~Well, I'm back!. . . with something hopefully not so sad this time. Hope you all enjoy.
Also - the Avatar reference is pretty obvious, but I had to do it. :P~
"Falling apart" is an interesting description when applied to people, and one which Dr. Drakken, not being an Englist or whatever the dickens Shego said those grammar-people are called, does not entirely understand. He's well-versed in the art of things falling apart – has had many experiments with volatile pieces of machinery and one particular large scale-model of the Death Star that he constructed with Kim Possible's boyfriend at the park one day this summer before realizing that neither of them ever planned exactly how they would lift it from the picnic table upon its completion. The Death Star went from a cohesive entity to a million tiny Lego bricks that leaked between your fingers, scattered across the grass, and rudely shoved themselves into the exact place where your instep would next land. And machines that fall apart stop running.
Neither of these analogies applies to Drakken. He hasn't lost any body parts, unless you count the two handfuls of hair he apparently tugged free in his sleep, and he is still running.
Boy, is he ever running! He wakes up every morning with his alarm clock, dresses in the safe familiarity of his lab coat, and heads to Global Justice, where he experiments with serums, helps repair the Immobilizer 2000, and slurps up Dr. Director's praise like so much cocoa moo, his knee clanking against the table as she comments on the progress they have made. Sometimes he arrives late, but he never leaves early, not now that he is a responsible, employed member of society. He still speaks to Shego on the phone every night, and her sympathy is like a seventy-degree temperature in February – it seems to be in the wrong place, but he'll take it anyway.
But.
But whenever Drakken's hands aren't holding a Bunson burner or a circuit board, they break into uncontrollable trembles. Quiet spaces stir him into a panic and have him tossing himself across the room, pacing in that manner Shego always says is going to carve groove marks in the floor, which seems a lot less likely now than it did last month. He picks at his meals, getting more food on the table than into him, and despite at least three binge-eating-induced tummyaches, he's started having to tighten his belt again.
What he truly needs is to throw his mind off the scent of Lapis Lazuli – metaphorically, of course, as his girlfriend has no actual scent. Whenever he isn't occupied with something else, she slips in her wispy way, and he remembers watching her face freeze and turn off as she told him she wouldn't get caught up in another war. His limited-but-still-better-than-average knowledge of geology tells him that lapis lazuli is a fairly soft rock, but as she faced him, she looked every bit as hard as those Diamonds she was so afraid of.
The Diamonds who could hold a brute like Jasper in the palms of their hands.
All right, that is certainly something to be afraid of. They'd be as big as Commodore Puddles was that one time he was hit by a growth ray that was supposed to be a shrink ray, which was sort of frustrating. But Commodore Puddles was Drakken's cute furry non-biological son, and he let Drakken ride around on his giant head. There's nothing scary about him at any size, unless you count his tendency to leave the latter part of his name all over the place, and they're working on that.
The clear place in Drakken's brain shimmers an idea whenever he thinks about the Diamonds, but whenever he tries to read it, something else keeps jumping up and blocking it like a pop-up ad for virus software. Or a plucky little teenage heroine who somehow managed to be shark-proof, acid-proof, and lightning-proof. Or one of those blow-up clowns with the round rears who spring back up after every single punch. You can hit them as many times as you want, over and over and over again, and the only thing that will happen is that you develop calluses, the skin on your hand thicker and tougher, impervious to pain.
Impervious to pain, Drakken is not, and he never has been. It was particularly vexing during his two decades of supervillainy. Couldn't emotionally manipulate the lonely, twisted geneticist whose help he needed without falling in love with her himself. Couldn't take a blow to the gut without crying out. Couldn't maintain the aura of menace he so carefully crafted after watching his beloved Synthodrone Eric dribble away into a pile of slush.
He has never been able to make himself not care. And it hurts, in ways that claw through his thoughts in the day and hover over him at night, waiting for him to drift off into REM so they can throw themselves on top of him.
One Saturday morning, Drakken is testing out his newest batch of Power Putty by hurling it at the ceiling to make sure it sticks – and that it doesn't eat through the sheetrock, the way his last batch did – anyway, he is doing that when the doorbell rings. Drakken zips for the door, tripping over his boots and his clumsy heartbeat and the insane hope that it is Lapis, that she has come to terms with her fear and come home to him so he can protect her from her crazed rulers.
A glance through the peephole, however, reveals two teenager-ish figures huddled together on his front stoop. The sight of them begins to starch up the back of Drakken's neck, until the reminder that they are all friends now loosens it.
Drakken sweeps the door open. He's glad Kim Possible isn't wearing one of her crop tops today, both for her sake – the wind is piranha-bite sharp – and his own – it would remind him too much of Lapis. Flicking around a tongue the consistency of prison gelatin, he spits out, "Nnngh, grak, mmmm." Those are the only noises he's made so far today as he was testing the Power Putty's jellied texture and its molecular density and the strength of its solvent.
Words – where do I keep words again?
"Greetings, Kim Possible," Drakken is able to say at last.
