~And we are back! :D Thanks to all my loyal readers. You guys are the best! 3
First time trying to write from Steven's perspective. Also first time really doing anything with Bismuth. It's going to be a little (maybe a lot) different from how the show brought her back, but I tried really hard to be fair to both sides of her. I've got plans for her in the next couple chappies too, if this one seems to lean too heavily in one direction.
Also going to give a shoutout to the new SU graphic novel Pining Hearts Play. Basically sixty pages of everyone loving on Lapis. How refreshing. :D~
Steven Universe can't help giggling as he pops open another fold-up chair and positions it on the sand to complete the row.
They are about to make history. The world's first fusion-wedding!
He's already sent out invitations to absolutely everyone in Beach City – from Not-Mayor-Anymore Dewey to the Fryman family to Sadie and the band – and mailed another addressed to Dr. Drakken in a Midwestern town called Middleton. It's kinda pinching at Steven's heart that Lapis won't be able to make it to the wedding, so having her boyfriend here will be the next best thing.
Steven plunks down into the chair to make sure it'll hold – they came from the Big Donut's back storeroom, where the "throw out anything that gets stale" motto doesn't apply. Last time he peeked into the house, Pearl's eyes were tear-shiny as she mixed together flour and eggs and other food that she ordinarily won't even poke at with her spear. Amethyst has been arranging flowers for the past hour or so. She can concentrate a lot better now than she could when Steven first met her, and he's proud of her.
Peridot was just pretty much wandering from room to room, gawking at everything from behind her visor, her elbow crooked around Plastic Lazuli Hope, who she's barely let go of ever since Drakken brought her over last month, saying Lapis had asked Peridot to look after her. The bear's name is still amazing, and she's almost as big as Peridot herself. Sometimes Steven will catch Peridot running her fingers over the stitched-in wings and squeaking out a sigh until Amethyst has to jump in front of her and hold periwinkle blossoms over her head like antlers to make her laugh.
Ruby and Sapphire are up on the stage now, the way they've been for most of the day, like they're afraid it'll suddenly not be real if they don't keep track of it. Suddenly Ruby looks up from tickling Sapphire under the chin and gazes in Steven's direction, and Sapphire looks with her, Steven guesses. He can't glimpse Sapphire's one eye under her bangs, but he's sure it's seeing the same thing as Ruby's two as they scan over all the empty seats:
Pearl. Of course, Amethyst and Peridot will be there, and they're special to Ruby and Sapphire, too, but only Pearl is an original member of the Crystal Gems. Though Steven wonders if he should include himself in that, maybe, because in some weird foggy way, he used to be Rose Quartz.
Who used to be Pink Diamond.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Saffy?" Ruby asks in her husky whisper.
Sapphire's hands come out of their usual in-charge clasp in front of her and pluck at the sides of her skirt. "So many of our friends aren't going to be here to see this," she breathes back.
"Yeah." Ruby sniffles, and then immediately tosses her head back, like she's making sure no one saw that. Steven did, but he decides to pretend he didn't. "Maybe – do you think we could bring their bubbles up? And that way they could sort of be –"
Sapphire's hand flutters like a moth to Ruby's wrist. "No. It's too dangerous. What if the bubbles popped?"
Ruby nods. "Yeah. I guess you're right."
Steven glances down at his sandals. There's so many Crystal Gems who he only knows as the puffer-fish on the beach, or the invisible monster on the island, or the really long arm that fell out of the bubble in the Temple. Unless he asks, he'll never know their real names or their stories. And asking will make Pearl cry, and Steven's not sure either one of them has totally recovered from Steven climbing into deeper and deeper layers inside Pearl's gem until he found her cell phone and watched the Diamond who'd always been the villain in Earth's story transform into…his mom. It makes the hole left behind by people like Lapis and Lars feel even bigger.
Sapphire's usually right, and she is this time, too – it's too dangerous to bring the Corruptions up from the boiler room. They'd sorta be the ultimate party crashers.
Still, there's one bubbled Crystal Gem who isn't a Corruption. One bubbled Crystal Gem who's able to remember Ruby and Sapphire. One bubbled Crystal Gem who, if the worst happened, could possibly still be reasoned with…he thinks?
