~How the heck does this thing have so many faves and follows? Ya'all are the best!~
*looks at episode "Reunited" and sighs in relief* Ahhh. . . that's more like it. Thank you, thank you, SU writers.
We journey back to Middleton for this chapter and fight an old foe of Drakken's. I hope you all enjoy. Reviews are appreciated. Thanks for reading.~
You awaken the next morning to the feel of Plastic Lazuli's gemstone pressing your cheek and the sound of Peridot's happy chatter. Your powers regain consciousness before the rest of you, smooth and clear, free of ripples, of ballast, of discontent.
Pumpkin still nestles at your feet; you raise a foot to give her a stroke with your toes, and the hammock capsizes, spilling you onto the floor front down so that you take the sting with your chest and not your gem. You have no need for the air that is forced out of you, yet its expulsion is painful.
"Lapis!" The cry is deep and taut, and it feels the lack of oxygen far more profoundly than you do.
"It's fine." Peridot's voice fall out in cool, casual beads, and you realize she is trying to sound like you. "She does that a lot."
This doesn't appear to pacify Dr. Drakken's anxiety any, for a moment later he stands over you, gazing down at you with loyal black eyes. "Lapis?" he says.
"I'm fine," you say and give him a small, authentic smile.
He reaches a tiny hand down to help you up, and you accept.
"Would you want to come back to Middleton with me for the weekend?" Drakken asks as he chews his sweet-smelling cereal at the table still pitched several yards from the barn.
"That sounds like fun." You glance at Peridot, who is watching Drakken eat with fascination. "Peri? Is it okay with you?" You aren't sure why you asked that – you are planning to go no matter what, and yet somehow you also wish to know that she will be okay with it.
"Yeah," Peridot says. "I can have 'me time' while you're gone. And not have to listen to you snore all night."
You plant your hand on the triangular tip of Peridot's hair and give it a light shove. "Watch it," you say.
She snickers through her nose, a sound you have come to not despise.
You fly alongside Dr. Drakken's hovercraft, and the two of you reach his home just as the sun has turned its full attention on Middleton; there is sweat on Drakken's upper lip when he lands in Mama Lipsky's driveway. Together, with fingers intertwined – a mild, manageable substitute for fusion – you walk up to the front porch. Drakken pushes the button beside the door which will chime to announce your arrival.
Mama Lipsky throws the door open at once. "Come in, come in!" she calls. You had almost forgotten the speed and the blare of her voice, several octaves higher than Drakken's but still clearly part of the same family. "Ohhh, it's so good to see you both! How's the world's cutest couple?"
Drakken leans down and reports in a loud whisper, "She means us."
"I kinda figured," you reply.
You don't roll your eyes as you say it, though, because the compliment is still noteworthy. You know you and Drakken are a bundle of disparities – his whisper is the same volume as your shout, and his teeth must be three times the size of yours when he flashes them. It feels good to be told the effect is charming.
"Come here and give your old mama a hug, Drewbie!" Mama Lipsky wraps her arms around Drakken and nearly lifts him straight off the dark wooden porch. He wriggles free after a moment, and Mama Lipsky turns to you, arms out.
A multitude of faces trample through your mind: Steven, Jasper, Drakken, Garnet, Peridot as she is now, Peridot back when she was larger than you, and the gaping bitter embrace of Malachite, just waiting for you to stumble so it could catch you.
You take a step backward. "Um, I'm not ready for a hug just yet," you say.
"Oh." Mama Lipsky's hands drop to her sides.
Drakken turns to you, mouth hanging open. "How did you do that?"
"I…asked?" you say.
"Huh." Drakken slips into a brief, thoughtful silence.
"And how are you doing, dear Lapis? After that awful woman attacked you, I mean?" Mama Lipsky takes your forearm in her hand and rotates it solicitously.
Your wrist remembers the imprisoning hold before the rest of you does. A subtle flinch twists your insides.
"I'm okay," you say truthfully. "It helps when your body can heal itself. Well, I know human bodies can do it, too, but we do it faster." You are glad not to hear the note of superiority that was once grafted onto you. "And you don't have to worry about Jasper anymore. She's bubbled."
Mama Lipsky's brow puckers. "Bubbled?" she repeats.
You watch the thoughts move behind Dr. Drakken's intelligent eyes for a moment before he says, "Basically, she's being preserved in a medically induced coma."
Very little of that means anything to you, yet Mama Lipsky is satisfied by it and ushers you into her narrow, tall house. You sit down at the table and fit your fingers into the groove you remember from your last visit.
Drakken remains standing and rummages through the food-closet. "Do you have any cocoa moo left?" he asks his mother.
"No. They were out. But I did get some of the mix-it-yourself powder," Mama Lipsky says.
"Ooh! Even better!" Drakken says.
He reaches into his pocket and produces a short, squat tub you recognize from Homeworld's science labs as a beaker. Into it he pours a stream of milk from the plastic spouted container, and over that he sprinkles in layers of something that looks like dirt but smells of an entirely different sort of potential. He knocks the milk and the powder back and forth with a spoon for several minutes until he holds a beaker full of chocolate milk.
Drakken sits down next to you and nudges the beaker politely toward you. You shake your head, and he lifts it and gulps most of the mixture down in one turn. When he looks up, a streak of pale brown rests on his upper lip. The word you learned yesterday – mustache – comes to your mind, and you laugh ever so slightly.
"So, what shall do fir –?" Drakken begins and is then cut off as his pocket begins to shiver with the hum of his phone. Grumbling, he retrieves it, and his scowl disappears as soon as he reads the words on the screen. "I'll be doggoned. It's Kim Possible."
He speaks Kim's name as you speak Peridot's – in a tone that has warped from enmity to friendship quickly enough to daze.
Drakken flips open his phone and presses it to his ear. "Hello, you have reached the wonderful and heroic Dr. Drakken!"