"…And?" the blond kid beside her asks, his eyebrows raised and waiting.
Rummaging around in his brain takes Drakken back to cleaning out his haunted-island-lair closet when he moved out – heaps and piles of junk that he needed to be sorted through carefully lest they be hiding some pointy weapon at the bottom. He grabs his first search result and pushes it out: "And…Robert Stenographer."
Boyfriend squints. "Close enough."
Kim Possible, however, is gazing at Drakken with concerned creases all over her. Oh, he must look a fright – not that he would ever make Humans Magazine's list of Gorgeous Specimens of Maleness (he is secure enough to admit that now). But at this point, Drakken can only imagine the numbers of stains, both chemical and confectionary, on the lab coat he's been wearing since Tuesday; what a rumpled, bedraggled case of bed-head his ponytail must have; and how red and bagged-down and tired and erratic his eyes must look.
"Drakken?" she says. "Is everything all right?"
He recognizes that voice. It's the one she uses on victims of kidnapping, on hurt or traumatized bystanders. Always so bothersome, and now directed toward him – it almost startles tears out of Drakken.
Okay, not "almost." He can feel the moisture seeping out.
"No," Drakken admits, and just saying it hurts. "Won't you come in?" he says, because the house is suddenly as big and empty as a Shego-less lair and as tight and claustrophobic as a jail cell, and that shouldn't be physically possible. "You must be freezing."
He takes a step back and wafts a stiff arm into the house – stiff because he has very, very little practice inviting Kim Possible into his living quarters. That same stiffness is apparent in Boyfriend's posture as he creeps into the house with his head ducked forward, as if he expects an ax or a mace to take a swing at him from the ceiling. It won't, of course – Drakken has kindly donated every weapon he's stolen from Jack Hench to the Lowerton Medieval Museum, although at the moment he could swear there's one last mace left and it's lodged in his throat.
"Relaaaaaaaxxxxx," someone squeaks. The mole rat crawls out of Boyfriend's baggy pocket and kneads Boyfriend's shoulders with his itsy-bitsy pink paws.
"Dude, I love your paint job," Boyfriend says, melting at his rodent's touch. "I mean, it, too," he adds without even giving Drakken the chance to squint at him. "Never be normal – that's my motto!"
Drakken very nearly smiles before the sadness pulls him under again. "That's brilliant! Why, I'd outsource from you if that were still the kind of thing I did! Errr, I mean…steal it from you," he says, a little embarrassed that his villainous auto-correct is still in place.
He settles himself on the edge of the couch. Kim Possible keeps a respectful distance – or maybe a self-preserving distance, Drakken can't be sure. "So," she says, "what's the sitch?"
The phrase that he used to cringe over is now like lotion to his soul. Drakken swallows hard, a mistake, because the mace's spines dig in even harder. "My first girlfriend left for the moon. Or someplace," he adds.
Boyfriend nods sagely. "That's rough, buddy."'
Kim Possible holds up a stop-sign hand to him and frowns at Drakken. "Lapis left you?"
For the first time, Drakken is able to empathize with the round-rear clowns, heroically and resiliently rising only to be met with another slam to the face. Knocked back down time after time, making your opponent even more furious by getting back up. The inaccuracy wallops him practically to the ground now.
"No!" Drakken barks. "She didn't just leave me! She left Earth altogether! She's convinced that the leaders of her people, who I gather are about twenty times bigger than Warhok and Warmonga –" the boyfriend shudders, and Drakken knows he shouldn't have dragged the Lorwardians into this, and he's sorry, but it's too late now to stop – "are mad at Earth for some really weirdly complicated reason and that they'll try to wipe out all life on Earth again like they did five gajillion years ago – "
" – and this time they might succeed?" Kim Possible supplies. Drakken glances her direction just in time to catch the ache in her big green eyes.
The mace must be built from modern technology, because it's able to retract its spines long enough for Drakken to speak again.
"It just broke her! She shut down and nothing I did would comfort her! All she wanted to do was take off for another planet where they couldn't find her!" Drakken says, bobbing his head.
Drakken sees anger in the tension of Boyfriend's scrawny body as he leans it forward. "So she just ran away and left the Earth to fend for itself?"
A half-sob, half-scream leaves Drakken's mouth.
"She had a panic attack, Ron," Kim Possible says lightly. "Good thing you don't know anything about those."
She gives her boyfriend – Ron, that's it! – a playful nudge with her elbow. Lapis used to do that to him.
"Oh. Heh-heh. Yeah. Good times." A thoughtful expression settles among Boyfriend's freckles. "She said she got in the way of the war last time."
"Yes, she did!" Drakken stares down at the carpet, currently nothing more than a rippled smear of dark red, and bites one knuckle hard enough to sting. "She was injured – and taken prisoner – and she just got out last year!"
"Bummer," the rodent gibbers, his whiskers drooping.
