~I hit 50 faves? And there's a KP movie premiering tomorrow? *pinches self*
Bad news: This is probably going to be the emotional low point of the story. Good news: We've got nowhere to go but up in subsequent chapters. Thanks for sticking with me through it all, guys. Love ya!~
In your dream, you stand aboard a ship in the midst of a devastating storm. Humans thrash about in the water around you, waving pale sodden arms in panic. You could pluck them from the water and save them, but your wings will not materialize. You must be cracked again, although you do not feel the pain of brokenness. Yet this wound is more incapacitating than your last crack; you are fixed to the deck, arms lifeless at your sides, and when you reach out to the ocean for help, it turns away as though it never knew you.
The other humans on the boat haul the drowning, freezing humans up to safety, wrapping soft blankets around them to stave off the chill. They are safe, and that is all that should matter, but you cannot help wondering why you were brought on this voyage if all you were going to be able to do was watch.
Not long after that, the boat tilts beneath you, awakening you. You know it is the hammock lurching instead, and you snag the fabric between your fingertips, anchoring it before you can topple out. Your toes hang centimeters above the floorboards. Sunlight slants in through the windows: a gentler, more submissive sun than the one you first knew, the one that seemed perfect at the time but now reminds you of the unrelenting white truth-lights in the interrogation room.
"Looking back on it today, I don't know how I ever thought we were supposed to be building a spaceship," you hear Peridot say. "Obviously the dust-eater would never have gotten off the ground."
"Oh, the vacuum cleaner? You'd be surprised. Some of them can be very aerodynamic if paired with the correct fuel cells." The buoy-words bob, and a warm current slides down your back. "Why, one time I developed a levitating vacuum cleaner to ride when my hovercraft was on the fritz!"
It must be Peridot and Dr. Drakken, discussing what remains of yesterday's forlorn little craft.
"Why did you want to ride on a vacuum cleaner?" Peridot says.
"Well, because if I rode on a broom, people would have thought I was a witch," Drakken says. You can imagine his hands flittering through the air as if in illustration, so earnestly one could almost believe he has the power of reflection, too.
You lower your feet to the floor and let go of the hammock, freeing one hand to hide your laughter. Witches, you know, are made-up creatures in some of the spooky stories Steven has told you at your sleepovers. Some witches are nice, given their powers when they emerged from their mothers the same way you were given yours when you emerged from your planet. Most of them, however, are evil characters who made deals with dark forces, essentially Corrupting themselves in exchange for the ability to practice black magic. Steven showed you a picture of one in a book, and while the dark colors and heavy lines the artist used were meant to menace, you have seen too much to be frightened of this childishly scary design, with the lumpy face and the nose skewed sideways like a weapon that came crookedly out of the forge.
With soundless steps, you walk up behind Drakken and Peridot. "Hi, guys," you say, and your friends shoot straight into the air as if they are wearing jetpacks, landing again before you can worry about them.
Drakken wipes his forehead with the back of his wrist. "Oh, thank goodness. It's just Lapis," he says, and then he flinches, carving valleys in the skin around his mouth. "Errr, I mean, not just Lapis, because Lapis is wonderful and I'm glad to see you, dearest Lapis, and –"
By this point, you are giggling out loud, and it appears to relax Dr. Drakken some. His petals bloom and so does his smile, filling in the valleys beside his mouth. "Yes. Indeed. Good. Good morning, Lapis. How did you sleep?"
You pause, remembering the dream, and Peridot shoves in her answer before yours can even take shape. "I'd say she did a pretty good job," she says contemplatively. "Her form was a little sloppy, but that's to be expected considering how new she is at this function."
"That's not even what 'sleeping well' means, Peri-dork," you say, nudging her with your knee. "It means you didn't have trouble falling asleep or wake up a zillion times in the night or have bad dreams."
"Clod," Peridot shoots back around an unspooled lower lip, although the brightness in her eyes jests with you.
Drakken's ponytail sways to the side, the polite inquiry there in the tilt of his head even before he asks: "Did you? Have bad dreams, I mean?"
It does not require much concentration to rediscover your dream, the successful rescue of the humans clashing with your uselessness. You shrug. "I'm not sure." Smiling a little, you add, "But I definitely shouldn't have. Nothing to be afraid of anymore. Steven's back, safe and sound!"
"I know!" Drakken cries. "Isn't it grand?" His fingers leap upward and trace shooting stars in the air above him, and he returns your smile with one of his large ones, gushing happiness.
"That's right!" Peridot says. "We've been waiting until after you woke up to call him!" You see the same tight strain around her jaw muscles that collected there the first several times she channeled her powers – waiting has been every bit as hard for her.
"Then we shouldn't wait anymore," you say. You lift a hand and give it a casual flick, surprised by how lightly and easily the gesture comes after yesterday, when every movement was cumbersome. Out of the side of your eye, you catch your reflection in one of your meepmorp mirrors, your hair scattered like straw, yet you make no move to neaten it. It is not something you care greatly about, especially not now, and you know Steven will not, either.
Peridot skips outside with her tablet secured under her arm, you and Drakken close behind. She sets the tablet on the grass and pokes at its screen with her tiny finger. Several more pokes later, an icon that resembles an old communication receiver appears on the screen, shaking back and forth as the tablet drones. Its borders are clear and reflective, and you take a moment to remind yourself that they are also square, not round.
Soon the icon is replaced by a set of round, pink cheeks filled with all you once admired about your people and all you didn't yet know to appreciate about humanity. "Hey, guys!" he says. "Hi, Peridot, hi, Drakken, hi, Lapis!"
You search him for signs of tears, cracks, discolorations, or bleedings. None show up. The last tendrils of fear shrink back into your gemstone, and it rests between your shoulder blades, its wholeness solid and comforting.
"Steven, hi!" You are smiling more broadly than you knew you could. "It's so good to see you! I'm so glad you're okay!"
"I'm pretty glad I'm okay, too," Steven says. He loops an arm around his miniaturized guitar – the one he calls a ukulele. "How are you guys?"
You can't even answer. You don't even know. "Was Aquamarine mean to you?" you demand.
"Yeah. But just words-mean," Steven says. "She didn't haul off and slug me or anything."