"Drakken, hi, it's Kim." Only the audio signal comes through, and you are relieved. While you understand that human communication can now operate on both audio and visual signals, like a crude Wailing Stone, you hate seeing faces boxed by a screen, as though their existence is defined by its borders. "I need to ask you a huge favor."
Drakken rubs his fingernails against his coat-of-labs and spreads them back out. "What kind of favor?"
"Well, Wade just beeped me with the news that Dementor's been spotted in the Upperton vicinity with some kind of electric monster-drill. And Ron and I are a little tied up at the moment…"
"Literally?" Drakken says. His mouth tilts upward.
"Literally," Kim confirms. "You know how the UN was going around collecting all the Lorwardian space junk left behind after the invasion?"
"Yes," Drakken says.
"Yeah, well, they missed a couple of obscure islands. Including the Isle of Killigan, so now there's a honkin' huge piece of space-tech in Duff's front yard. We showed up to get rid of it and got caught in one of his stupid booby traps. I'm getting my laser lipstick out right now, but even when I do get free, my first priority is to make sure Killigan HASN'T collected some space death ray and ISN'T going to go on a rampage with it."
"Or think it's the world's biggest golf ball and give it a whack with his golf club," a second, less composed voice adds. "That'd be pretty bad, too."
"So what you're saying is…you want me to take down Dementor for you?" Drakken says. His shoulders are rising with pride.
"Please and thank you," Kim says.
"You're welcome and…also Lapis is with me. We can take him down together! That's good for a relationship, right? I mean, it works with you and – um – " Drakken fumbles.
"Spankin'," Kim cuts him off. "Talk to you later. With any luck."
Drakken slips the phone shut again and whirls to face you. "Is that…is that okay, Lapis? Would you want to fight Dementor with me?"
"Does he have powers?" you ask.
Drakken shakes his head. "No. Just tech."
Tech. The sound of it transports you to the ravages of Homeworld, littered with the runoff of reckless Gem creation, soil gone to ash.
It takes a moment for your soul to shed the resentment.
You stand there, breathing in the hot chocolate; it smells rich and full, almost too big to fit in your nostrils yet tempered by the smoothness of the milk. It is a scent that could never be on Homeworld, and it boosts your cautious wings. Confidence trickles down your back.
Grinning, you use a phrase of Steven's: "Let's do this."
Dr. Drakken scrambles upstairs, mumbling something about fetching his "gravitomic ray." He returns moments later with an armful of various tools, distinctly Earthen with their exaggerated buttons and the patches screwed over their circuitry. Their unwieldiness has come to carry a certain charm.
The two of you fly north of Middleton into a similar area, although the houses are larger and placed at wider intervals as if their glamour, like a Diamond's, pushes all others from their space. Such isolation appears normal in the first two rows of houses you pass. Only on the third does something too odd even for Earth flicker into view.
Grime streaks the road in two parallel courses, and ragged rips scour it, some extending to the road's granite borders or even to the grass beyond them. In the hub of the debris, the road's center has been cut open. It was done from above, not from below.
It is too evocative of some of your own handiwork.
Drakken lands the hovercraft on the granite and shakes his head. "Of course his drill actually works!" he says, the buoy-words bitter and briny. "Most of mine fell apart the second they broke through the dirt. Then there was that one ingenious model that stayed nicely together the whole time, but its GPS took me the wrong way, and I ended up drilling under Chicago's reservoir. I was almost glad when the police showed up to arrest me, because at least I'd get dry clothes in prison!
"Of course," he adds with a grin, "If I'd known you back then, it still might have worked out."
You close your eyes. "Don't even joke about that," you say before you open them again.
Trenches form on Dr. Drakken's forehead, and the blue skin in between laps like rivers. "Oh. I see."
The creases in his forehead tell you he doesn't "see," not entirely, but you let it go if only to escape the topic.
"Dementor's got to be at the other end of this tunnel," Drakken says. He crouches beside it, examines it, and turns back to you. "I hope you're not claustrophobic."
"You mean – am I afraid of claws?" You have seen them on Steven's pink lion and a few other Earth creatures, and you can see how they are something one should take care to avoid.
"Errr, no. Small, closed-in spaces. Like being underground."
You straighten your shoulders. "I started my existence underground. I think I can handle going back."
"Marvelous!" Drakken begins a chuckle, a thin, wheezing, encaged sound that can't quite fight its way free. "I, on the other hand – ehhh, I'm not exactly claustrophobic. I haven't been diagnosed or anything. I just – err, I prefer plenty of elbow room."
"Oh." You frown; offering closeness, your first instinct, will likely only make things worse. "How about I go in first?" you finally say. "If you're behind me and I walk fast, that should give you enough room for your elbows."
Drakken shoots you a look of gratitude.
You walk over to the edge of the hole and jump in, wings at the ready in case the fall is long. It isn't – a meter or two, you would guess, before your feet stumble to a halt on packed earth again. A tunnel crawls through the dense soil, and you move a few paces in before calling upward, "Okay, Drakken, you can come on down now."
Dr. Drakken plummets from above, his limbs tussling in the air before his stomach slams into the dirt with a resounding thud.
"Ow." His voice is as tiny and meek as yours, the robustness lost.
You press your lips together so you will not laugh. "You okay?"
"Yes, I believe so. Just let me get my flash –" Drakken stands up and his head pounds against another thick layer of dirt. "Ow-www!" You do not ask again, because his whine has recovered its strength now.
Eventually Drakken reaches into his pocket and comes out holding a stick with a rounded, blunt end that illuminates the tunnel ahead of you.
You are able to walk through upright. Dr. Drakken would be fine with his back hunched, but that would require a more attuned sense of balance than he possesses, so he creeps behind you on all fours. You are still firmly in the upper mantle, where the light and heat are low, the pressure undemanding and unproductive, yet it still feels as familiar as your own physical form.