Steven puts a hand to his gemstone. It sizzled and burned like a sparkler when he found out he was holding a Diamond and not a Quartz like he always thought, when he wondered how much of anything about Mom was ever real. Right now, though, it's the only place on him that isn't thudding or churning or shrieking at the thought of what he's about to do.
Stopping to pant on the side porch, Steven slides one foot in front of the other, creaks the door open, and pokes his head into his house. He's never been very good at sneaking, and even though this is surprise-party sneaking and not disobeying-sneaking, he still doesn't want anyone to catch on.
But phew! Pearl is still mixing up the cake, frowning a bit as she slides her finger down a cookbook page. Amethyst and Peridot sit at the island next to her. Their job is to sort out the plastic silverware, though Peridot's really just scowling at it because she can't move it with her mind and Amethyst is chewing on a corner of the cardboard box it came out of.
Steven walks around the warp pad and to the huge door that separates his house from the Temple rooms. He lifts his shirt, and the door reads his gem and slides open. It's only his second trip to the Boiler Room without Garnet or somebody with him, and even though he tries to walk softly, his feet are elephant-clompy anyway. Their pattern on the floor matches the rhythm in his ears, and it seems to beat out her name:
Bis-muth. Bis-muth. Bis-muth.
It isn't hard to find her innie Gem in the tangle of bubbles. It looks the same as it did when it was bubbled inside Lion, when it clattered to the floor of the forge after her big body disappeared…
Steven stands on tiptoe to reach it, sweat beading on his forehead in the tight heat of the Boiler Room. The bubble falls into his hands, and Steven makes a real effort to hold it gently – he's stronger than he was the last time he collected a Gem from this room.
With Bismuth leading the way, Steven walks back to the Temple door.
He does another head-poke to make sure everyone's still busy. It looks like it – Pearl frowning at the ingredients on the back of a frosting tin, Peridot tapping at her tablet screen so that her music comes flowing out. It isn't as heavy and sad as the stuff she listened to when Lapis first left. In fact, some of it has a hopeful tingle to it.
Steven speed-walks through the kitchen as fast as he can and bumps open the screen door. Ruby and Sapphire sit on the porch, watching the sunset, and even though they're basically too wrapped up in it and in each other to pay much attention to him, Steven still thrusts the bubble behind his back and walks backward.
Please, don't use your Future Vision, Sapphire. He crosses his toes 'cause his hands are busy and he keeps them crossed until he's out of their sight.
Good. Now there's a spot right behind the refreshment table where the bubble can float. To the audience, it'll be hidden behind the wedding cake, but Ruby and Sapphire will be able to see it from their angle on the stage.
Only a few more steps to go.
Steven glances up at the refreshment table to confirm that. And that's all the time he needs for his crossed toes to hit a clump of beach grass. He doesn't stumble as much as he used to, but it's enough, 'cause the bubble falls out of his hands and lightly bounces to the ground.
The bubble's protection disappears, and after a flash of light, Bismuth takes its place. "Rose!" she cries as soon as she sees him.
Steven immediately pulls out his shield and peers through the pinkness, 'cause right there, in that moment, he's sure he's looking at Jasper.
Just for a moment, though. Then Bismuth's eyes get confused, and she blinks them a bunch of times. "Or…no…Steven? It's 'Steven,' isn't it?" she says.
Steven's "Yeah" scrapes his dry throat on his way up. Bismuth's thick-muscle arms are dangling loosely at her sides. They look like the arms that gleefully spiked a volleyball on this exact beach, not the arms that shoved him toward a lava pool.
Two, three steps backward, and he's able to talk again. "Hey, Bismuth," he says. "Long time, no see?"
Bismuth doesn't answer. Steven gives her a couple seconds to catch up. Last thing she knew, she was standing in the forge with Mom's sword through her. That would explain how almost-scared her eyes are as they dart around the beach like she's never been here before.
"What…what happened?" Bismuth finally says. There's a sharp edge to her voice but it isn't angry. Neither is her face. How she stands, her neck down and her feet digging into the sand, reminds Steven of the tricky fox who was just tricked himself in the animal book Dad used to read him when he was little.
Humbled. Steven can see the word on the page even as he stares at Bismuth.