Kim Possible picks her way across the floor to Drakken, sliding her graceful feet between candy wrappers and snack cake packets and over one particularly disfigured plastic cookie box that Drakken may have mangled somewhat when he licked even its crumbs away yesterday. An urpy bubble of memory forms in his middle.
A little embarrassed turns into a lot embarrassed, and Drakken puts his hands up to his cheeks, where he knows they've crimsoned. "Errr, yes, sorry about that," he says. "I've doing a little…" He looks down at this young woman who used to be his arch-foe, and she looks back at him so very, very kindly that he glances down to make sure his legs aren't dissolving into Legos. "I know it's not a healthy way of processing my emotions," he starts again.
"No judgment here," Kim Possible says with a shrug. She still sounds as if she is talking to a shaken-up civilian, and Drakken is glad he has finally reached the spot in his life where her goodness doesn't grate against his nerves anymore. "It's a lot healthier than trying to level the continent."
She smiles, and it twinkles at him, teases him. The normalcy of it rips a long spasm of grief through Drakken, the kind he always tried to hide in Kim Possible's peppy little presence. This one, though – he decides to trust her softening eyes with it.
Drakken nods for no reason that he can think of. Heartsick as he is, scientific curiosity is bubbling up in him like a baking-soda-and-vinegar-reaction that can't be suppressed. "What are you two doing here, anyway?" he asks them. "Aren't you supposed to be in…Paris?"
"Spring break," Kim Possible says, her voice as gentle and tender as the hand she is kindly not touching him with. "It's March now, you know?"
"Is it?" Drakken gazes around the bleary living room he only faintly recognizes as his own.
That doesn't put a pinch of concern on Kim Possible's expression this time. She is used to him and his absent-minded-genius escapades.
"Yeah. It is. And we're totally taking you to dinner," she says. "I bet you could use some real food."
A shivery-happy thing rattles through Drakken, the same shiver he gets when he plunges his hands into the sofa cushions to retrieve the pen he dropped and instead comes up twenty-five cents richer.
He wants to bask in the moment a little, but Ron, as usual, blunders into it and smashes it to pieces. "Hey, yeah," he says with his usual crooked grin. "Wanna go to Bueno Nacho?"
This shiver is not happy or hopeful. It is pure winter desolation, March or not. Drakken clenches his fists around his hair-spikies and gulps. "No, I can't!" he manages to croak. "Too many bad memories!"
"Bad memories?" Ron repeats, incredulous.
"Diabolically bad memories." In a near-whisper, Kim Possible rolls the intense words her boyfriend's way.
Drakken gulps again, even harder now.
A circuit is completed behind Ron's eyes, right before he claps his oversized palm over them. "Ohhhhhhh," he says. "Oh, man, I actually did not remember that was you."
It is a compliment of the highest order, and Drakken feels himself glowing. Almost literally.
"So where'd you like to go instead?" Kim Possible asks.
Drakken gapes at her for what must be a good two minutes, because he is not accustomed to this, to Kim Possible requesting his opinion as if she will actually take it and place it on whatever precise, widely successful scale she uses to weigh all her decisions. "Well, there's this new place that just opened down by the community center," he says at last. "It's called Soup's Up. I've been meaning to try it?"
There's an upward tilt to the last syllable – like there is to a good-mood ponytail and a graph that signifies rising profits. Only those two are both confident and certain, and this is completely uncertain. Drakken still halfway expects to be guffawed at any second now.
Instead, Kim Possible says, "Soup's Up it is, then," gets to her feet, and hitches up a plush red shoulder bag that reminds him of a movie theater seat.
Drakken follows her. His chest seems to have transformed into a space heater, blasting away the cold and smoothing the achy hump from his backbone.
Soup's Up turns out to be a parallelogram, as are most of the buildings in Middleton, with a trapezoid-type jut where its automatic double doors whoosh in and out. Drakken dances in front of them for a few minutes, Ron and the mole rat joining him, just because it is so good, so very, very good to be in control of something for a bit. Inside, the lighting is dim, which seems to hush the atmosphere, the floor unnervingly slippery but free of grime or grease.
When the three of them step up to place their orders, the man behind the counter treats all three of them to the same smile – the smile one gives to those who have saved the world at least once. For a glorious, untimable interval, all Drakken can see is that smile, and as he slip-slides toward a booth, he can feel it easing its cozy way through his veins, like an immunization shot without the needle-pinch. It is fleeting, though – by the time Drakken makes glutial contact with the booth, his body might as well have been stored in a refrigerated boxcar for the past week or two.
The glance Kim Possible gives him brims with her usual effervescent passion for doing good. She considers comforting him right now, Drakken knows, every bit as much her responsibility as it ever was to foil him. "Do you want to talk about it?" she says.