As you navigate around tree roots and plain stones, the dirt occasionally vibrates as a car rumbles by. From above, they looked harmless; from below, they sound monstrous, their wheels crunching the road. One gives a particularly raucous growl on its way, and you cringe away from it only to encounter a wet snout at your ankle.
You take a few steps backward. "Okay. What are you?"
The creature doesn't answer, and its shadowy form bears no resemblance to a human. When you creep closer, you take in the splayed feet and the smooth pelt. "Oh. Yeah. I've seen you guys before." You remember the first group sent to Earth to determine if it was suitable for colonization, six thousand years ago, coming across several of these in their investigations.
"It's just a mole," Drakken calls from behind you.
"A mole for who?" You think of the Jasper who sided with the Crystal Gems, the spy who fooled Pink Diamond for so long.
Drakken chuckles again, and this time the ring of it is rich and genuine. "No one. Different form of the word. It's just what that animal is called."
"Oh." You stand back and wait for the mole to scuff its way across the tunnel before you keep going.
Every now and then, you can hear Drakken grunting behind you, the way Rubies do in hand-to-hand combat. He is breathing in dankness and breathing out anxiety. You understand – someplace this cold, dark, and cramped aboveground or underwater would incite panic in you, as well. It compromises the bravery in your stride, yet you march through it anyway.
It is not too much later that the tunnel ends in a shaft of sunlight filtering in from another emergence hole. You hoist yourself out onto another road, warm under your hands. Dr. Drakken tries to climb through after you, but his misaligned back stalls him halfway out the hole. You bend beside him, turn at an angle so that no one can sneak up on your gem from behind, grab onto his wrists, and give him a gentle tug. He pulls easily free.
"Thanks, Lapis." Drakken cleans the front of his coat-of-labs, pink spots on his cheekbones. "I really owe you one –"
Before he can finish, Drakken's entire body seizes as if it's being Destabilized. The skin beneath his eyes slinks upward, his eyelids tweaking hurriedly, baffling sounds squeezing out from him. "Ah, ah, ah –" it's a single dissonant note, repeated over and over as his neck arcs ever higher.
Then in a span of time too quick to measure, Drakken doubles up at the waist. The sound he makes – "CHOO!" – combusts in the air. A rainshower sprays across your cheeks.
You turn away, not wanting to look at him, not wanting to see the damage an eruption such as that would do to a frail human. "Dr. Drakken?" you risk saying.
"Yes, Lapis?" The buoy-words are caked in sludge yet unhurt. You glance back to see Dr. Drakken standing there, fragile body intact, one sleeve wiping the area beneath his nose.
"Oh my gosh, how are you okay?" You throw your hands in the air. "You exploded!"
"I did what now?" Drakken blinks at you for an instant, and then a smile dawns on his face. "Oh, that? That was just a sneeze. Earthlings do it when things irritate their noses."
"So it's…totally normal?" you say, dulling your tone.
"Totally," Drakken agrees. "And – just for future reference – when a human being sneezes, it's polite to say 'Bless you.'"
"Why? Just in case you do explode?"
"Oh, no, no." Drakken's fingers stir in front of him, crafting an explanation. "A long time ago, there was this superstition that your soul actually came out of your body when you sneezed. If someone said, 'Bless you,' the soul would go back in. Supposedly, anyway. Now we know it doesn't work like that, so it's just a nice thing to say."
He smiles at your puzzled expression. "Doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? Superstitions rarely do. Makes me glad we live in an age of science! Heh – you must think humans are even sillier now that you hear that, though, am I right?"
"Not really," you tell him. "Gems used to have superstitions, too. There was this old one that if the first creature you saw on a planet was green, it meant bad luck for the colony. Actually, I think it used to be any color that wasn't white, blue, or yellow, because anything that didn't match the Diamonds was a sign that the planet would resist."
"Fascinating," Drakken says. The buoys stack on top of each other, their excitement towering. "Oh, I can tell you all kinds of human superstitions if you want to hear about them. Don't open an umbrella indoors, don't walk under a ladder, avoid black cats, break a mirror and you get seven years bad luck…"
"But broken mirrors are the best kind," you say.
Drakken stares at you in horror and immediately slaps both hands over his mouth. "Oh my golly goodness gee whiz, Lapis, I'm so sorry –" he rushes to say.
You lean forward so the top of your head nudges into his chest, and your laughter falls into the cobalt cloth for a moment before you have to turn around and confront the machine you have been sent to stop.
As Kim told you, there is a drill, latched onto an oversized pilot's cab that glints Opalescent in the midday sunlight. Notched, metallic lining cycles around a pair of blunted supports roughly the shape of the food Steven called hot dogs.
You almost smirk. No piece of Homeworld equipment, even the Injectors that have now become antiquated, would ever be so garish.
"I think we found it!" Drakken says.
"Uh, yeah." You hear your sarcasm and soften it with a tilt of your head. "What else could it be?"
Drakken's eyes are hailstones, hard and round. "Dementor!" he cries at the figure approaching.
You pivot and look down at a man shorter than you are. He is not tiny, though; his body is square-cornered and packed tidily together, his forearms nearly twice as big around as Drakken's. His skin is a few shades darker than Jasper's hair, a muddied yellow. The metal mask that Drakken mentioned fits snugly around his head, chin-length like your bob, his jaw bifurcated by a dark brown stripe of smoothed fiber. You wonder if it might be hair, somehow restricted to growing only in that short block.
"Dr. Drakken!" the man says. "Hello again!" His voice is high-pitched, powerful, and much warmer than you would have imagined from an enemy of Drakken's.
Despite that, you know it must be Dementor. Something concentrates between the two of them as Drakken glares back at him, something that cannot be parted or plumbed, like the cream-rivers on Kindergarten Base 13.