You leave your eyes open; if you blink, you will see Jasper's helmet colliding with Steven's soft face. "Was Topaz mean to you?" you say.
"Topaz? Nah. She – they – whoever – are pretty nice, actually. She was going to help me escape, until Aquamarine stopped her." Steven frowns. "The hierarchy on Homeworld seems pretty weird."
A Topaz fusion sparing an enemy. It is too beautiful for you to picture. Yet you would much rather try than allow yourself to wonder just how much Steven has learned of that hierarchy, if he knows that your place in it was beside Aquamarine.
"So how did you escape?" Peridot cuts in, in earnest. "We heard something about a 'lion,' but I have no idea what that means."
"Okay, yeah. Lars and I snuck away while the Diamonds were arguing –"
If anyone asks who Lars is, you never hear it.
Your memory collides with your old life, knocking both of them out of orbit and spraying everything you love with debris. Someone shrieks, a terrified white sound too high to be Steven's or Drakken's and too loose to be Peridot's.
"Lapis?" Steven's voice is faint, though you aren't sure if his fear is guiding him to talk that way or if your fear is just guiding you to hear him that way.
"You actually met Blue Diamond?" It is all you can say. Dimly, you become aware of Drakken's hand on your head, but you jerk away from it, seeing Blue Diamond's condemning finger swiveling toward Earth again.
"And Yellow," Steven supplies.
Your face is in the grass then, and your hand slaps glass on its way down. CALL ENDED flashes across Peridot's screen, staying atop your vision so you can see nothing else. You empty of all traces of Steven, of Peridot, of Drakken. You barely manage to catch the edges of yourself. Your fingers grab your upper arms, diving deep into your superficial flesh, scratching and nicking, but your grip is so weak. Blue Diamond will have no trouble breaking it.
You lock down, flattened inside, at the thought of Steven standing before Blue Diamond - your stately Diamond, who can veer from compassion to understated wrath within a wing's beat. And Yellow - rigid and unforgiving. . .
They will break you, as you cower here in the field, your gemstone exposed to anyone gazing down from the sky. You should at least try to cover it, yet you have gone rigid. Your body is a plank, and the noises of worry that surround it mean nothing to you.
"Lapis!" Peridot screeches her concern. Her voice is near, nearer to you than you are to yourself. You are far and drifting farther with every memory:
In the wait leading up to your first ball, you and all the other Lapises clustered around a mirror that you did not yet fear, examining yourselves and each other from top to bottom. As you were the newest batches of Lapises, this would be only your second presentation to your Diamond and your introduction to the other three. Your hair, you recall, was messy and uneven, but Blue Diamond did not appear to mind on your day of emergence, so surely she would not mind now.
You crossed the room slowly, advancing on Blue Diamond's throne, above Pink Diamond's and across from Yellow Diamond's. The Lapis in front of you – whose gossip flowed freely as a stream but whose smile was always genuine when she looked at you – stumbled on a section of floor and fell, sprawled at the base of the throne. All conversation in the room stopped.
Blue Diamond's eyes narrowed and then lowered to the other Lapis's feet. You saw it too. The second toe on her left foot hung slightly crooked, hooking almost sideways – a defect no one noticed until now.
It was Yellow Diamond who spoke. You do not remember what she said; you only remember that her cold, brusque voice replaced the atmosphere in the room, becoming the only thing anyone could absorb.
The other Lapis was given boots and a look laden with disappointment, and she was relegated to the back of the room, where she stayed at every other ball thereafter.
Yanked from that memory, you see again Bismuth's face, chipped open in a smile, and relive the white flash of pain, as livid and jarring as White Diamond's outline.
You re-knit your entire body together, unaware of the passage of time, yet when you grabbed the sides of your gem to begin your journey back, there was no tunnel behind them as everyone has told you they should have been. Instead, they were blocked on every side by something impenetrable.
The rough voices of Quartzes flailed the air around you.
"What's that you got there?" one of them said.
"A Lapis." You can still remember the second Quartz's coarse grunt. "Must be one of theirs."
They believed you to be a Crystal Gem. You were trying to yell, "No! I belong to Homeworld!" and you couldn't.
You no longer had a mouth.
You could not reach the nourishment of the universe. You could not even reach your ocean.
Homeworld's soldiers threw questions at you, questions you could not answer. You could only collect the words, store them for future use, hoping that someday you might have gathered enough to explain your story.
Before you could, though, a Quartz shouted, "Oh, stars! Get off-planet, get off-planet! Now!"
A stampede began and the mirror was dropped. Quartzes hurtled past it, overturning it multiple times – your world repeatedly went from sky to ground before finally, cruelly back to sky, just in time for you to see the enormous white hand rise from across the galaxies. Energy curled from it.
You did not know what was happening, but it could not have been anything good.
Through your oval peephole, you watched a yellow hand rise, below and to the right, just as she stands on the Diamond symbol, the same energy swirling in her palm.
Those next few moments were eternal as you watched the black space to the left of the white hand and hoped to the stars it would remain empty. If anyone would show mercy, it would be her. Yet if anyone had reason not to show mercy, it would also be her.
The blue hand lifted then, and your world was thrown from its axis.
All three masses of energy met and fused into one golden-white beam that streaked toward Earth. You watched Rose Quartz toss up her pink shield and in panic-stricken movements grab the fusion and the Pearl, the only Crystal Gems close enough. Her eyes crunched shut, already leaking with regret.
The beam hit the planet. It did not discriminate by loyalty, only by the swiftness of a Gem's escape. Sounds of agony filled the air. Crystal Gems, traitorous Gems, collapsed to the ground, shivered, only to rise again as monsters. You saw the whole thing.
A mirror doesn't have the choice to look away.
Jasper's hands smashed against the wall, one on either side of your head as she instructed that you would turn all information you had about the rebel Gems over to her. Don't you want to, anyway? she growled. Don't you want revenge on those Gems who knew you were in that mirror and didn't get you out?
Truthfully, you did. Yet every facet of you, even the most vengeful ones, was filled with an image of Steven – smiling, pink, and merciful.
When you started to shake your head, Jasper grasped you and thrust her other hand behind your back, and above your gemstone she hung by the slimmest of margins a thumb that almost matched it in size. She began to list all the possible ways she could crack you, from the swift and sure to the slow and painful.