Drakken's neck muscles freeze, unsure whether they need to accommodate a yay or a nay, and just in the nick of time, their order is delivered to their table before he has to answer. A bowl of tomato soup sits in front of him, thick and creamy-red, wearing a sprig of parsley the way people in old movies wore feathers in their hats. Drakken stirs it in smooth, gliding-type whorls, lifts a spoonful to his lips, and sips it in. As it slides over his tongue, his taste buds remember Mother gadding about the kitchen, her arms waving as she shook spices into her giant pot. The coarse fabric of placemats that had been washed too many times, so that their stitches were starting to poke out in sprigs. The kitchen table, which his experiments left stained and discolored in ways that couldn't be fixed – as a precursor to his face, Drakken supposes, only Mother said the spots added "character," for both of them.
And then he spills it.
No, not the soup – although some of that does slop out of the bowl every now and then. He spills the whole story, starting with the part none of them were alive for – the first war, five thousand years ago, what Lapis has told him about it. The punch. The mirror. The imprisonment. Steven rescuing her. Her returning to find her home scarred up and crawling with new, hostile faces. Being brought back as a prisoner to "inform" on the Crystal Gems. Fusing with Jasper to save Steven. Being freed again, only to awaken to the fact that she could never again return to the planet she missed so much. Her adjustments. Greg's kidnapping. Steven's kidnapping. Lapis's panic attack. The Diamonds themselves, what few details he has about them. In between sips of soup that seem to form a blanket down his throat and into his belly.
When he is done, Kim Possible's peachy brow folds at him. "Drakken, I am so sorry," she says.
"Why?" Drakken says. "For once it isn't your fault!"
As soon as he has barked it out, he coils back and covers his mouth. "Sorry," he moans around his fingers. "Habit."
"Sometimes it's hard to kick –" Kim Possible begins.
The last word turns into a physical being, a being with its skinny-but-steel-cabled leg flung forward, meant to meet him and break him open and leave him sore and possibly even – shudder – bloody. "Not in the face!" Drakken cries, flinging his arms up to shield the touchiest areas.
" – those old habits," Kim Possible finishes. She smirks without malice. "Have you ever considered switching to decaf?"
Ron reaches over and lays his hand across Kim Possible's wrist. The dotty freckles clustered on either side of his nose have turned into long, lamenting eyelets. Teardrops. Like Lapis's gem. "KP, there can be no chillage after you've watched your girlfriend disappear into space," he says.
Drakken hasn't seen Kim Possible go pale before, never despite his many efforts, but that's what happens now. She squeezes the back of Ron's hand, a gesture subtle and effortless. It hurts to look at them. Hurts to look at everything. (Come to think of it, when was the last time he changed his contacts?)
In his memory, Lapis weaves her tiny cold fingers into his as matter-of-factly as if she was piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. The blanket in his throat knots and stiffens. Tears stagger out from between his eyelashes and careen down his face.
Kim Possible sits softly across the booth from him. Drakken picks up his napkin, crusty-pink from where it mopped up some spilled soup, and tries to dab his eyes with it, though it only ends up getting soaked. "I bet you must think I'm the world's biggest wuss," Drakken garbles as he watches her.
The edges of Kim Possible's lips turn up, but not into the sharp peaks he remembers. "Not for this," she says. "Some people are worth crying over."
She gazes – mistily, Drakken would say, if he weren't talking about one of the absolute toughest young women he's ever known – at her boyfriend.
Drakken presses hard on his ulnar artery to see if that will get the spasms in his shoulders to stop, but it doesn't. "I just – I just – she's the first girlfriend I've ever had. I don't want her to forget about me."
Ron shakes his head. "Dude, nobody can forget you. We know. We've tried."
It's Kim Possible's turn to touch Ron's arm, a light smack this time before she turns back to Drakken. "Drakken, you have made such a turnaround recently," she says. "I majorly can't believe I'm saying this, but you're kind of a great person now. And I've seen the way you are with Lapis. How sweet and gentle you are – and careful with her." She smiles and swishes her spoon. "Girls don't forget about good boyfriends."
"You're referring to me, right?" Ron hisses to her.
"Yeah, I'm referring to you," Kim says, and Ron's cheeks wash pink.
The space heater turns back on inside Drakken, not quite settled, not quite secure, not quite certain it will not be switched off again soon. "You guys are being – so nice." He chokes on the words as he watches Ron slip a piece of biscotti under the table to the naked rodent. "After all I've done to you –"
Kim Possible leans toward him, and her pretty necklace of beads doesn't even graze the soup bowl carved out of a bread loaf. "It's not totally selfless," she admits. "My twenty credit hours do not leave me enough time for having to bust your tail, too."
Perhaps it is an insult – surely his villain-self would take it as one – but Drakken can't quite bring himself to be offended. Not with her sitting there, still smiling. Especially not when she adds, "But we do want to be here for you."
"I know!" Drakken says, and for a moment he doesn't know why that is making him cry harder instead of…less hard? Softer? "I know I have you and Shego and my mother and Dr. Director, but – Lapis – she has nobody!"
"Drakken, you are sooo not nobody," Kim Possible says simply.
If the little lovebirds exchange another goopy look at that point, Drakken doesn't see it. He is taking deep breaths into his hands. "Yes – but I can't talk to her. She's out in space, and I can't – "
He stops and he could swear he hears something go Boiiiing!