Dementor notices you and gives you a smile squared at its edges. "Oh, and who is this?" he says just as pleasantly as before, pronouncing the last word as zeez.
Drakken responds with no more than a gurgle.
That is fine with you; it wasn't really his question to answer anyway. "I'm Lapis Lazuli," you say with the clarity and conviction that you still find a little too easily whenever you introduce yourself.
"Ah, yes, indeed." Dementor circles around you, exactly as the Agate who first examined you upon your emergence did. His eyes, when he stands in front of you again, are neither assessing nor cruel; they dance within the pockets cut out of his mask. "Ja, and you have the stone, too. I see, I see. Very nice, very nice.
"Can it be true?" He turns to Dr. Drakken. "Have you found love?"
Drakken gurgles again. His arms are clenched by his sides, and his fists jerk sporadically like Greg's fishing line. He is a man who would welcome an altercation yet is not prepared for it.
"Yes," you answer, and you take a step toward Dementor. His head is only a narrow margin below yours, and the tight brawn collected in his chest speaks of a strength that outmatches Drakken's. "I'm his girlfriend."
Dementor leans his head back and cackles. The sound is several pitches lower than his speaking voice and crisp with the ring of certainty.
You don't like it.
"All right, enough of this, Dementor!" Drakken finally manages to say. He spreads his feet so far apart that they begin to turn out beneath him, and he nearly stumbles before pulling back upright. "What's the plan? I know there's got to be a plan. Some sort of second-rate plan from the poor man's Dr. Drakken!"
You glance at him in surprise. He wields arrogance now, in the same clumsy way he held his feet apart, thinking it makes him steadier when in fact he is more likely to be knocked over. You turn your glare on this compact little Ruby-man who has brought out this side of Drakken.
Still smiling easily, Dementor does not waver in the slightest. "Of course there is a PLAN! Mine Dement-Drill will bring the TOWN of Upperton to fall on its KNEES!" He talks strangely, shelving words where they don't belong, rising to a shout at the end of each sentence regardless of whether it's warranted.
You feel your top lip curl. "Why? What has 'the town of Upperton' ever done to you?"
"It is not what the town has done to me, Fraulien." This word you have never heard before – in fact, you aren't sure it is a word and not just an urgent sound projected from the base of Dementor's throat. "It is what I can do to IT!" He swivels to face Dr. Drakken again. "You, of course, know of Upperton's scientific MUSEUM?"
"Know it, robbed it." Drakken bats a hand. "Wasn't overly impressed. The one in Middleton always had better loot."
"Ah. Then I see you never received the memento on the ancient artifact of the Maya that they have become acquired YESTERDAY?" Dementor says.
You creep closer to Drakken. "Maya?" you whisper to him.
"Ancient Earth culture," he whispers back.
Of course, he must mean ancient by human standards – which would fall around the last time your people were on this planet, the era of the War. You remember, simultaneously, seeing museums on Homeworld with displays of outdated Quartz armor and early Bismuth weapons, fabrications printed beside them; and being kept as an exhibit in the museum inside the surface of Pearl's gem, alphabetized under "M" for mirror and watching her daily insecurities be shoved ever deeper into realms you were glad not to be able to visit.
"So those pieces would be worth a ton of money," Drakken says, batting the air again. "Big deal. Aren't you rich enough already, Dementor?"
Dementor smacks the side of his helmet and then lifts his eyes to Drakken's with an expression hard enough to cut Quartz. "Oh, Drakken," he says; the words almost have a fondness to them. "You always were such a TERRIBLE villain!"
Drakken's eyes grow hazy and a fat, tree-shaped vein climbs forward on his neck. Monosyllabic grunts bark from him, one after another. In the hassled look he gives his enemy, you can see your every wretched attempt to call up wings through a cracked gem. His eyes are too bright, overworked, beaming out his nervousness.
You long to drive your arm into Dementor's stomach. You have the feeling it would clang hollow with greed, more hollow than your own.
"No, the thing about the Maya," Dementor says, "is that their calendaring system has LONG out-survived THEM! They predicted the world would come to an end sometime in the early twenty-first century, did not they?"
You shrug, too embarrassed to admit that you aren't quite sure which century Earth is in now. It should be somewhere around the seven-hundredth, but Dr. Drakken told you that the counting of years started over around the first Christmas.
"But perhaps they were not predicting the exact day of the planet's DESTRUCTION!" Dementor continues. "Perhaps they were guess-estimating how long it would take for someone to decode their INSTRUCTIONS – on the back of these simple clay pots – for how to bring civilization to the BEGINNING of the END?"
Drakken's entire body begins to shake as the breeze touches it, as if it weighs no more than light itself. He is a baby sea turtle in that moment: peeking out from his nest, judging his journey to the ocean, knowing full well that every predatory thing on this planet is ready to swoop down and consume him. "Ohhhh." He gulps. "And those clay pots are on display in the Upperton museum now, aren't they?"
Dementor's palms meet with a derogatory slapping noise. "Brilliant!" he says. "Give the man a RUBBERIZED CHICKEN!"
You don't obey those orders. Instead, you say, "So – you're going to ruin Earth?"
"In a manner of speaking, ja."
"So –" you tilt your head – "where are you going to go once Earth is a wreck? Do you have some other place in mind? 'Cause trust me, your 'genius' technology is going to be about fifty years behind on any planet other than this one."
"Nein, I will stay HERE!" Dementor says. "I will stay here and RULE over the WORLD!"
You almost laugh. It is something every single Gem is Taught from emergence onward: a place cannot be both a colony and a home.
"You're going to stay and rule over…over what? A bunch of toppled-over buildings and a lot of dead grass?" You toss your bangs back so Dementor can see the wrinkle in your brow. "If everything's destroyed, how will you rule it?"