"Well…it's Ruby and Sapphire, see," he says. "They're getting married…"
Bismuth's eyebrows jump up. "They're getting what?"
"Married."
"What's a married?"
"It's a verb, actually," Steven tells her. "Marrying is something humans do to show they love each other and they want to spend the rest of their lives together if they can."
Bismuth just nods as if that makes perfect sense. "But…where do I come in?"
Steven peeks over the top of his shield. "Well, they were sad that most of their old friends couldn't come, because they're bubbled –"
"What?" Bismuth cries. "Why are the rest of the Crystal Gems bubbled? Did they fight with Rose, too?"
Back behind the shield Steven goes. "No, no, it's nothing like that! They got Corrupted! See, the Diamonds realized they couldn't win the war, so they –"
Bismuth cuts him off. "Iron sulfate!" she says, as though those are swear words. "Isn't that just like the Diamonds?"
She sounds bitter again, and Steven cringes. "Ruby wanted to bring the bubbled Gems up to watch," he blurts out, "but Sapphire said it was too dangerous, 'cause what if they got out? But then I thought it would be okay if I brought your bubble up, since you're not a monster –" he thinks he sees the corners of Bismuth's mouth tip up a little at that – "and I was gonna put you over there by that table, but I stopped looking where I was going, and I tripped and I dropped you…so here we are."
"Here we are," Bismuth repeats. Her hands aren't hammers. They aren't even fists. "So…am I staying?"
Steven hears the question mark break at the end, and he nods. Well, I mean, now that she's already here and not trying to kill me, she might as well. At least for the wedding.
"Do you promise to behave, though?" he asks her, lowering the shield a few inches.
Bismuth's eyes well up. "Are you kiddin' me?" she says. "I love these two!"
Steven takes a deep breath and feels the shield slide back into the place Mom gave him to hold it. Part of him but not. The shield's round rim has a relief-tickle to it, and it has just slipped back in when Amethyst comes running down the beach toward him, calling, "Yo, Steven! I ran out of flowers and…"
Amethyst screeches to a halt, her boots skidding, tossing sand in all directions. She takes one hard look at Bismuth and throws her head back to yell, "Pearl! You gotta come see this!"
The anxious sound knots Steven's stomach. It takes a lot to scare Amethyst. That must be what Pearl's thinking, too, because she appears on the porch steps and makes it a few steps down the beach before she understands. The sight of Bismuth may have stopped Amethyst in her tracks, but it seems to speed up Pearl's long white legs even more, because the next thing Steven knows she is by his side.
Pearl tries to dazzle Bismuth by smiling, but it's as flat as bad root beer. "Bismuth!" she says. "How…how…how…unexpected!"
There's usually at least a hint of song when Pearl talks, but this time there isn't. The arms she slides around Bismuth's neck don't have their usual smooth glide, either. They are stiff and alert as she gracefully and on-purpose situates her body between Steven's and Bismuth's.
Amethyst isn't as subtle. She grabs Steven's wrist, yanks him to her side, and holds onto him tight. "What the actual heck, Steven?" she hisses.
"I'm sorry!" Steven says, not sure which of them he's apologizing to. "I was just going to bring her bubble up as a surprise for Ruby and Sapphire, but then it popped, and she's here now and I didn't want to poof her again because she hasn't even done anything this time and I know the two of them wanted the rest of their friends to be here – can she stay?"
Pearl levels a watery glare at Bismuth. "I suppose," she says, voice as stiff as her arms. "Only if it's okay with Ruby and Sapphire."
"Swell," Amethyst says. There's a layer of ice on her grunt that Steven hasn't heard since they faced Jasper so long ago. Bismuth was never her war buddy, and he guesses volleyball partner doesn't stack up well next to the bit about her trying to kill Steven.
Ruby and Sapphire both gawk at Bismuth with the same teary, torn faces Steven saw on Pearl. Ruby puts out her hand as if to give Bismuth a friendly slug, and then she retracts it and dances to the side a little. Sapphire hovers about four inches off the ground and repeatedly pulls her fingers together and then pushes them apart.
"It's up to you guys," Bismuth says, kicking at the sand. "Can I stay or not?"
