he teaches you to play, and on each of them you do well enough to earn a sprinkling of tickets, but the real joy is in watching him.

The movements of his hands have never been agile and they are not now, but they are quick and creative; you see them twist and contort the controls, bending to angles a less frantic mind would never think to try. Perspiration falls from his bunched eyebrow like dewdrops from the undersides of leaves. It should not soothe you to witness such a spectacle, and yet your center feels soft and safe, your wings flitting from one side of your gem's interior to the other, trying to match the twitching of his fingers.

You take turns retrieving the tickets that churn from the machines, though you let Dr. Drakken be the one to count them, as he seems more invested in the number than you are. With each subsequent higher total, his smile expands and brightens, a new galaxy trying to form.

At the front of the building, warm air drifting over you from the open entryway, you stop and stare when you spot, attached to another inconsequential-looking game, what appear to be four large helpings of the ham Mama Lipsky serves at every Christmas dinner. It takes you only a moment to realize that they are stiff and synthetic, never alive, that they were made to dangle from either side of a long, rectangular frame that reminds you of the structures at the library which house books waiting to be returned to their shelves. Your eyes drop to the cord branching from its base and follow it to the sunken place in the wall where its end is buried in a socket and reinforced with several layers of adhesive.

You smile.

"Hey." You coax Dr. Drakken to a stop and point at the game. "There's Meat Beat Mania. The game Garnet got so into that Steven had to unplug it to get her to go the fight the Corruption that was about to destroy the town?"

You try to envision the moment, and the clearest picture reflected inside you is of Steven as you first knew him, shorter than you and with eyes still unfamiliar with anyone's cruelty. Wistfulness trails the length of your back, liquid and startlingly warm, and you hold back a sigh.

Drakken looks at the game, too, and he chuckles. "Oh, yes, that game. Looks like they've made it a little harder to unplug now." A strange planning glow enters his eyes, but he stops and shakes his head, his ponytail slapping his neck. "Okay, Drakken. That's a safety precaution, not a challenge for you. You don't have to overpower it to be awsome."

"Totally not." You tap the back of his hand. "So…you think we could beat her top score? Steven says it's like an all-time arcade high."

Drakken glances down at you, his lips spreading, his face alight. "Only one way to find out, isn't there?" he says, and when he dashes off the mischief in his step is harmless once more.

Across from the game machine, you position your feet on a brightly colored mat, too thin and flat to be of use cleaning dirtied shoes, and several lumpen patches which must be movement detectors crackle, sensitive to your weight. Dr. Drakken hands one set of hams to you, the artificial bone hard and smooth as you curl your fingers around it. Clunky buttons rather than hand controllers line the machine's plastic jaw, and when Drakken pokes at them, an animated creature appears. A pig, you recognize from television shows, stands on her back legs while she waves her front legs in the air enthusiastically. "Let's get shakin', bacon!" she calls.

"Rather ironic coming from a pig," Drakken says with a blink.

"Are pigs related to bacons?" you say. "Because I've seen Steven eat bacon meat for breakfast."

Drakken grins. "Yes, but also no, but also yes. You see, 'bacon' isn't the name of an animal – it's a type of meat that comes from pigs."

"Oh." You frown and suddenly wonder if "ham" is not the name of an animal, either. There is no time to ask, however, for Drakken punches another button and words Two-Player Mode leap onto the screen. Drakken crouches on your right, his grip on his set of ham controllers tightening, the skin pinched beside his cheeks.

The game, once it begins, is easy enough to decipher. Arrows roll across the screen, pointing in one of four directions; it is your job to move the meat controllers to match them. You understand, then, why Garnet excelled at this game, with her future vision sorting through every possible combination of arrows.

At each new level, the arrows speed up until they appear onscreen in but one brief flash, the way days used to seem to pass for you on Earth. Your movements become smaller and tighter so there is less distance to cross from one direction to the next. Dr. Drakken's arms, conversely, begin to form wider waves, his legs creeping apart.

"Now you're really cooking!" the pig announces, and a volley of arrows fly from the bottom of the screen. You turn your wrist to catch an arrow before it can disappear, but Drakken throws the whole of his body to the side; his hips twist, his feet tangle, and he stumbles. You take a step backward, but he walks across your shoe on his way down, pinning the straps to the ground, and your lanky legs lose what meager amount of coordination they had.