Dementor turns to Drakken. "Quite a little mouth on her, does she not have?" he says, clapping Drakken on the arm. Drakken backs away from it like a besieged spacecraft that has no choice but to go into reverse.
The smirk Dementor forges tells you the size of your mouth has nothing to do with it. His amiable nature, never artificial, hangs in glossy tatters – corn silk, stringing and tangling as it is stripped away to reveal what sits at the core.
"Earth will be reshape-ed, in MINE IMAGE!" he says.
You would shiver at how much he sounds like a Diamond were it not for the ridiculous spilling of grandeur, a spectacle the Diamonds would find far beneath them. Even Pink Diamond, untrained and vulnerable, could shatter his body with one drive of her finger.
"No, it will not!" Drakken cries. "Because we're going to stop you! I have powers now, and so does –"
You rush forward and grab Drakken by the sleeve. It has been so long since you have confronted a foe who didn't know of your connection with water, yet you can see almost instantly how it will work to your advantage to keep it secret.
"Drakken!" you say in a scolding tone. You glance back at Dementor. He is not a stupid man, his eyes quick and alert as he watches you, and there is no point in denying Drakken's statement. "Be quiet. You almost told him that I can fly!"
Steven's winks have always sent a message: You've got to trust me. You hope yours is conveying the same as you crook one eye shut at Dr. Drakken.
Drakken's nod is immediate but bewildered; reaching into his pocket, he comes back with several brightly colored spheres which he hurls to the ground in front of Dementor. Their sides burst when they hit the ground, and garish purple and white smoke climbs up into the air.
You squint through the smoke and clear it from your lashes with a jerk of your head, a trick Professor Dementor cannot emulate. His rectangular hands flap sightlessly in front of him for several moments before he ties one into a fist and drives it into Dr. Drakken's stomach.
The air Drakken needs leaves him in a thin, pained cry. Your vision blots him out, not wanting to watch him fold into himself like a vortex has opened within him, and comes into a point on Dementor. All the ambiguity about this man has been bubbled inside you. He is a threat to Drakken, and he must be stopped.
Professor Dementor must hear Drakken hit the ground; he smiles, a sharp slant of white, throws an arm over his eyes, and bolts through the smoke in the opposite direction.
You do not let him get far.
Your wings smoothly carry you to a point right above him, and you drop on him in a flurry of skirt and anger. Both of your hands ram against Dementor's chest, a wooden buttress where Drakken's is a piece of driftwood, and knock him back against the road. He jolts, attempting to worm his way out from under you, but you lock in tighter on the upper arms that refuse to yield to your hold and sit upon him as a human would sit upon a horse, one leg on each side.
"You nasty little Junk-Cut!" you hiss at him, horrified by your use of Elite slang, yet not horrified enough to keep it from spilling from your lips. "Why would you do that to him?"
Dementor laughs again, and this time he offers an amiable shrug as well. "It is just how these things DO!"
His pleasantness is Pyrite: it has the same shining charm to it as Dr. Drakken's does, and yet only a fool would mistake one for the other.
"Maybe that's what you think," you say. "But you're wrong. You don't get to hurt him anymore."
Dementor sighs. "I am very sorry, Fraulien."
One of his arms tweaks out of your grasp just long enough for his finger to come down on the single button on a slim console he has concealed in his hand. Something tan and ropy shoots from the other end of the console. You recognize fisherman's knots mere seconds before it wraps around your legs, pins your arms to your sides, and then finally immobilizes your head. You don't realize you've fallen until you feel the sharp bits of material against your cheek, castoffs from where Dementor split the road. Inside, you scream at yourself to move, but your physical form is unresponsive, as if it has already been cut apart from your will.
Just like in the mirror. Just like in the mirror.
The world becomes a place black and glassy, a place you cannot touch even as you lie atop it. All you hear are a set of footsteps, light but thunderous, and a voice that says, "What did you do to her?" There is a springing sound, a thud, and another yelp of pain – not Drakken's as you expected; this is not pure enough, not fragile enough to be his.
Skinny fingers tear the net from you as quickly as their shaking will allow. As soon as you are freed, you rotate your head to see Dr. Drakken standing beside you, petals ridging his face and a vine deployed from his neck. Professor Dementor lies in a stupefied heap against the wall of the nearest building, groaning. Your gem is too awash in relief to flash even a hint of victory.
Before you can even thank him, Drakken stalks in Dementor's direction. As Dementor pushes to a sitting position, Drakken looms over him, bones reaching forward like knobbed sticks with which he could club Dementor. "How dare you?" Drakken yells at Dementor. "She can't take confinement like that! She has PTSD!"
That is not one of your meepmorps, so he must mean you have it in the same way he has dyslexia. You wonder what those letters signify.
Dementor turns his palms upward as if asking for supplication from an Agate. "Of that, I was not AWARES!" he says. "Vat kind of ANIMAL do you think I AM?"
"A human," you say, stepping up beside him.
Dementor's helmeted head turns toward you, and you watch it startle as it traces your blue skin, your powers, the gemstone firmly entrenched at the top of your spine back to its origin. Recognition, distrust, awe, and curiosity are as tightly packed and hardened as geodes in the centers of his eyes.
While Dementor is distracted, Drakken retrieves his Gravitomic ray and fires a long aqueous shaft of light at the drill. The beam cups the machine like a gentle, obedient wave and sends it into the sky, beyond Dementor's grasp.
You make a sound half grunt and half giggle.
Dementor, however, tips his chin upward, the stripe of hair glistening in the sun like a mole's pelt. He fiddles with one of the straps across the front of his uniform. Only now does it occur to you that it looks to be another coat-of-labs, though his is authentically tight across the shoulders and the chest, the places Drakken's coat needs padding so as not to hang loose. Dementor gives the strap a tug, and two funnels shoot out the back. You recognize the scent of primitive rocket fuel and the roar of engines before he begins to ascend.