Sapphire does that thing where she seems to suck her whole tiny self in behind her bangs. Future Vision!
Bismuth's jaw tightens, and so does Steven's chest. He can't imagine how it would feel to know that one of your best friends has to consult her Future Vision to make sure you aren't gonna hurt her.
"Yes," Sapphire says coolly. She says everything coolly, so it isn't much of a clue.
Ruby gives a nervous giggle.
Bismuth's face seems to relax, but it doesn't exactly brighten any. This isn't the reunion she would've picked if she had a choice.
Except that she did have choices, lots of them, and she made ones that make this reunion what it is now. Steven can't escape from the thought, even though he feels bad for her. He wishes he had Future Vision, too, 'cause he can't imagine where they'll go from here. There'll be time to work that out after the wedding, though.
In the meantime, it looks like the world's first fusion-wedding might have one more bridesmaid.
Dr. Drakken pries open his mailbox and drags its contents out. He's sifting through the usual mishmash of bills and advertisements when a smaller, lighter envelope falls into his hands. It's addressed to him – by hand, not typed (although, if one wants to get technical, typing is done by hand, too).
The rounded, jovial letters look so friendly that Drakken feels his ponytail perking as he tears through the sticky-seal. Out drifts a sturdy stock-paper whose corners have clearly been snipped with craft scissors all around a delightful if somewhat perplexing drawing of a very-short red person holding hands with an equally-growth-stunted blue person.
"You are cordially invited to the fusion-wedding of Ruby and Sapphire," the text reads, in neat Sharpie, barely smudged – Drakken is impressed. He's never heard of a fusion-wedding before, but the use of the word fusion, not to mention the use of the names Ruby and Sapphire, must mean Steven is behind this somehow.
Sure enough, the address printed at the bottom of the invitation directs him to Beach City.
Drakken rotates the paper in his hands. A wedding. That sounds like a happy event, a Big-Happy. He hasn't had too many of those in his life as of late – although his life has plenty of Little Happies, crumbs he scavenges like a starving little mouse. A starving little mouse who just received an offer of gourmet pet food for the rest of its life.
The date is set for this weekend, when he is free. Very, very free – had to cancel his bimonthly bowling tournament with the henchmen because his back has been giving him fits all week – and Drakken would rather not be alone in an empty house with himself and his thoughts, despite the fact that they are much better company than they used to be. Most of the time, he feels fine but flammable. One carelessly placed flame, however small, may incite him.
He has decided that he is going before he's even halfway back up his driveway.
Of course, Drakken has no idea what to wear to a fusion-wedding. Is such an event as formal as a human wedding? More? Less? Drakken decides to go with "less," because the only tuxedo he owns is the one he wore to his high school graduation, and it's no longer comfortable, the seams biting into his shoulders.
So on the day of the wedding, Drakken takes a shower, luxuriating in the warm water beating down on his skin, dresses in a crisp lab coat untouched by anything from his pantry or his chemistry set, gives his ever-shaggier hair the first true brushing it's had in practically forever, and even sticks a blue bow tie into his pocket in case it turns out to be needed. Hopefully it won't. Every time he puts it on, it chokes his neck in a way that makes him want to rip off his dog's collar and apologize for ever putting it on him in the first place.
Spring has really, fully arrived at last, Drakken observes on the hovercraft ride over. Sunset isn't until seven p.m., the air breeze gentler and smelling of green things. It's his first spring as a good guy, the first where he won't have to hide his appreciation of the sunshine and flowers and baby animals that were not supposed to appeal to a supervillain. Oh, he tried to disdain them and it often worked – as long as he didn't get too close to them, because then they rubbed their happiness off on him.
By the time the hovercraft touches down on the beach, everything is warm inside Drakken, and his legs are tingling with excitement. He swings them over the side of the hovercraft and teeters for an anxious minute, arms windmilling, on sand he was expecting to be firmer – spring has loosened it, too.
No sooner has he resumed command of his balance than it is knocked away again by a tiny blur that throws itself at him. It could pass for a large banana on its way to yummy ripeness, but of course it's not. Of course it's Peridot.
She grabs his knees and squeezes them tight. "Drakken!" she cries. "Drakken, Drakken, Drakken, Drakken! It's you, it's you!"