The idea collides with him like an asteroid, except there aren't any bits of him that break off and go hurling through space and a few that land in the middle of the Nevada desert for the space scientists to come over and dust off and comb through for signs of – ohhh, he's getting distracted, but the mention of space scientists spins Drakken exactly back to where he was going with this.
"Does Professor Ramesh still work at the space center?" he asks Kim Possible, startling halfway from the seat. "I mean, he hasn't a midlife crisis and changed his occupation like me, has he?"
"Uh, yeah, he still works there." Kim Possible appears thoroughly bewildered, especially when Drakken scoops her into a hug, holding her by the shoulders. "Um – Drakken?"
"I have a brilliant idea!" Drakken says.
It should be all he needs to say, and it is. Kim Possible gives a good-natured groan. "Of course you do."
"Yeah, and dude, you didn't have a midlife crisis," Ron puts in. "You just, like, grew a soul."
Drakken nods. "True dat."
A surprised splat of laughter bursts from Kim Possible.
It is true dat, though. He has a soul now – an active one, at least – and although it hurts in a way that not even his back can compare to, it has come alive with the clear space inside, blueprinting exactly what he needs to do next. Drakken slurps the last of the soup from his bowl, gives his chin one last napkin-wipe, and bolts right for the front door.
Well, he would bolt right for the front door, but first they need to figure out how to split the check…
How anticlimactic.
It is not that you are miserable on Kanatar. Kanatar, with its cold, bracing temperature and its beauteous iced cliffs, is not a place where people are miserable.
Even now, you can hear the cheerful ringing of pickaxes and the rhythmic shudder of a drill from the nearby mines. Like your people, the Kanatar are mostly interested in what lies below the surface of a planet; underneath theirs is a rich, frozen metal that is used to construct all their edifices and traded for other supplies they need.
You dig your toes beneath several grainy lumps – too hard to be sand, too soft to be stone – and run one hand over the pale, gliding edge of their ice-ocean. Eons before you, the Lapises sent to this planet actually managed to melt this ocean, free the water, and attempt to use it as a terraforming weapon. Although the crust of the planet gave more easily afterward, nothing could ever be done to soften the mantle. An Aquamarine, you were told, spotted a more malleable planet in the same solar system and suggested redirecting their focus. Blue Diamond agreed and pulled her forces off Kanatar.
You wonder now how much of that story was true.
Beneath your palm, you can sense this ocean's friendly spirit but also its foreignness – as though it speaks in a stew of recognizable yet oddly pronounced sounds, their stresses misplaced. Accents, Dr. Drakken told you they are called.
You clench your eyes shut in anticipation of pain that never comes. It is still near – it surrounds you, vibrating in air speckled with dust rather than clogged with pollution – but it can't seem to find its way to you. You almost wish it would, because you know it is what you should feel for the people you left behind. Every time you think of them, something potent and invisible crashes into you from behind, and you wonder if this is how humans feel when a wave tumbles over them.
Dr. Drakken. He would want to know what the Kanatar are like, you know. That would be a hard question to answer for, just like humans and Gems, Kanatar cannot be summed up easily: their appearances may be more uniform, but their personalities are their fingerprints. So far, though, the overall tone has been one of welcome.
A group of late-rising Kanatar stretch and sit with their legs folded beneath them for their morning nourishment ritual, all five of their limbs expanding and reaching for the light of their distant sun. As it touches them, their skin swells and is soon ridged with a dense coating of what resembles ice, although its texture appears looser, more pliable – like the wiggling food Steven once ate out of a cup with a spoon. There's no way to know for sure unless you touch it, though, and to do so would be horribly impolite. You realize how hard that would be to explain to most Earthlings, but not to Steven. He has a deep, innate respect that readily fills in and connects the gaps of what he cannot understand.
The Kanatar hiss their appreciation to the sun and head for the mines and quarries to join their laboring companions, whose own ice-coats have already thawed just a little from the work. They will continue to melt throughout the day, until by nightfall, the last droplet will run off, and the Kanatar will fall into a faultless, motionless sleep.
A juvenile Kanatar runs by you, connected to the cloud-pet that hovers above him by a sturdy length of string. He lets go of the string momentarily to wave to an older Kanatar whose facial patterns mark her a member of the same class, and by the time he realizes what he has done, the pet has drifted too far above his head for his small fingers to reach. In his wails, you hear Peridot, squealing for you to come back as you abandoned her.
Your wings make the decision before your mind does, springing out and carrying you up to the cloud-pet, which wags its tail and yaps almost as sweetly as Pumpkin. You grab the string and tow the pet back down to the screaming child, curling the string into his hand and murmuring, "Gotta keep your eye on these guys, okay?"
The child cheers and rushes ahead. The older member of his class turns to you and whispers, "Thank you." Her voice is deep, almost as deep as Drakken's, and it spills around you with the echo of places you have never been and places to which you want to return.