He hits the floor hard and you fall sideways across him, your face and neck hanging over one side of his back and your legs over the other. You feel a groan tear through his chest, though when he speaks his voice is tinged with sport: "Man down! Man down!"

You press your face against the mat, scented with the undersides of shoes and with food too old to eat, and you begin to laugh. The two of you must look so ridiculous.

You wish Steven were here to see how silly you look.

The worry dusts across your shoulders, flits down your back, and is gone in a moment. Steven is never without family nowadays, and one day someone will bring him back to this place so that he can play again too. You need to believe that, and you do.

You push yourself up and offer a hand to Drakken. He wobbles to his feet, and to your relief his eyes are dark with embarrassment rather than pain. You glance behind him to the machine, where the pig shakes her head sadly beneath the words "GAME OVER."

"Would you believe I meant to do that?" he says.

"Nope. What level did we lose on?"

"Lucky level thirteen, I believe." Drakken twists toward the screen and then away, his eyes scrunching shut. "Did we beat Garnet's score, at least?"

You look at the list of the arcade's record scores, the top of which you know must belong to Garnet, and then glance at the number of points the two of you have accumulated in the corner. Your score is measured in thousands, Garnet's in hundreds of thousands. "Not even close," you report.

"Cheese doodles!" Drakken lets one fist drop onto his flattened palm. "Oh, well," he says, his voice steadying, "if someone else has to have the high score, at least it's someone good like Garnet."

You tuck your ham controllers back into their straps on the side of the game, envisioning Garnet's amusement if she could hear Drakken now, the almost imperceptible change that would come over her face. You can also picture Greg, grilling hot dogs on his barred oven above the beach, singing to himself as he nudges the meat around with a flat-faced rod.

"Is there really a song that goes 'Gimme the meat, boys, and free my soul'?" you ask Drakken.

He laughs – charitably, you think, considering how odd the question must sound to him. "Yes, it's a real song. But it goes 'Gimme the beat, boys,' not 'meat.'"

"Oh." You shrug. "I guess either one works for this game."

"True. But in order for the alliteration to still work, it'd have to be, 'Gimme the meat, moys,' and that's not…" His voice trails off, then lightens. "Hey, you know what that sounds like, actually?"

This time, you are ready for him. "Gimme the meepmorps and free my soul," you sing. Pushing your hair back from your forehead, you pause and add, "That's probably the most accurate one, anyway."

"Oooh, our tickets!" Dr. Drakken jumps in place, as though his hand has come down on a thornbush, and his head turns back toward the game. Tickets have spilled from its opening and come to rest in a coil on the floor.

You put one arm behind your back and watch from behind as he kneels beside the tickets, his hands fluttering over them. His shoulders climb as he counts until they are gathered nearly below his comical ears. He spins around to face you with an exulting smile.

"Seventy-nine!" he cries. "Lapis, we have seventy-nine tickets!"

You grin back at him. "We can go buy that thing you wanted, then."

Drakken nods, several times, and then places his hands on either side of his head and presses as if to remind himself to stop. He turns and sprints, short-legged, toward the counter, leaving the tickets behind. You shake your head and pluck them from the floor, then follow.

When you reach him, Drakken is standing in front of the prize counter, tossing his weight from one foot to the other and then onto the very ends of his toes on both. You fold the tickets into his hands, and he pushes them across the counter, his face a sweet pink, and points in earnest at whichever item captured his attention so before.

The man with the bare dark head bends to unlock the glass case from behind, and his shadow stoops with him, leaving the counter in the light. It is not a mirror, yet your reflection floats across the surface, and she stares back at you. You thought you would never see her like this, cast in a moment this far from fear, so far from what used to define her.

You smile at her.

The man straightens, and the ring passes from his hand to Dr. Drakken's, where it sits, thin and barely opaque against his black gloves. You watch Drakken's chest rise and fall once again before he places the ring in his pocket and pats the fabric down around it.

His hand takes yours, flesh meeting light, and you lead each other out into the sunshine.