Wow. With a greeting like that, who needs world domination, am I right?
It's impossible not to chuckle, impossible not to reply, "How are you, Peridot?"
Peridot interprets that question differently than most people in his life do. He feels her pull herself straight, still pressed against him, and she says, "I have been taking care of Plastic Lazuli Hope just as you requested. Does she look well-cared-for?" She shoves the bear close to him.
"Yes, of course she does," Drakken says, though in reality he only gives the bear a peripheral glance – the resemblance is just too painful. But he can't help reaching out and running his hand over the bear's wings, rendered by his mother's sensitive stitching that has no equal. He has to stop and swallow away a lump the size of a volleyball, press the backs of his hands to his eyes. "Sorry. It's hard."
"It is hard," Peridot says solemnly. "But Steven said today's supposed to be a happy day, so we can be happy! I'm in the wedding, you know!"
She takes a step backward, and for the first time Drakken notices that her usual pinpoint-precise uniform has been exchanged for a sunshiny-yellow little sleeveless dress with a hem of frilly rack that bounces in place above a pair of pink shoes that appear to have been stolen off a lawn gnome. It launches a chemical conversion, melting the hard sadness in his chest into something runny and far easier to lug around, a heterogeneous mixture of bitter and sweet.
"I am the girl of flowers," Peridot reports. "Do you like my dress?"
"Yes," Drakken says without hesitation, and he feels something lively spark behind his eyes. "Does it twirl?"
Peridot nods.
"Twirl for me," Drakken says, pointing a finger toward her and spinning it.
And so Peridot does, twisting the sand beneath her little pink gnome-shoes. The wind catches her skirt and puffs it up to twice its size and tosses it around, and it carries her giggle straight back to him. The whole thing will be freeze-framed in his mind, Drakken decides, as a reminder that life can still be very, very good.
"Very nice," Drakken says, and he emphasizes his words with the appropriate amount of clapping.
Peridot beams up at him. Her hands make his feel huge in comparison as they slip into his and she drags him across the beach to Steven's house and up the steps to the wide wood porch. Steven stands there, talking with a pair of miniature people, one red, one blue – an acid and a base on the litmus test.
Steven wastes no time in wrapping his arms around Drakken's waist. "Hi, Drakken! Glad you could make it!" he says.
Drakken bends down and ruffles the kid's curls – something he has never done for a child at any point in his life. But Steven has a way of drawing it out, just like how the sunshine draws out the chlorophyll in plants, the ones around Drakken and the ones inside him. "Glad to be invited," he says.
"How lovely to see you again, Dr. Drakken," the blue person behind Steven says.
"Thank you sooooooo much for coming!" adds the red one.
Drakken blinks over Steven's head at these people he doesn't know who apparently know him. "Umm…who are you guys?" he says, hoping too late that isn't too rude to ask.
The red person points at the blue person. "She's Sapphire."
The blue person returns the favor. "She's Ruby."
"Oh." Drakken blinks for a moment, taking them in. Ruby wears a white bridal gown, and the red ribbon tied around her short, dark, square-cut hair – wait, he knows that hair – sports a blossom not unlike one he might produce. Sapphire has a gentlemen's tuxedo buttoned up nearly all the way to her full lips – wait, he knows those lips. Side by side, the two of them look like a pair of tiny wedding-cake toppers.
Of course! Of course.
Drakken shoots his hand up as if he is in school. "When you guys are together – do you make Garnet?" he guesses.
There are nods all around, and Drakken lets himself grin. Yes! He has just mastered the genetics of Gem fusion, if there is such a thing – and, if there is, Drakken has just decided it should be called Gemnetics. Not bad for a day's work.
"I will get us 'sodas,'" Peridot announces, and disappears inside.
Steven, too, is decked out in a tux, the white of it already soaking through with his glee. His eyes are soft as can be when he asks, "So…are you doing okay, Drakken?"
"I've been good," Drakken says, and then he frowns for a moment. "Well, in terms of moral alignment, anyway, and that's huge progress for me!"