"'Welcome," you mumble and walk away. Behind the quarry, you sink down, knees pulled toward you, your skirt a thin barrier between yourself and the cold – the cold that cannot harm you, but continually reminds you that you do not belong here. You think of how Steven shivers when he is cold, how his skin prickles into tiny half-Pebbles, pulling the thin hairs on his body higher. He beamed when you pointed that out and said that was exactly the point, that this strange reaction is meant to raise body hair, which warms humans and other haired creatures – "mammals" was what Steven called them.
The word sounds so brutish, and you are glad that you lost all traces of a loyal Homeworld Gem before you heard it. A being half-Gem and half-mammal would have seemed a perverse combination to anyone who aligned her thoughts by the Diamonds'. It gives him such warmth, though, and in that regard, he has an advantage over your people.
You bury your toes beneath the clumped grains again.
That is where High Emperor of Kanatar finds you. You recognize him immediately – he is meters shorter than any other full-grown Kanatar and the thick, creased antlers that only the royal family have sprout from his head. He was the one with whom you pleaded for asylum upon your arrival. He granted it, and dismissed your vow to find a job with a wave of his hand, saying, "Nonsense! You are our guest. If you wish to work, we will try to find a place for you, but we certainly are not going to assign a refugee to forced labor."
He approaches you with a bow. "Miss Lazuli?" he begins.
Your gem tightens on your back, remembering when Drakken would teasingly call you by the same name. "Yes, sir?" you say.
"I'm sorry to trouble you, but we've received an incoming intergalactic transmission –"
You stare straight ahead, refusing to blink even through the dust, knowing that as soon as your eyelids meet, Blue Diamond will surely be frowning at you from behind them. "Hostile?" you say, and though the question does not waver as it leaves you, your wings are perched inside you, prepared to burst through and carry you away from yet another planet that has been nothing but kind to you.
"There's no indication that it's meant to be, but its encryption is like nothing in our codebooks, and we simply can't decipher it," the Head Emperor says. "I thought that perhaps it might be something the Gems are familiar with."
You stay your wings, rise to your feet, and swing the dust from your hair. "I mean, I'll take it a look at it, but I can't promise I'll recognize it," you say softly.
The Head Emperor bends at the waist again. "Yes, certainly. This way, if you please."
"Where's it coming from?" you ask him.
"Sector 877-B, Planet Three."
You stop midway through your next step. How the Kanatar number their sectors is something of which you have little knowledge, but – planet three?
The thought curls inside you, brushes you, and you think you know, then, what is to be tickled: the slimmest of touches, barely skimming the surface of your skin, making you tingle and ache, making you jerk away from it and beg for more at the same time.
"Planet Three?" you venture. "Is that – Earth?"
"I believe some of our sources do call it 'Earth,' yes," the High Emperor says.
As you make your way toward the Kanatar transmission base, your physical form feels lighter and lighter, as though it is giving up semblance of the solid body it pretends to be. You tell yourself that this could mean anything or even mean nothing at all.
Yet – Kanatar is galaxies away from the Crystal System, and the Kanatar, as a whole, are a peaceable species who have never so much as attempted to colonize another planet. How would anyone on Earth know –
Several other high-ranking Kanatar stand in a knot around a screen about the size of Blue Diamond's mouth. The one with the most verdantly green face speaks up: "Is this her? The Gem?"
On Earth, you would have reminded him that you are right here and do not appreciate being talked about like you are not, but a tide of shyness has passed over you. You duck your head as the High Emperor bobs his. "This is her, all right," he says. "Miss Lazuli, why don't you go on over –"
Whatever else comes next, you never hear it. You step closer to the screen, and what you see is not a space storm, tearing through galaxy after galaxy and claiming everything in its path. It is a rain shower, meant just to sprinkle on a single, specific area.
The message, streaking across the screen in large, sprawling letters, reads, "I LEVO YOU, LASIP."
A gasp leaps from you as the tension holding you breaks.
Relief floods the High Emperor's eyes. "So do you recognize it?"
You nod.
"Then tell us. What is this strange code?"
For the first time since you left home, you smile. "It's called dyslexia."
With his shift at Global Justice over for the day, Dr. Drakken is throwing himself around the house in his search for a Time-Occupying Activity.
His Game Boy demands new batteries before it will let him help the little frog cross the road, and when Drakken rifles through his file cabinet for replacements, there are only two in the "B" for "Batteries" slot, and they're both dead. It should be a temporary death, given that they're both rechargeables. But the recharger – the one where the batteries hook in and sit under the awning like Mother and her friends, waiting for their hair to dry at the salons – is missing from its slot, and Drakken has no idea where it could be, and so they might as well be fossils.
Drakken runs back to his room and flings open his closet to see if he needs to do laundry. Nope, his lab coats are lined up, standing ready for duty in his closet. The washing machine itself is recovering nicely from that purple stain he accidentally blasted onto it during last week's experimental pairing of old clay and laundry detergent. Turns out they're the most explosive couple since Nicky-Nick and Brittina.