She spoke with weapons with her voice, and you summoned a weapon of your own, one you did not know you had: "Blue Diamond would never let you get away with that."
The weight of Jasper's sneer was palpable, even when she turned it back in Peridot's direction. Isn't that cute? She thinks Blue Diamond doesn't know.
You see Blue Diamond point at the inappropriate, accidental fusion and you hear her demand Ruby's life in reparation for it. You imagine the statues that frame the entrance to Blue Diamond's extraction chamber and your naïve assumption that they were inanimate or at least unconscious. You remember the day you caught a low groan from one of them and set about telling yourself that certainly you were mistaken. You picture Steven pressed into that wall as a statue, or shattered, or writhing as he Corrupts. All other fears – mirrors, fusions, or the savage trench at the bottom of your sea – shrink to the size of Pebbles in comparison.
You close your eyes, smell the smoke, hear the awful squelch of swords through manifested bodies, and though no one touches you, you know you are going to die any moment.
Someone continues to scream your name, her cries swarming up to the sky like the call of a shore-bird. You should help her, yet all feeling in your physical form is lost, panic spreading through every facet of your gem, and your legs cramped across the grass, immovable.
"Lapis!" shouts a second, deeper voice. Hands are on you. For a second, you almost believe they are strong before you realize that they are only tense, skin lodged tightly against its fragile underpinnings. It seems fitting – it is only his care for you that strengthens him.
You stare at blue cheeks, at the black swoosh of an old wound making a comet trail on the left one. "Lapis?" Drakken repeats, more gently, his buoy-words clattering as if they are being smashed against the rocks.
"I can't!" you say. Neither word is more than an ugly gasp.
Drakken's large round chin begins to crumple. "It's okay," he says. "You don't have to."
He spreads his arms around you in a circle so expansive that he touches only himself. Keeping you in the middle, he scoots on his knees, moving you with him. Your frightened eyes catch glimpses of yellow petals and shining, gritting teeth.
You never feel the ground beneath you change to wood; you know you are in the barn now only because Drakken shoves both of you beneath a table. It is warmer here, and you are less vulnerable without being contained.
"Here, do this." Drakken covers his ear, wraps the other hand around one leg of the table, and begins to rock his body back and forth. "It helps."
You shove a hand up under your hair, finding it wet with a liquid outside of your control. Strands huddle together on your forehead like frightened animals as you begin to rock. The movement reminds you of one of your waves, softly pitching, doing everything in its considerable power to comfort you. Briefly, it succeeds, and then your vision is snuffed again. All you can see is Blue Diamond, who truly did give you life, raising her fingers to take it away. She will take all life on Earth, with or without anyone's help.
There is only one solution.
"We have to leave Earth," you say. Your words are tiny and tight, as if they anticipate being penned in by a mirror's parameters again.
For a time, you hear nothing in reply. The silent pallid aftermath of a battle lingers around you, until beneath it you hear a buoy-string of sound. At first, it is something indecipherable – deep, terrified, and kind – but as it inches its way toward you, you realize that is your name, repeated over and over.
You aren't sure if your eyes are open or not. Your surroundings have faded, overpowered by images of Blue Diamond, her tranquility unwrapping to expose a hardened core; and of those Gems who also devoted their lives to her, beginning with the blue Pearl. Her quiet, self-denying company seemed far friendlier than anything you shared with the other Lapises, yet you knew that to become too friendly with a Gem so astronomically inferior was a risk to both your status and her existence.
"I'm not getting caught up in another war," you say.
"No, no, we wouldn't want that," Drakken says. He wears a twist of sympathy in the middle of his eyebrow. "We…don't like war, do we?"
Your palms land on the wood floor, and you somehow force them back, one to the side of your head and one to the table leg. "I can't. I can't. I can't."
Dimly you are aware of Drakken moving closer. "I know, I know. Shhh. We'll figure…we'll figure something out."
"Lapis!" The pinched, fussing cry seems to erupt directly from someone's nose. Frantic little footsteps slap against the wood. "Lapis! Drakken, what's wrong with her?"
You imagine Peridot searching the barn with eyes the size of the bowls in which Mama Lipsky serves her soup, hunting for you, desperate to dispel the panic building in you. You are frightening Peridot. You are frightening Drakken. You should stop.
Yet when you reach for the layer of gauze that you can typically spread over yourself and everyone else present, it passes through your grip and shoots away on the breeze. You cannot stop. You can talk the sea from its bed and persuade its waves to level your enemies, but you cannot stop.
"She's having what we refer to in my profession as a 'problem,'" Drakken tells Peridot. "Minor setback – she'll be fine!"
You have used that word, fine, to tell many untruths, and you can only hope your lies never sounded as limp and pitiful as his does.
Someone small, too small even to be Peridot, pushes between you and Drakken on four stumpy legs and slides her tongue over your cheek. The sensation of Pumpkin's slobbering, affectionate licks are even emptier and more distant than your memories of the Lapis with the bent toe. Your body is immaterial, anchored only by the gemstone that burdens your back and the slim estuaries of pain that weep out from it.
Heat courses from Dr. Drakken's hand as it hovers above your skin, asking the question his lips can't shape. You nod, and his clumsy little fingers come to rest on your shoulders, their warmth soothingly real against your artifice.
You stay this way, clamped and rocking, until you at last you can see, instead of the vast, straight backs of Quartz soldiers on the march, your own hand grasping the table leg the way shore-birds' talons hold crabs for their next meal. Your breathing slowly becomes dependable again. Beside you, you can feel the sigh that lifts and lowers Drakken's chest.
Universe energy screams inside you, as if it has filled all your niches and now can find no other place to go, just as it did that night you stood as a barrier between Steven and Jasper on a smoldering beach. It is the surge of certainty; you knew what you needed to do then, and you know what you need to do now.
"It'll be okay," you say to everyone, ripples in your voice. Dr. Drakken twists around to examine you, dark eyes as intense as the Gem-scanning light on a Homeworld patrol drone, and whatever he finds is enough to provoke a crooked smile. Your hands meet steadily in your lap, although they clutch the fabric of your skirt in a quick, unplanned motion.