"Blast, blast, blast!" Drakken cries. His hands, never idle, writhe at his sides, the pressure on him turning his intrinsic energy to something hotter and more restless. "Why didn't I think of jet packs? I mean, I did think of jet packs! Jet packs were my idea, and he copied me!"
"I got you," you say and are off the ground instantly.
It takes no more than three beats of your wings to catch up to Dementor. You come up behind him, clench one jet pack in each hand, and squeeze. You crush them the way you crushed Peridot's tape recorder, all your fury seeping out through your fingerprints. When you are done, they are husks of metal too damaged to even catch the light.
For the first time, you see fear take shape on what is visible of Dementor's face beneath his mask, and you take a moment to enjoy it before you swoop down, and pull both of his hands behind his back, holding them there with yours. The fluttering that keeps the two of you afloat is the only sound.
Dementor wriggles in vain. "You," he says with his earlier warmth, "are much more STRENGTHENED than you look!"
"Thanks," you say. Drawing your wings back, you flap over to Dementor's machine, which is still held below the clouds by a ring of Aquamarine light, and poke your finger into the beam to interrupt it. You hear the power spiral out of it, and it plunges to the ground, landing with an impact that kicks Dr. Drakken over sideways and cracks many of the light bulbs decorating it.
Dementor howls, a sound like monsoon winds.
Drakken rises, his walk unsteady and his expression startled, but he manages to tilt a thumb up in your direction. You cannot return the gesture without dropping Dementor, so you give your shoulders a happy lift as you look down at Drakken.
"Break it! Quick!" you call to him, and then you leave him to it. Your capacity for destruction is not fit for even the most savage humans.
You ignore Dementor's screech and watch as Dr. Drakken gathers a breath in his chest, just as you always do when you need to send a message to your water. His neck flowers, and the vines wrap around the drill machine, crunching it, ruining it before your eyes.
"Take that! And that! And that!" Drakken cries, his arms sweeping in their characteristic wide arcs before he bends them more closely to face him, knuckles knobbing in triumph.
You smile.
As soon as you touch the ground, Dementor grinds the weight of his booted foot across your bare toes. His boots are not soft-soled and delicate like Drakken's, either; they are encased in metal like his mask, a soldier's boots. It is an unfamiliar pain, and in the few Earth-seconds it takes you to understand it, Dementor twists out of your hold and dives straight for Drakken.
"Don't touch him!" you say, calling back your wings and shooting after him.
Before you can get there, however, Drakken aims the Gravitomic Ray's point at Dementor and fires. Dementor, however, dodges the beam, and it instead lifts a red squatty structure from the ground, planks of water gushing skyward as it rips free.
It is time to use the power Dementor doesn't know you have.
You drop to the ground again and creep toward the deluge, feeling the cool, timeless bond, the loyalty at your disposal. Your mind rises to meet its mood and embraces it, a collision that can be best translated as May I use you wisely, only in bolder, more spacious terms. You shape a fist, and the water mimics you.
Dementor chortles again, and your back tightens at the pain it brings to Drakken's face. "Ohhhhh, DRAKKEN!" he shouts. "It is SUCH A SHAMING that you –"
He never gets to finish his sentence. You thrust both fists forward and punch him as hard as you can, for Drakken, with all your newfound ferocity. The boxy panel that is Dementor's body glances off the watery fingers and weaves across the sky like a comet knocked out of orbit.
"Have a nice day," you say and then turn to your boyfriend. "Are you okay?"
"You two are SO CUTE TOGETHER!" Dementor calls as he falls out of sight. There is a smile in his voice, and this time it isn't a mocking one.
You find yourself hoping that he lands on something soft.
Landing on the ground, you release the water from your control, though it is still there, as it always is, running around the edges of your being, an appendage more closely linked to you than Peridot's limb enhancers ever were to her. Drakken raises his hand to you. "He didn't hurt you, did he?" you ask as you high-five him with care.
Drakken shakes his head. "We were awesome!" he crows.
"Yeah, we were." You see no reason to hide your glee now that it is just the two of you. "Great job with your Gravitomic Ray."
"Err, yes." Drakken looks away from you, and with one jittering hand he rubs the long flat top of his ear. "That was completely intentional. I was planning it from the beginning!"
"You lie," you say cheerfully, splashing some of the water his way.
Drakken's eyebrow, which he had lowered like Peridot's visor from your first glimpse of Dementor, yields and grows sheepish, softer. "Well, it worked, didn't it? All's well that ends well!"
It is not a phrase you have heard before, but immediately the ending to every Camp Pining Hearts episode surfaces: the six friends, tucked safely into their cabin, give each other hugs and share their trail mix, having already forgotten whatever petty squabbles threatened to turn them against each other that day. "Yeah," you say, shrugging. "All's well that ends well."
Drakken glances up at the floating red structure. "Oh, yeah, we'd probably better put that fire hydrant back. Heh. Still not entirely used to being a responsible citizen."
The phrase almost makes you shudder, although you know that what it means down here on Earth is far different from the things you were Taught.
You coax the water back down into the hole left behind by the fire hydrant, and Drakken's vines resituate the hydrant on top. He dusts his hands together, gives you another high-five, and the two of you return to Mama Lipsky's house, where she goes over you, one patch of skin at a time, the way Rose Quartz would check her allies for the slightest split in their gems after a battle.
You, of course, never would have received such treatment. You were a Lapis. You were always okay.
That thought evidently doesn't make you shudder anymore, either, because Mama Lipsky seems satisfied that you are unharmed. Although Dr. Drakken has told you that most humans don't have powers, you would not be the slightest bit surprised if Mama Lipsky's tears could heal, too.
"I'd better call Kim Possible back," Drakken says a while later. "Let her know we took care of Dementor for her. Oh, and to make sure Duff Killigan didn't blow her to Kingdom Come!"
That must be up past the North Lands.