That gets a smile and a cheer from Steven. Drakken can almost feel Shego's elbow driving pointedly into his side, telling him there is something mannerly to be done and he is not doing it. Usually that means he's used his sleeve for a napkin or a tissue, and since he hasn't done that, Drakken has to take a few seconds to scroll through a list of everything from sneezing into your elbow to not reaching across the table to get a dish before it finally lands on reciprocation.
"Have you been doing good, Steven?" Drakken asks politely. "Feeling good, I mean. You're always a high-quality person…"
He trails off as Steven utters a deep, puffy sigh. "Yeah. Mostly pretty good. I – uh – I learned some things that might make it a whole lot better or a whole lot worse."
This is such a logistical anomaly – not impossible but rare – that Drakken leans in and he's nearly certain his ears jut even farther forward. "What's that? Do tell! . . . .If you want to," he tacks on.
"Well…" Steven looks at the sky, then back at Drakken. "Did Lapis tell you that everyone thought my mom shattered Pink Diamond?"
Drakken nods, his neck itchy and uncomfortable even without the bow tie. He is so far out of his area of expertise here – he has no idea how a mother you never met feels inside your heart, what it would be like to know her only as photos on a hard drive saved by the laptop's previous owner. And to know that mother destroyed someone long before there was a you? "Alien" doesn't seem alien enough to describe it.
"Uh-huh. So it turned out…my mom was Pink Diamond," Steven says.
Drakken's thoughts immediately scatter in all directions. "Wait. She shattered herself?!" He catches himself before he can also blurt, "How could she even do that?"
"No." Steven shakes his head. "She faked her shattering."
"So she pretended to shatter herself?" Drakken asks.
"No, she got somebody else to pretend to shatter her."
"Then how could they blame your mother if they saw somebody else do it?" Drakken says. He is falling further and further behind with every syllable.
"Because that someone looked like her –"
"But she was already there!" Drakken nearly shouts this last part.
"Rose Quartz and Pink Diamond looked different, though. Because of shapeshifting. Rose Quartz was like her secret identity." Steven sighs again. Its brittle edges don't hold any impatience, only weariness. "Do you read Spider-Man comics?"
Drakken feels his face spring to life. "Boy, do I ever read Spider-Man comics!" Okay, now he is shouting – no "nearly" about it.
"Have you read the one where Peter Parker has to prove he isn't Spider-Man, so he gets somebody else to dress up in the Spider-Man costume so Spider-Man and Peter Parker can be in two different places?"
"I love that one!" Drakken says, and the situation begins to re-sort itself in his brain. "So – you're saying?"
"Pink Diamond had somebody else shapeshift into Rose Quartz," Steven confirms, "and pretend to shatter her."
"Ohhhhh." Drakken taps his temple, the sudden clarity beneath it as comforting as a dip in a hot tub. "Oh, it's all so clear now!"
At least to him.
Ruby and Sapphire exchange the sort of shrugs that can take the place of talking, if you're close enough to the person.
"That's good, though, isn't it?" Drakken ventures. "It means your mom didn't shatter anyone!"
"Yeah," Steven says, "but it also means she lied to almost everybody she ever knew." A third sigh. "Including my dad."
Drakken flinches right down to his tailbone.
"I mean, he knew she'd had a whole life she wasn't telling him about, but still," Steven continues. "And it means I know even less about her than I thought I did."
Drakken rubs the goose bumps prickling his scalp. In the little TV in his heart, he can see Steven chasing down a wispy glimpse of his mother the way scientists pursue absolute zero – always a degree or two beyond their reach.
And then before too much else can happen, the world ends.
No, not really. Not right away, either. It begins with Amethyst squeaking open the screen door and saying, "Hey, what up, Drakken?" and giving him a high-five. The sturdy smack of her palm against his stings, but it's actually less painful than a soft brush would be, because that would remind him too much of Lapis.
The door creaks on its hinges one more time, and out comes Pearl. And with her – and with her –
Rainbow dreadlocks. Broad shoulders. Meaty hands that can tear straight through a smaller Gem's gut.
The whole porch begins to shake beneath Drakken, and he grips the railing with hot, quavering hands.
Standing next to Pearl is his least favorite element on the whole periodic table. And she sure as heck isn't neutralizing his stomach acid the way she's supposed to!
The match is tossed, and Drakken bursts into flame. Even though the wood is still atilt, Drakken runs across it, his fist shaking, his mind needing a minute to catch up to his body.