"It's okay," you continue. "I'm okay."
Drakken's body slackens, and you are reminded of the long, skinny line of Amethyst's whip, falling limp beside her side after the threat has disappeared. You creep forward on your knees out from under the table, and Drakken follows you. A petal has sprouted at the base of his neck.
"Lapis?" Peridot says. Her eyes are soft green moss.
"It's okay," you say again. "But we need to leave Earth."
Drakken's smile seeps away like a run of wet ink, the kind from which you and Peridot drew out a rainbow. "What? Leave Earth? You're kidding, right?"
"No. The Diamonds will take out their anger on this planet just like they did last time. I'm not going to stand around and wait for them to come for us."
Peridot slowly walks backward out of the barn. Light glints off her visor, safeguarding her expression.
"You're serious, aren't you?" This time, Drakken does not appear to expect an answer at all. "Oh, holy polar moles, you're actually serious?"
"Yes. You and me and Peridot and Pumpkin – we just need to get Steven and leave." Your wings flutter nervously inside your consciousness. Getting Steven away from Earth will be like prying a planet from its orbit, and yet you have to try.
"You're serious! You're ready to go! Just like that!" Drakken pants now, each expulsion of air pulling back in without delay, as though he cannot spare any of them. His mouth wobbles, and above the petal you can see the branched vein ebb and flow with his hard, futile swallows.
"Should we go back under the table?" you ask.
"No." Drakken shakes his head at least four times in a row and stands up straighter. "Lapis – just us? And that's all that survives of Earth?!"
You wince and turn away from the barn door so you cannot see the suggestions of new plants poking up from the winter dirt or the clouds strung finely above the horizon. You wish he hadn't put it that way. This would be indescribably easier if you still saw Earth as a middling planet overrun by useless beings utterly dependent on oxygen.
"It's okay," you tell him. "We can bring – we can bring your mother. And Shego."
You have never wished fear upon him before, yet now you are hoping for just that: enough fear that you will see a modicum of agreement when he looks back at you.
You don't.
"That's great, Lapis, but what about all of Shego's brothers? What about all my friends at Global Justice?" Drakken speaks in a rushed, unsteady tone, but his eyes are firm behind the shroud of tears. "And what about everyone Steven loves? Which would be….nngggk, bleh…that would be roughly everyone."
That is all he has to say for your painful, scattering thoughts to turn immediately to Greg and all the other occupied seats at the Harvest Feast table: the fusion of love who sheltered you after you escaped your fusion of hate, the Amethyst who did not need limb enhancers to save you from the cracks in the earth, the Pearl who will not be owned.
You no longer hold bitterness toward the Crystal Gems. The ease of your forgetting them is even more disturbing. A certain coldness plunges into your back with the power of an Injector drilling through mantle.
"I'll figure that out once I'm safe," you say. "In the meantime – will you come with me?" You hear the shrill corners of your voice; it is not a question or an invitation anymore but a plea.
Dr. Drakken's eyes run into yours as if they are not planning to stay there long. You are a raindrop teetering on the edge of a leaf; you live in the knowing moment between Bismuth's hand transforming into a hammer and the searing pain that ripped you apart.
"I can't," he says. "You were right – I owe Earth too much. I can't run away and leave it to be conquered!"
Even as he shakes back and forth, his shoulders crashing toward each other and back apart, you can see it: the part of him that does not waver, a Gem with a damaged body yet an intact gem. It will not be gratified with his own safety or even that of his mother. His eyes, dark and round, do not remind you of Steven's this time. Love and war rage from them; they belong to Rose Quartz.
You feel more strongly connected to Peridot's smaller-than-average lake than you do your own physical form. The surface of the water writhes, spreading forward in ripples of anguish.
"But you have to," you say.
Drakken's face contorts into deep, sorrowful lines. "Lapis, you're kinder than this," he says. "Can you really leave an entire planet to be destroyed?"
It is the type of question that clearly has only one answer, yet you give him a different one anyway:
"Yes," you say, and before he can rear back in surprise, you add, "It wouldn't be easy, but I've done it before." You lift your head to look at him. "What I couldn't live with…is if I didn't save you."
Drakken turns away from you at that. You watch his long eyelashes flick in profile.
It should pain you further. Instead, you feel a strong hot surge of anger. It is an anger you haven't felt since you were her, an anger that in prior days of confidence you believed was merely a runoff of Jasper's as she eagerly eyed your ability to turn water into spears of ice.
"You don't understand!" you say. "You. Don't. Understand. The Diamonds are going to come to Earth. They're going to have armies, Drakken! Quartzes and Topaz fusions and everything else they can think of! They'll come with swords and spears and whips and – and mirrors –"
Drakken's soft, entreating expression hardens. "If I see anyone with a mirror, I will personally break it over their heads, and to heck with seven years of bad luck! Anybody who wants to hurt you – they've got to get through me first!"
You stare at him for a moment. That is not hard to picture: the full-sized Amethysts and the small Rubies pooled into enormous warriors, drawing their weapons on Steven and Drakken, hacking away their tiny sacred lives.
"You're a human!" you burst out. "They'll totally kill you!"
Drakken draws back as if you have driven an icicle into his stomach. Grunts drip from his mouth, a leaky tap. "Lapis –"
"I mean, that's very nice. I appreciate it," you amend. "But – seriously – please don't give up your life for me."
It is something which you have never begged from someone before.
"Can you honestly stand there and say you're not scared?" you ask.
Drakken's arms stand rigid at his sides, and he straightens the slight hook in his spine so that he rises taller. "Absolutely!" Just as suddenly, he droops, and another petal shoots up from the top of his neck, right above his ponytail. "…not," he adds. "Sorry. I forgot I was talking to you."
Ordinarily, that might cause you to giggle. Now giggles are irrelevant, so inaccessible they might as well be encrypted into one of the apps on Peridot's tablet.
"If you come with me, we can keep each other safe," you say.
"We can do that here, too. I have flower power, remember?" Drakken tugs at the yellow petal curling over the top of his head. "And it's fought aliens before and won!"
You have to avert your gaze from the brightness of his smile. "Jasper," you snort.
"Well, yes," Drakken says. "What's your point here? Jasper was terrifying!"