Drakken pulls his phone from his pocket and pecks clumsily at the keys. His fingers taper down to a nib like the Pearls' do, yet his movements have none of their precision and are far more entertaining to watch.
When the door-chime sings the arrival of another guest, you open the door to a form with legs even longer than yours and hair almost as lengthy. Shego enters the room at a regal glide that could pass for an Elite's.
"Oh. Hey, Space Girl." Shego greets you with her pointing face; you are surprised how happy she seems to see you.
"Hey, Earth Girl," you reply. You give your tone a sharp flick, drying it as easily as you would your physical form.
Dr. Drakken, on the other hand, is still wet around the elbows and has dirt embedded in the knees of his pants. Shego notices. "Sheesh, he's a mess," she says. "What have you guys been up to?"
"We took down a villain," you say.
"Which villain?"
"I'll give you three guesses," Drakken says from the kitchen, his phone conversation over.
"Well, that should be about right, considering there are, like, three people left who are ACTUALLY still villains." Shego's eyes roll. "Let's see – Professor Dementor?"
"Ding-ding-ding!" you chirp, imitating the announcer on the question-and-answer show Peridot likes to watch.
Shego mutes a laugh into her palm. "You kicked Dementor's tail, huh?"
Immediately you classify it as a speech figure; humans are not supposed to have tails, and Shego has no way of knowing if the battle involved kicking. "Well, I water-punched him pretty hard," you say.
Shego's laugh isn't so muted this time. "And I wasn't invited?"
"Oh, Shego!" Drakken says.
"No, I get it." Shego joins Drakken in the kitchen and sinks with grace into a chair. "This was a couples' thing. I'd just be a third wheel."
You can guess from her significant inflection and the glances she tows from you to Drakken and back again what that means, and yet you still frown. "Lots of things need three wheels," you tell her.
Shego grins. "Thanks, kid."
"Do you know Professor Dementor?" you ask politely.
Shego raps her knuckles on the table. Its surface is marked and nicked in places, a ragged appeal Homeworld would not tolerate. "Yup. I know him. Matter of fact, I interviewed with him before I decided to come work for Drakken instead."
"Oh." You marvel again at the humans' methods of selecting Purposes, how whoever is in command of the Earth's hierarchy trusts them to choose a field of study, to find their own Teachers, to not riddle their system with the errors to which they have left themselves so open. You are not sure yet how you feel about this. "So you could have worked for Dementor?"
"Could've. Never would've." Shego's lip rolls upward and stays there, as though someone has pinned it in place. "The little goon actually tried to hit on me."
"He tried to hit you?" you repeat in astonishment. Drakken has told you of Shego's fighting skills and the powers that burn in her hands. To attack her would be tantamount to inviting her to crack you.
"Oh, no. No, he didn't hit me," Shego says in a rush. "Hit on is – uh –"
"It's like flirting," Drakken cuts in, a pendulous frown dragging the corners of his mouth. "Only grosser."
"Ugh." You do shiver this time. As obnoxious as Ruby and Sapphire can be when they can't look away from each other, you can't imagine them doing anything gross. "So you liked Drakken better?"
Drakken's face glows.
Shego splays her fingers on the tabletop. "Look, Drakken was a dork. I knew that right away. But he was at least a halfway-decent dork, you know?"
"Yeah," you say. "I know." You slip your hand into Drakken's and give it a squeeze.
It is late now. Mama Lipsky has already gone to bed. At around the same time, Dr. Drakken disappeared into the basement, mumbling that he had "something to check on." Shego relaxes on the couch with a glossy magazine as if she feels at home here, too. You pick up the first book you can find, which is decorated with pictures of dead meats and fresh vegetables and filled with instructions for how to mix them into food.
At last none of the food-stories interest you anymore, and you decide you might as well go to sleep. You tiptoe down to the basement to give Drakken a good-night hug.
The basement door creaks open to a burst of noise from the television set. On its screen, machines as tall as Blue Diamond lumber among human cities. Vaguely person-shaped, the machines swat at buildings with their cannon-like arms, crush cars under their broad feet, and march onward with their vile faces gleaming in whatever light survives. Above their empty eyes, two prongs reach up and twist until they form the shape of the letter D.
You are about to ask what movie he is watching when you recognize Ron's house in the background, followed by several other buildings you flew over on your way into town.
It is hot, rending chaos. There is none of Homeworld's diligence or foresight, merely blasters firing at mismatched intervals, sophisticated glass structures crumbling, human beings fleeing with terror in their gaits.
Several seconds later, the footage shifts to several peace officers restraining a man who looks nothing like the Dr. Drakken you love. As he writhes a look backward, his friendly blue skin has frosted over, his gemstone teeth part in hatred, and he gives off the seethe of the badly cracked.
Nothing on you moves. You are seeing something worse than corruption. No unnatural tails or growth of horns, no mindless or missing eyes, no extraneous tongues or spewing of acidic saliva could possibly frighten you more.
Drakken leaps backward on the couch, pale from the forehead down. The glow from the screen casts the rest of him in shadow, as if he stands beyond reach on the ocean floor.
You feel like a boulder has broken loose from one of the upper layers of the Kindergarten and rolled downward, gaining speed with each turn, until it runs you over and comes to a stop with you crushed against the soil and your ability to draw a breath destroyed. You don't need it, yet as you stand there with your arms stiffening at your sides, you would not mind having it to refill your hollow parts.
"Lapis?" Drakken says. His voice has been ripped free of its moorings.
You can't find yours at all. You simply stand there, your legs two pieces of kindling under you, until a wave of something – something powerful and sizzling, as you always imagined Destabilization to be – awakens them, emboldens them to turn and stride from the room.