"You!" he bellows.
Inside of him, Drakken's flowers hiss, a sound they have never made before – a weary, steam-filled type of hiss, like a train coasting to a stop. It's impossible to discern if any have sprouted or not, considering all of his skin is essentially on fire at the moment.
Bismuth laughs. It's nothing maniacal, nothing even close to maniacal. "Is this how he greets everybody, or is it just me?"
Amethyst gives her shoulders a cold hike that Drakken wants to thank her for. "So far, it's just been you," she says.
Mass confusion settles over the whole group – well, actually, does whatever the opposite of "settle" is, threatening to crush them all. Drakken will not let it. "You poofed my girlfriend!" he cries.
He might as well have fired a doom ray into the crowd. No – to be honest – very few of his machines have garnered this sort of attention, the sort he was always aiming for.
Steven takes a step backward, stricken as white as his fancy-suit cuffs. Ruby's eyes are horrified, and what Drakken can see of Sapphire's face under her curvy, frost-blue bangs is a composition of forced stoicism. Amethyst packs her hands into fists. But what slugs Drakken square in the gut is the sight of Pearl – her long, thin back pressed against the house, her eyes folded shut, fingers meeting like steeples over her mouth, the look of someone who has put all the pieces of the puzzle together only to have it create a picture of dead fish bobbing to the surface of a polluted lake.
Or something like that.
The only expression that doesn't radically transform is Bismuth's own. It scrunches a little into something kind and casual, contradicting and contaminating what Drakken knows for a fact to be true! "Gee, I'm sure sorry about that," she says. "But there was a war on, and we did what we had to do." She pauses, sweeps another glance across Drakken. "I can't picture you with a Quartz."
With every second that passes, fury poison-darts a new part of Drakken's body. Bismuth thinks she's aware of what this is all about, and she's wrong, wrong, wrong. "She isn't a Quartz!" Drakken says, and he doesn't check himself this time. He opens up and lets the harsh thunder he perfected early in his supervillain career boil over, stinging him on his way out, and that's not fair, because it should be stinging her!
Bismuth frowns. "Now, I know I never poofed one of ours."
"She wasn't a soldier at all!" Drakken can feel every letter of every word throbbing in his throat, side-by-side with his heartbeat. "She's Lapis Lazuli!" He can't bring himself to put a tag like "a" in front of his girlfriend's name, not now, not after everything.
Now Bismuth's face transforms, the kindly stranger puzzling over him abducted and replaced with an evil clone of herself. What overtakes her face reminds Drakken, strangely, of a screwdriver – one end blunt, the other sharp. Both cold. Both hard. Both potentially lethal.
Both so unwarranted at the mention of his tentative, soft-spoken, soul-bruised girlfriend. The girlfriend he hasn't seen since her fear got the better of her and spirited her to Kanatar.
And that fear might not have been so huge, so overwhelming, if it weren't for Bismuth and what she did.
Drakken's hands grope blindly in front of him, and they are villain's hands again, hot and impulsive, scrambling for a button to push that will open the floor and dump this awful, awful person to his sharks. Because piranhas are too good for her!
The thought looms in Drakken's brain, familiar and terrifying, like the villain in a horror-movie franchise that really should be gone by the sixth installment. He finds enough of the person who saved the world inside him to bring those hands to his neck and clamp down, holding his flowers back from wreaking havoc once they sense his strife. He made a vow to the world, and he is not going to break it!
No matter how much I want to…
Bismuth leans back and tilts her head at him, the dreadlocks rustling. Her smoldering, sad eyes seem out of place in the midst of a portrait of hate. "You do know she's manipulating you, right?" she says.
If she were speaking in tongues, she couldn't have said something more nonsensical.
The understanding mentally trickles over Drakken, slow as Chinese water torture, and soon he is mentally thrashing and writhing at restraints that aren't really there, but he can still feel them. "GGGKKNG! What?" he booms.
Bismuth backs up, just the way a teacher would to dodge a spitball hurled her way. It shouldn't rake nine-inch claws across Drakken's pride anymore, but it still does. "I'm sorry." Her voice flinches, still so bizarrely kind. "I can tell you really care about her. But you've gotta understand – someone like that will do anything to get what she wants."