"A Diamond could hold Jasper in the palm of her hand," you say.
The color slips out of Drakken's cheeks at the same rate the feeling slips out of your fingers. "Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh, Cheez Doodles!" he sputters.
"You see? That's what I mean!" You knot your fists and rest them on his chest, which feels so scrappy and weak beneath its padding. "That's why we can't fight them.
"Please," you add. "We could find another planet. Just start over there. And you – you could be its ruler."
"No!"
You jump back. Dr. Drakken's manner of speech is always loud and rough yet rarely, when directed toward you, harsh.
"Don't say that!" Drakken hollers. "You think there isn't a part of me that wants that more than I care to admit? You think there isn't a part of me that would still love to do exactly that? Well, there is! And every time I listen to that part of me, horrible things happen to me and the rest of the world! Ruin! Chaos! Tragedy! Mutant termites! Despair! Fast food restaurants warped beyond recognition! Screaming people! Brainwashed people! People tortured – forced to sit on ice cubes until their rears freeze!"
His soft, innocent jaw quivers, pushing forward. For an Earth-second, as you glance at him, he is replaced by blurred, grainy footage of an unfamiliar man in a suit that glittered with metallic raindrops, being torn away from the overturned buildings for which he is responsible.
"It's too tempting to go back!" Drakken says. His bountiful voice is moist and split into little pieces.
"I've gotten caught in the middle of a war before!" you snap. Instead of receding the way they want to, your words grow. "And I can't do that again!"
"Yes, well, I've asked for only one oxygen mask and left the entire rest of the world to suffocate before, and I can't do that again!" Drakken smears a hand down his face, the lines sternly set and thick on its surface, as though his scar has multiplied and crept out into every crevice.
Guilt knocks around in the hollow places inside you, yet you have nowhere to put it, so you wash it aside.
"Lapis…" Drakken's gloves block your view of his fingerprints, which are the only thing you want to see right now. "You're braver than this."
"What if I'm not, though?" you lob back.
Maybe he is right; maybe you are somewhere inside, but that bravery is hidden beneath scratching, scraping layers like the corn in its casing, and they are not nearly as easy to shuck aside. You remember snatching up the lake and wrapping it around the off-color Greg – the Andy, Steven called him – ready to toss him away, never considering whether or not he could survive a fall from that height. You remember the metal plating of Greg's van and the bone in his leg cracking with the same ease.
Your weakness and your strength leer at you from the shadows, and you aren't sure which has the sharpest teeth.
"I'm staying," Drakken says, holding himself with both elbows cupped, even though the salted breeze is warm today. "If you need to go – you can go –" He pushes the words out, and you watch Dr. Drakken crack right before you: the sound on his lips, the synthetic wall of his shoulders, the jagged moisture in his eyes. As it overflows, he cries, "Oh, God, I was gonna be cool!"
"You don't need to be," you say. "You're talking to me."
The brilliant chime of the warp pad registers with Drakken's heightened senses before your dulled ones. In a span of time short even by Earth measure, Steven appears, and he bounds across the grass, colliding with Drakken, sending them both to the ground.
Steven pushes himself up first, his lips white. "How's Lapis?" he says.
"She's – uh –" Drakken rubs at his neck, where another two petals have blossomed. "She's having some difficulties."
There are no tender new sprouts of grass in the unyielding earth beneath you. They are talking about you like you are not even here.
You're not so sure that you are.
Steven shakes his curls. You see the worry rampant inside him, and you know it is your doing. "I'm sorry. Maybe I shouldn't have told–"
"No," you interrupt him. "If you hadn't told me, I wouldn't have known that we need to leave Earth." You are pleased with the flow of your words, flat and shallow, as if nothing teems beneath them.
Steven's beautiful eyes widen. "Leave Earth? You – you really want to leave?"
His question locks a vise on your gem, compressing the essence of you until it is something small, tight, and mean. "I don't want to leave," you say. You look at Steven, grown so strong but still so breakable, and at Dr. Drakken, who could dissolve like sea foam with even so much as a glance from the Diamonds, and your resolve only heightens. "But the only way to be safe is to get as far away from Earth as possible!"
Steven studies you for a long moment. The color and life seem to have been stripped away from him, drained as if by White Diamond. He looks nothing like the happy boy who would giggle away his breath when you played back the blaring, horn-like sound of him blowing onto his own palm again and again.
"I can't, Lapis," Steven says, though you already knew his answer: it is inscribed on his face, written in script far more commanding than even a Diamond's signature.
You look away. Once again, you have underestimated Steven's goodness. You had to believe that anyone who stood trial before the Diamonds would have been instilled with the same fear that pushes you away from them.
"I can't run away from Earth," Steven says. "It's my home."
You clutch, in desperation, at Steven's arm. The skin gives way far too easily for someone who plans to stand in the Diamonds' way. "But it doesn't have to be!" you tell him. You gaze around him at the trees with their beginning buds that will grow to leaves, at the open area where you played baseball, at the truck's back end sticking out of the barn's loft, and you watch it all burn, your cherished sea run dry. "We can find another planet and it can be our new home!"
"It's not just that, though," Steven says, shaking his head again. "Everything and everyone I've ever loved is down here, and it all needs my help."
You are left speechless, staring down into the long dark shaft of your selfishness.
Steven places his hand over yours where it rests on his arm and squeezes, and for a moment all you feel is the gentle pressure. "If leaving is the only way you can feel safe," he says, "you should leave. And none of us will be mad at you, I promise. But I'd be a lot happier if you stayed." His voice reaches out, extending an invitation to you.
You drop your hand and take a step backward, the ground nebulous under you.
"You're not coming, either?" you whisper.
"I've gotta stay," Steven says. He is standing close enough to touch, yet you cannot touch him; it would not be fair to touch him when you are no longer on his side.
Behind you, Dr. Drakken begins to blink rapidly, saying nothing. You want to tickle his nerves until he can't help but chuckle; you want him to be garrulous and outlandish again.
"Fine," you say. It has never been more of a lie. "Peridot! Come on, we should get going!"
A triangle of yellow hair, lifted above a translucent visor, pokes around the corner of the barn. Peridot traipses her way toward you as though she expects you to turn the lake she created against her. "Umm…Lapis…I don't know how to say this," she says. "But I like living in the barn. I don't want to leave it."