Not running exactly, your feet nevertheless carry you at a pace much more rapid than they typically do; when there is a great distance to cover, you are more likely to rely on your wings. As if you are looking through those same wings, Mama Lipsky's living room and kitchen pass in a blur. Only the knob on the back door, blunt and bulging, makes an impression on you as your fingers twist it to the side and you stumble through the space that opens before you.
There is a miniature dock out back, even though there are almost certainly no ships nearby. You sit down on it, fold your legs around wood cooled by the autumn night, and the familiarity fades all other details from your consciousness.
It isn't fear you feel. If fear is an Amethyst, then this feeling is a Jasper – similarities are obvious but the differences even more so, at least to everyone but Yellow Diamond's bubble-headed Ruby brigade.
The footage plays across your mind, a soundless cacophony of disaster: the fiery blast of weapons, the faces distorted with screams, the glass blasted from the outside in on those buildings – taller, trimmer, and more advanced than you knew humans had learned to construct. They remind you of the towers on Homeworld that once stood proud and strong and are now far too common, blotting out the view of your regal sun so that the Diamonds are the ones who shine most brightly. You remember seeing the multitude of them when you came back. The urge to terraform was never stronger; you wanted to rally every droplet of water in the galaxy and send the towers to the ground in a tidal wave for what they had done to your beautiful home. Now, remembering the barbarous destruction on the screen, you are glad you never did.
Inside it all, you see the sneering man being carted away to stand trial, determined to damage the world to an even greater degree than it had damaged him, justice lurking cold and corrupt behind his eyes.
You tilt your head back and look up at the stars, at the updated patterns that have become familiar to you. They are the same patterns that oversaw the night when Dr. Drakken broke the world, you realize, your gem heavy with more stories of war and revenge.
The door opens a margin, and Drakken pokes his head through the space. "Lapis?" It is the most quietly you have ever heard him speak. "Is it, err, ngh, okay if I come out?"
"Yeah," you answer him, surprised at how firm, how calm, you sound. It is easy to remember, in this moment, that your body is made of light and not substance.
Dr. Drakken trips across the dock and sinks down next to you. His hand reaches forward as if to touch you and then pulls back to his side in restraint – restraint that would have been an impossibility for the enraged being on the screen.
As he looks at you, his eyebrow is every bit as sheepish and smudged as it was that first day on the beach, crowning wide, shamed eyes. There is no doubt he is the man who taught you about fingerprints, the man with whom you trusted a demonstration of your fusion dance, the man who refused to let Jasper have the last word on what you were.
You lean forward and take his hand. It is every bit as cold as yours.
"So….I have no excuses for that," Drakken says. "None. That was – that was my biggest and most serious attack on the Earth. The closest I ever came to taking over the world. And you know something about power?" He speaks to his open palm, much as you spoke to yours while confessing you considered forming Malachite again. "It's like…it's like toxic waste or something, brrrgh! Maybe a few human beings can come in contact with it without being poisoned, but not many! And I, the great and glorious Dr. Drakken, am not one of them!
"Today Dementor told me I'd always been terrible at being a villain," he adds when you say nothing in reply, "and that hurt. I needed to go back, re-watch that so – so I'd remember that being terrible at villainy is a good thing." These words are not playful buoys; he tosses them out as though he hopes to hurl them into the sea and have the tide carry them away. "I'm – I'm so sorry you saw that!"
Maybe you aren't. You think of the gem tattered on your back and of the brand-new jolt of fierce energy when you gazed at the three rebel Gems who crouched unhurt in front of you, and you understand. You understand, and your spirit no longer has to tread to keep afloat inside you.
"That wasn't you," you say in a whisper so soft you're surprised Drakken detects it at all.
Bitterness clumps at the edges of his laugh. "Yes, well, that's what my mother said. She was in denial, too. Of course nobody wants –"
"No. That isn't you," you cut him off, and you raise your hand before he can contradict you again. "But it used to be."
Drakken squints at you, the way he squints when he first rises in the morning, dazedly pleased to find the planet awaiting another day with him.
"This whole time, I've been wondering if someone can really, truly change from bad to good." Drawing your knees up, you glance toward the sky again and recall the Gem with the faulty silver eyes. "And I now I know for sure – they can."
You are rewarded beyond your imagination when Dr. Drakken smiles, nearly outshining the moon. "Lapis – I – blekk, narrr. I don't know what to say."
"Obviously," you say, giggling. "How about, 'All's well that ends well,' right?"
Drakken's laugh is real this time, although some sad algae still collects on its surface. "If only it were that simple."
You nod. For all your love of Camp Pining Hearts, you know it does not acknowledge many of the complications that run humans and Gems alike aground every day. That was evil you saw in the indent of Dr. Drakken's lips and in his movements, still straining toward revenge even as someone with greater strength than his yanked his hands behind his back. The man kinder than almost anyone you know once gazed out on the planet with vision predatory as Pink Diamond's, and now he sits with his hand between both of yours, his weak grip belying the potency of his care for you.
"No, I get it. Other things matter besides the ending." You smirk crookedly at him. "Like we could forget that. But maybe" – you hear your voice softening – "the ending's what matters the most."
"I love that!" Dr. Drakken claps his fists beneath his chin. "Can I use that? In a song or on a greeting card or something?"
"Sure," you say with a shrug.
The two of you head inside, Drakken still grinning almost brilliantly enough to ward off the sleepiness you see in him. You find a spot on the couch Shego has vacated and curl up with your head on the cushion. Your eyelids close, and you lie there, thinking of planets' changes and evil men's apologies and oceans' rhythms and the tyranny of good women unraveled by their own ambitions. Blue Diamond's image flickers for an instant before being replaced by Peridot throwing her arms around your waist, Pearl scooting over on a bench for you to sit beside her, and Steven pushing you behind his shield.
You sleep then, and you dream of a world where Dr. Drakken's hideous machines morph into soft yellow flower petals and fall to a planet that is equal parts Earth and Homeworld, where all is well that has ended well.