His windows he scrubbed clean as soon as he got home, the dimming sunset-light forgiving of Drakken's absentminded strokes, which tend to leave a streak or two behind. His dishwasher's all loaded, and its churning, creaking, grumbling sounds mirror what's inside Drakken entirely too well for him to relax – and ohhhh, just saying the word mirror stings! His lawn – ooh, Drakken just can't get over the fact that he has a lawn now! – is clear of winter's leftover leaves, thanks to the leaf-sucker of Drakken's own invention. Much less selfish than a leaf-blower, which only shifts the problem onto someone else. He had to take the vacuum cleaner apart to make use of its sucker-tube. Drakken supposes he could reassemble it and give the stairs a once-over, but the sound frightens Commodore Puddles, and there's enough fright in the world as it is.
Maybe he needs to watch something, then, something that always sends the message that there's nothing to fear, because the good guys – a category that Drakken now falls into – will be there to save the day.
Yes! A brilliant idea – if I do say so myself, Drakken adds, remembering his newfound modesty. He kneels beside the DVD player he bought at a garage sale last fall and tugs open the avant-garde drawer beneath it furnished with his sparse collection of DVDs, which rattle as the drawer skids to a gleeful halt. Drakken has just wrapped his fingers around the complete Scooby-Doo series when a steamroller of anguish flattens him – anguish he almost forgot about, the way one can forget about the paper cut on one's ring finger until one decides to use hand sanitizer, and then the world dissolves into black pinpricks.
It's not black spots that take over Drakken's world now, though. What he sees through the burning sensation are glimpses of Lapis, the day he introduced her to the ghost-busting Great Dane – her eyes squinted doubtfully toward the screen, her mouth in its little figuring-something-out O, her laughter spilling over only once, when Shaggy's hair is blond for one frame. That was also the day he came down with that twenty-four-hour stomach bug, and Lapis looked after him…
He remembers it as well as any feverish genius can, Lapis as light and careful in her concern as Mother is overbearing and soggy in hers. Lapis singing to him – Drakken can't recall the song, only the lilting melody, turned burnished or golden or something else really pretty by its time in her vocal cords. Her touch on his forehead, cool against his hot-wax skin. The feel of her tiny, firm hands on his stomach as she spoke to the water within in it, mollifying it, persuading it to remain where it was instead of coming back up.
All of it, every single detail of it, rolls around inside Drakken, unsteadying him and draining his strength until he feels like he's just thrown up again. Except without the relief. Just dizziness.
With streaky-window vision, Drakken slaps the drawer back in place and rocks backward, letting himself land on his fanny. He reaches up and grips his hair-spikies, breathing in gasps. If someone stuck a thermometer in his mouth now, he doubts there would be any red in it at all – that's how cold he's abruptly grown.
Thermometer. Measurement.
Of course! Drakken thinks as he gropes behind him for the sofa and finds only carpet instead. I can do an experiment!
Nothing as large or grandiose as what left the washing machine purple-stained. Just a nice, simple experiment he's done a thousand times before, reassurance that the whole universe has not unraveled, that air still has mass and takes up space. Let's see, all he'll need are a few balloons and a scale – a grocery-weighing scale, not the scale Drakken weighs himself on. Or, more accurately, doesn't weigh himself on anymore, because that number keeps getting smaller and more fragile, and that's something his self-esteem doesn't need.
Insecurities are like a drug to his self-esteem. A dosage transforms it into its own alter ego. Emphasis on ego, because that's exactly what it becomes – a big, bulky, bloated thing, hungry and empty, parading through his chest, elbowing away his decency. It lies inside him still – dusty and dormant, to be sure, but still there, and the thought of tickling it awake scares Drakken even more than the thought of having his blood drawn.
So, yes, science is just what he needs right now. Common sense may say that air doesn't have mass or take up space, but science will prove that wrong. Science is the pacifier to his self-esteem, the sort that slips into its mouth and shuts it up with a sigh.
Let's see. Balloons…
Drakken is fumbling in the file cabinet – under "P" for "party," because he would have seen them in the "B" section earlier when he hunted for batteries – when the phone rings, a scream in the too-quiet house. Drakken's limbs rev forward and knock him against the wall so hard he's surprised he doesn't damage its paint job the color of forget-me-nots. Judging by the pitter-patter of pain in his cheekbone, he'll soon have a bruise to match.
Groaning, Drakken peels himself off said paint job and lurches down the hallway, but by the time he reaches his kitchen extension, he's skipping again. It could be all kinds of people with all kinds of good news. Shego calling for their nightly chat. His accountant congratulating him for the ever-accumulating amount of black in his books. Humans Magazine desperate for an interview.
(Hey – it could happen!)
Drakken retrieves the phone and winds its cord casually around his pinkie finger. "Hello, this is Dr. Drakken speaking," he says, quite cheerily.