"Oh, we can take the barn with us," you say with a wave of your wrist.
Peridot makes a noise of anguish sharp enough to pierce her throat. "All right, you broke me down!" she says. "When I said 'I like living in the barn; I don't want to leave it,' I was using 'the barn' to symbolize 'Earth'! It's my home now, Lapis! I don't want to go!" She glances down at the shivering gourd beside her. "And I don't think Pumpkin does, either."
Pumpkin whimpers and steps aside.
You know, then, that you are somewhere else, your fundamental being already lightyears away. The body standing here on Earth, its bare toes in cold soil, is nothing more than the other half of a fusion: wired to you, under your control, yet never truly yours to possess.
"Please, Peri," you say, horrified by how her miniature form blurs in your vision before you can clear your eyes again.
"I want to fight for Earth," Peridot says. "But that doesn't mean you have to, Lapis. If you just stay, we'll take care of you! You can just hide in the barn and never come out again ever if you don't want to! I will conceal your whereabouts from all the soldiers and sentries Homeworld can send! They'll never know you're here!"
She holds out her hands to you. You should take them, but the Diamonds are everywhere. Yellow Diamond is the sun shining down on you, Blue Diamond the shadow cast behind you. On this planet, you will never be free of them. Every move you make could have them waiting at the end of it.
"A lot of good hiding will do me if they decide to launch another Corruption Bomb! Or release the Cluster!" you blurt out.
For the second time today, someone valuable to you cringes as though you have shoved an icicle through them, Peridot's mouth knotting. You have a vague suspicion that Peridot may not have ever been told of the first Corruption Bomb. She says nothing, lowering her face and trudging back around the corner of the barn.
This is the moment where if you had any of the kindness and bravery Drakken extols in you, you would change your mind.
Yet when you search yourself for kindness, you are stricken with the same sensation as when you tried to gather water in Jasper's desert kindergarten.
Your bravery is White Diamond – a being that exists, but only technically, hidden away from the world, captive in her own head. Sometimes wonderful things happen and are attributed to her, but she never comes out even long enough to claim credit.
The memory of Jasper's chilled presence, next to you and within you, takes her place.
Dr. Drakken places himself in front of you, gasping as though he has jogged a far greater distance than the one between him and you. "Lapis, I believe in you," he says. The buoy-words have snarled together, a single loose string aflutter among them.
You laugh without moisture or feeling. "Well, that makes one of us."
Drakken lays halting hands on your shoulders, as though he expects the light which forms them to scatter at his touch. "Where are you going to go?" he says.
He does not ask where you think you are going, which would mean he was planning to try to stop you. You cannot remember from which imprisonment you learned that.
You see Pearl standing by White Diamond's side one day and Pink Diamond's the next; you hear Blue Diamond's soft, cold voice chiding you; you feel Jasper's hateful fingers restraining your wrists. "As far away from Earth as possible," you blurt.
"That's not an answer," Drakken says.
"It is an answer," you tell him.
"It's a bad answer." Drakken's words shake yet hold firm. "Look, if you're going to leave…don't I at least deserve to know where you're going?"
His jaw lunges forward in affected arrogance – an arrogance painful and peeling like the sunburn Paulette got in Season Three.
Your mind travels the galaxies, examining each ravaged colony. The only planets where you would be safe are the ones that cannot give the Diamonds what they want, whether because of a natural flaw or because the Diamonds have already siphoned them dry.
"I'll go to Kanatar," you say, lessening the pressure of your heel in the dirt. You do not need to injure Earth any more than you already did when you decided you would not fight for it. "The Diamonds tried to colonize it, but it's just so cold there that all the Gems came out all deformed and misshapen. It was considered a waste of energy when there were so many other potential colonies out there. They haven't been there for at least seven thousand years, but they never got around to ripping up the warp pad. So you can warp there, if you need to. Well, I mean, you can't," you address Drakken, "but a Gem could."
It is the most you have said since yesterday.
"Okay," Drakken says. He swallows. "Okay. Okay. Okay," he repeats, as if unaware that he continues to speak.
He is facing the sun now. Rays of light glance off the wet trails on his cheeks.
Steven's tears are clustered at the corners of his eyes. Rather than weakening him, they somehow enrich the strength and the courage you see beside them, in those eyes that have now seen Homeworld and looked upon the Diamonds. A soldier Gem emerges as a soldier Gem, needing only a span of time to cool down and be Taught. You have never watched anyone mature like this before. You are not sure you can bear it.
You lean forward, and your fingers catch on Steven's elbow. You cling to that gentle, ruddy fold, trying to commit it to memory. "Steven," you say. "Please – if the Diamonds come, and you fight, and if there's no way you can win – take Drakken, take Peridot, take Pumpkin – and warp to me."
The Diamonds could still follow them, and perhaps that is all right. You will not fight for the planet that gave you a place to stay, but you will fight for these four, your friends, who made it a home.
You hope with every droplet of water on Earth that Steven will nod. You expect him to shake his head.
He does neither.
His arms loop around your waist. "I love you, Lapis," he says.
You lose all feeling in your back.
Over Steven's head, undefined figures play on the walls of the barn: a Crystal Gem slings her blade directly through the center of a Ruby and then collapses to the ground herself, writhing as she is corrupted. It is not real anymore, but it once was, and it will live forever in reflection. "I love you, too," you whisper for only the third time in your life. "Good-bye.
"And tell Peridot that I'm sorry," you add.
Steven frowns. "You can tell her that yourself."
"No." You turn away from him. "I can't."
You cannot express your regrets to Peridot's tiny disconsolate face. You cannot watch it arrive at the conclusion that you hate her. You hate only one person here, and she is not Peridot.
Steven will not give up, you know, and neither will Dr. Drakken, not while there is even one human left on Earth to defend. They will stay, and they will fight, and the stars already mourn their cause so sharply that you cannot feel a single other thing.
Drakken steps forward and embraces you, pulling you flat against the long line of his torso, which is somehow sturdy and spindly at the same time. Inside, the ocean of his heartbeat roars and crashes in fierce waves. He smells of the sweet brown substance he mixes with his milk and something harsher that Peridot uses to mop the barn floors, and he shakes against you.
It should mean something to you. It should mean everything to you. It should wrap itself around you and hold you on this planet like an anchor.
Instead, the bomb hisses as the Diamonds launch it toward Earth to maul their own people, and you cannot rid yourself of the tight, slithering sensation that someone is at your back, even now, and you go rigid.
Dr. Drakken must notice this, too, because he lets his arms drop, with reluctance, at his sides. He hooks one finger under the point of your chin and gently lifts it so that your eyes meet his streaming ones. His nose also leaks.
"I…I'm going to miss you," he says.
You take a step back, suddenly angered.
"I'm not getting caught up in another war," you hear yourself declare, and even your anger sounds lifeless. Your gem throws your wings out either side.
With one frantic flap of them, you are off the ground, leaving Earth behind, taking nothing with you.
"Lapis!" Peridot cries beneath you. "Wait – wait, Lapis!"
No. Waiting will only make it harder.
Peridot continues to scream, yet inside of you and all around something else is screaming, too, and has been ever since the word "war" first puckered Blue Diamond's lips. You don't remember hearing it even back then, only seeing its shape. It screams now with reminders of the Crystal Gems Rose did not have time to save, of the loyal Homeworld soldiers who could not flee the planet in time, and of a home that will forever remain elusive, and it easily drowns out Peridot.
You pound your wings at a speed you haven't used for millennia, pinning them back to hurtle through the tiers of the Earth's atmosphere. Your gem is intact, pulsing with life on your back, and yet you sense that something else has cracked, something impossible to feel, as surely as if it's taken the brunt of a Quartz's determined heel. Cloud vapor parts for you, rolling off your skin, and you abandon it as well.
Somewhere below you, your three best friends stand on Earth, in terrible danger. One of them is also your boyfriend, and you can only hope Mama Lipsky was correct when she said broken hearts don't physically shatter the way fallen Gems do. If he has shards in his chest, it is your fault. Why didn't you tell him that you would miss him, too?
Why didn't you tell him that you love him?
You brush threads of your hair back from your forehead with the back of one hand as you fly into a sky growing less and less blue, and you wish you didn't already know the answer to your own question: Because you are a coward whose own safety is too delicate and valuable to her to risk on even those who have treated her with far more kindness than they owe her. You are a person who, when danger reignites, will desert those who are supposed to matter to her. Your one experience with sacrifice ruined you from ever choosing it again.
Outside Earth's atmosphere, you don't take one last look at the planet of changing leaves, hospitable oceans, and intricate human beings. You flee with what remains of yourself, and it is not nearly as hard as it should be. Fear mats your conscience and rules you.
You once believed you were too good for Earth.
Now you know the exact opposite is true.
Dr. Drakken squints up into the sky until Lapis Lazuli has faded from view, and probably for quite some time thereafter, as well. He keeps thinking he can see her wings aloft in the sky, but it turns out to be just the giant, tadpole-shaped tear streaked across each eye.
DNAmy's words poke themselves into his head – You're sweet, but the truth is, my heart belongs to another man. He thought that was the painfullest, devastatingest, most cast-grammar-to-the-wind-doggone-it outcome of any romance. Turns out he was wrong. Drakken has been sucked into his own Doomsday devices, bashed around inside their hardware, and spit back out the other side, and this is still worse, worse even than the time he –
Rambling. And, yes, now, the rambling.
Drakken smears a sleeve across his face and it comes back dripping. All his bones disintegrate and a vise closes around his heart, and he doubles over, and it won't stop, the shivering and the sobbing and the head-shaking. Especially when it occurs to him that Lapis, wherever she has gone, will not be crying – not because she doesn't care, but because she is not the type of person who cries.
He thought perhaps he could help her because they are both creatures of fear, but now he sees how silly a notion that was. Dr. Drakken has been scared more times than he would care to admit…but when he snagged Lapis by the shoulders and made her answer him, the fear that looked back at him was spread wider and dug deeper than anything he has ever experienced, anything he has ever seen on a human – err, make that a humanoid – before. Frozen to her. Aged and wintered until it is as pungent as old cheddar.
And now she is gone.
And here he is, gulping and quivering, his thinking halted just the way it was when his child-self watched Mother pull off her wedding band before heading to her first job interview, just the way it was when his supervillain-self watched Shego's brother tromp into the lair and demand she help them. It is the same tune Drakken has been humming all of his life – him, helpless to save the people he cares about. He thought that now, with his powers and all, that would be a thing of the past, and in a way it is. Should the Diamonds – yellow, blue, or any other color – set foot on the Earth, he can crush them into rubble.
But is that really what you want to happen? Drakken can hear his psychiatrist asking.
No. It isn't, and he knows that. What he wants is Lapis, safe and sound and home. The noble side of him allowed her to run from the threat of an attack. The selfish side would rather have her by his side, even if it means she was in a little bit of danger, which can't be as despicable as it sounds, can it? Not after he swore a solemn oath to keep her and the rest of the Earth safe, right?
He doesn't know. Gears grind in Drakken's digestive system. He doesn't know.
"No! Lapis!" A primal, through-the-nose scream erupts from somewhere nearby, and only its soprano-and-climbing pitch clues Drakken in to the fact that it didn't come from him. He glances up to see Peridot's legs churning dust behind her as she streaks across the field, calling, "Lapis! Wait! Stop! Come baaaaaaacccccccck!" She hits the edge of their crop-square, bounces off a stump of a corn stalk that is almost as big as she is, and flops onto her back in the grass, screeching at nothing and everything.
Drakken has no words for any of it – just a shredded, aching sound that elbows its way out of him and that even he can't decipher.
Steven, however, has words, and they are, "Oh my gosh, Peridot, I'm so sorry. Are you okay?" He rushes over to her and squats on his ankles, his hand out.
To Drakken's utter surprise, Peridot jolts away from him, yanks up a handful of grass, and tosses it in the general direction of Steven's face. "Go away!" she yelps. "Go away – you're not Lapis!"
She has reached her boiling temperature, and Drakken half expects her to melt into the lava which she is related to, and then he'll have lost both of them. His doubts and fears and pangs and frustrations, which have been swerving from lane to lane in his head like Cousin Eddy is driving them, pull over to the side of the road and make way for the clear, unblemished place where he received the instructions on how to defeat the Lorwardians.