"Lipsky? Oh, sorry, I mean, Dr. Drakken?" Professor Ramesh's instantly-recognizable voice sing-songs through the phone, sounding as always on the verge of a laugh. That laugh that came spurting out of him while nineteen-year-old Drew Lipsky was being knotted up like a cheap tie by his own robotic date…
Drakken clamps his jaw down on the memory as hard as he can, tries to force civility through the clench. "Ah, yes, Ramesh. How good to hear from you," he says. Okay, and "Ngggh!" as well. But it's better than Why on earth are you calling me, foul betrayer? or something.
"I am so glad I caught you, Dr. Drakken," Ramesh says. "Do you remember last week when you came down to the space center to send a note to your girl?"
Your girl. It's almost musical, the way Ramesh chants it. Sacred. Sweat practically shrink-wraps his glove to his palm.
Drakken nods and quickly covers it by supplementing with, "Of course. How could I forget?"
"Yes, well, we have received a transmission from that same galactic quadrant where your message went."
Drakken's experiment is instantly forgotten. He doesn't need it now, anyway, because he can tell air has mass, the way it's pressed in on him from all sides, squeezing him skinnier than ever. The world is zipping by, fast-forward, and his heartbeat has to scramble to keep up, and oxygen really shouldn't have this great an atomic weight. "Is it – is it from her?" he booms. (All right, squawks.)
"It is not signed. I suppose you will have to come in and take a look for yourself." Ramesh chuckles, maybe the first grown-up version of his laugh Drakken has ever heard.
"I'll be right there!" Drakken blurts, or maybe he just thinks it before slam-dunking the phone back into its cradle and rushing out the front door with one arm flailing out of a jacket sleeve. He's all the way to the end of the driveway before it occurs to him that he's forgotten the hovercraft, and he has to open the garage door, dance from foot to foot as it lifts, and buckle himself into the driver's seat.
He's not sure he remembered to close the garage door behind him…
On the flight down there, Drakken keeps his hands bearing down on the steering mechanism at all times, and he can still see his elbows quivering off to the sides. A vine he never felt grow hugs the side of his neck, pressing its pink flower to his chin to comfort him. The sunset-sky has turned to a deep, spunky shade of blue that makes him think of Lapis's bangs dangling into her eyes as she dips her head in that shy way of hers…
She is on Kanatar, she told him. Kanatar, which he knows nothing about, other than that it's too cold to make Gems there and it would sound wonderful with his name – Drakkanatar! – if he were still into conquering planets.
That he finds his way to the Middleton Space Center at all is something for Ripley's Believe it or Not.
Of course, Drakken thinks as he bounds up the steps one at a time (would be two, but his legs are too short), Shego would say that sending and receiving transmissions from a girlfriend a galaxy or two away would be an entry in and of itself. Actually, knowing Shego, she would probably say that him having a girlfriend at all would qualify. He wishes she were here now, to say something sarcastic and keep his nervy body on the ground. One wrong move on anyone's part, and Drakken knows he will smash through the ceiling again, jet packs or no.
Ramesh opens the door for Drakken and leads him into a room strung on all sides with computer monitors and touch screens. Drakken can feel the pull of the distraction they offer from his knocking knees, from his rodent-rambunctious energy. Who needs caffeine when you have what feels for all the world like a herd of naked mole rats frolicking in your gut?
Drakken brushes his finger over one terminal, earning himself a glare from its owner. Before he can glare back, Ramesh pops up out of nowhere, the trick of a video-game enemy, and starts to reach for Drakken's hand. The look on Drakken's face – undoubtedly a pure rainbow of hope speckled with first-date nausea and flashing with warning lights – must stop him, because he backs up a step and wafts his arm over to yet another screen in the back.
As he walks toward it, Drakken can't help but think it deserves to be bigger.
The men circling the screen appear to recognize Drakken from the news, because respect flickers into their eyes when they see him, and of their own volition, too! The washed-out, obedient, mild-controlled look is such a husk in comparison that Drakken shudders inside to remember it. His gratitude begs to be voiced, but it flees from his thoughts as soon as he catches sight of the goldenrod, square-cut letters straight out of Star Wars, scrolling upward on the screen as if they are being pulled in with a tractor beam.
"Is that – is that – is that –?" There are other words in the English language, but Drakken cannot for the life him guess what they might be.
One of the men jerks his head toward the screen. "See for yourself."
Drakken nods and leans in. His lips shape the words as they float by, finding their contours and cuddling them in, almost as close and tight as he cuddled the Hydro-Pollinator the night he figured out it was much more suited to doing good than evil. And so was he.
The message reads:
Space sucks! It is so boring! I should have brought a book! The Kanatar are really nice, but they don't know what a meepmorp is. I tried to explain it to them, and they looked at me like I was one of those species with ten heads, you know? Also, I think I left Plastic Lazuli Hope behind in the barn. You should probably give her to Peridot so she won't drive you too crazy. I'm sure she's being even more obnoxious than usual. Ugh. I can't even imagine.
P.S. I love you too. Forever and ever.
Drakken's lips don't move anymore. They are wet and salty and upturned.