It is a miracle, albeit not the one he was hoping for. Drakken rises to his feet, strides over to Peridot, bends down and grabs her hands, midget specimens even in his. "Peridot," he says in a voice that sounds low on batteries. "Peridot, don't take it out on Steven! Take it out – on the ground!"
Peridot rolls to look at him, although Drakken isn't sure any optical nerves function behind her fitful stare with its fried-dough glaze. "What? How?" she blubbers.
"Like THIS!" Drakken slams a fist he doesn't remember forming into the earth. The impact shudders through him, rattles him, and he doesn't mind a bit. "Blame the ground, and hit it as. Hard. As. You. Can!"
Another blow to the stiffened spines of grass.
"You mean, do this?" Peridot's own tiny fist crashes into the ground. Something resembling relief trembles at the edge of her expression.
"Yes, exactly!" Drakken cries, and for a moment he feels pride in his little protégé before the pain slaps into him again. He flings himself, belly-down, across the ground and takes an enormous breath.
And for the first time in the nine months since his reformation, Dr. Drakken throws a full-blown, punching, kicking, spitting temper tantrum.
It isn't something he's missed having to do, but there is an element of satisfaction to it, the howling and the spit-spewing and the pounding of the ground that gives the illusion of punishing the world itself. There's also an air of familiarity, although it doesn't entirely match his memories – as if he is performing an experiment similar to one he performed earlier, only now he's using liquid nitrogen instead of gaseous. This time, he isn't venting his frustrations against Kim Possible or some other goody-goody who pulled the planet's control out of his reach at the last second. He yowls at Homeworld, at the powers he doesn't know – the ones who Lapis was once so dedicated to, who feel they owe her nothing in return for her devotion, who would rank her safety below some bizarre quest for revenge against Steven's late mother, who have away the only woman to ever love him back.
(Well, besides his mother. And possibly Shego, although she would likely never admit to such sentimentality.)
Beside him, Drakken hears Peridot mimic him, lashing out in noises that fuel the nuclear meltdown in Drakken's core. Only when they dissolve into heaving sobs does Drakken, too, cease and desist, allow himself to acknowledge his limp-noodle of a body and that pain in his side – why do they call it a stitch, anyway? Because it sure doesn't feel like a stitch – it feels like a bitten-open area that needs stitches. It throbs much the same way his cheek did the day he scratched it with the blade he forgot he was holding.
Drakken sinks to his seat on the ground and folds his legs in tight, reducing himself. The less surface area he covers, the less of him there is to hurt.
In a matter of moments, he has a lap full of Peridot. She buries her face in Drakken's torso, her tears mingling with his. Drakken has no choice but to put his arms around her, tight and close, and rock both of them back and forth, and he wonders about the chemical composition of Gems' tears. Would they be different from human tears, if you could plop one of each on a slide and examine it through a microscope? Gems must shapeshift tear ducts – but are they copying the tear ducts of humans or some other species altogether? Or it is entirely their own? He wants to know, he suddenly needs to know, but even his brain – the should-be eighth wonder of the modern world – is crawling with cobwebs and rusty with…rust.
Okay, and now I'm starting to boast again. "Tooting his own horn," his mother used to call it when she would scold him for it. It means he's in an even pathetic state than he thought.
"Wow thanks," Peridot says, muffled against fabric. "For teaching me how to assault the ground."
Drakken ducks his head, forces humility. "My shrink helped me with that."
"You needed shrinking help?" Peridot pulls back and peers up at him. "Did you used to be bigger, too?"
An unexpected laugh bursts from Drakken, slinging snot across his upper lip.
"Not that kind of shrink, Peridot." Steven finally speaks again, all shaky. "It's like a counselor."
"Licensed psychiatrist, in my case," Drakken clarifies. "I'm very, very messed up."
Peridot reaches up to Drakken's chin and wipes her face on a yellow petal he didn't feel sprout. "What…what are we gonna do now?" she asks.
Something acidic burns at the back of Drakken's throat, accompanied by a liverwurst taste. "I…I don't know, Peridot," he says. "Miss her, I guess. Pray for her. Love h –"
The last sentence dissolves entirely, and Drakken must bawl into the backs of his hands again.
When he looks back up, Steven's eyes are little ponds themselves. "Drakken's right," he says. "We care about her. That's something we can do even from two billion miles away." He chuckles wetly. "I guess we wouldn't be sitting here crying if we couldn't."
Drakken doesn't know how much longer they sit there and cry. The sun is tickling the edge of the horizon by the time he has to stand up and stretch and think about getting back to Middleton – because the fate of the entire free world could still rest on him and his abilities, you know? Peridot clings to him as if he is her baby blankie and only lets go when Steven distracts her with her tablet, and a brilliant idea strikes Drakken's brain, and he gives her instructions on how to Facetalk him on his laptop.
"Call me if you ever need to talk about her," Drakken says, giving Peridot's fingers a clammy squeeze. "Anywhere. Anytime. Okay?"
"Okay," Peridot whimpers. She slowly releases her grasp on Drakken, the way he was sometimes reluctant to let go of his mother when he was a kid, and walks the walk of the incarcerated felon away from someone they won't see again until next week.
Lapis's shy smile crowds Drakken's mind. The soft spurting giggle kept hidden away like an underground spring, the one he hasn't heard for what seems like forever. Even the thought of her mini-buzzsaw snore twists him into one big smarting knot. She may have flown the coop…but she's a prisoner now, too.
Again.
Once he and the hovercraft are back in Middleton, Drakken travels an extra few blocks and parks it in Shego's driveway. She answers the door, already halfway through a question of, "Whoa, Dr. D – everything okay?"
"No!" Drakken says. He wraps her in a hug and pours out the story to her. The sinewy strength he leans against never falters, never has in all the years he's known her, but even her giant cascade of hair seems to sag sadly.
Shego – sad?
She must be. Because even as he soaks the shoulder of her jumpsuit with his grief, for once she has no wisecracks to offer.
~Yes, I did steal the "I was gonna be cool" line from Doctor Who. Seemed fitting.~