Before Drakken can return with his thoughts – most of which are somewhere along the lines of, Get thee behind me, Satan – Steven pushes his way through and stares up at Bismuth through big, glimmering tears. "Bismuth," he says, and his voice is a sorrowful sag. "You poofed Lapis?"
Bismuth looks like she would rather hurl herself from the nearest cliff than stand before Steven's tears. It might be the first valid reaction Drakken has seen her have to anything. "Well, yeah, but – I poofed her. I didn't shatter her. She reformed. She was fine." She has the audacity to shrug.
Oh, the "yeah, but," "yeah, but." Over the years, Drakken has heard thousands of first-time offenders try to "yeah, but" their way out of the police's clutches, and he can recognize it when it hears it now. It isn't really off-putting to watch her squirm.
But Steven, being…Steven, isn't enjoying this in the slightest. "No, she didn't," he says. "They stuck her in a mirror before she could reform. She was in there for five thousand years, Bismuth!"
Steven's broken, sniffly version of anger makes Drakken clutch his elbows with opposite hands, and usually that movement triggers questions of whether or not Shego – the most talented contortionist he's ever met – can touch her elbows with adjacent hands. He's always meant to ask her, but it's never been a good time…and right now, it's thoroughly irrelevant! he reminds himself.
Bismuth lowers her head, too, and Drakken doesn't see a bull about to charge. It almost looks like she is trying to shrink herself down smaller.
She can't shrink down small enough, as far as Drakken is concerned. He feels a pop and is almost sure it's the entire right hemisphere of his brain going up in smoke. Except that he can still flick the fingers on his left hand – the hand stronger for holding a spoon or a pair of scissors, for throwing a ball or, he supposes, a punch, even though that's not the way he fought even back when he was a supervillain. Pretty tempting now, though…
"Yes! That's what you did to her! And why?" Drakken thrusts his finger at Bismuth, then turns it around to himself. "Is it the blue skin? 'Cause we get that a lot!"
A long squint from Bismuth. "I'm blue," she says.
Drakken finds himself moving closer, studying her – a fascinating specimen of extraterrestrial life. Large and brawny, but not as mammoth as Warhok or Warmonga. Hair that appears to be made out of rainbow sorbet. Skin just a shade less…something than his own. "I'd say more of a cadet gray," he corrects her.
"Can we please focus?" Amethyst yelps from the floor.
"Yes. Quite." Drakken remembers in that moment who he's surveying, and it feels as though his flesh actually ripples in place. He clenches his bottom row of teeth to his top, hoping that will keep him from replaying the mental footage of Lapis's body winking out of existence the way it did last time she was attacked by a Gem seven times her size –
To everyone's apparent surprise, it's Pearl who speaks next. "It was because she was an Elite, wasn't it, Bismuth?" she says. Her fingers pinch the bridge of her nose, like her grip on it is the only thing standing between her and a fit of hysterical crying.
Rather than nod or shake or her head or do anything else to actually answer, Bismuth whirls on Drakken. "Isn't that just like an Elite?" she says. Her eyes are so pitying that Drakken has to caress his elbows intently to keep from closing the space between them and – and – and –
Well, truthfully, he has no idea what he'd do, but he's willing to bet it would land on the wrong side of the hero-villain divide.
"Find some nice Earth guy who'd be a sucker for a sob story – an Earth guy with powers" – Bismuth gestures to Drakken's head. Oh, that pop he felt earlier? Turned out to be two flower petals breaking through, and he's beginning to sense another vine tickling beneath the surface. " – and she got the poor guy to fall in love with her. Man, that is low."
She feels sorry for him. She feels sorry for him because he has the most amazing girlfriend on the planet – well, she's not on the planet anymore, but the adage still stands! Drakken would scoff in Bismuth's face if he felt he could do it without losing his breakfast.
"That's nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggghhhhh-NOT what happened," he says instead. Not bad for a retort completely unrehearsed.
Bismuth ignores him. No, worse –
"Looks like she did a good job, too. Of course you don't wanna believe it," she adds, her sympathetic tone more nauseating than a spoonful of cod liver oil or whatever that disgusting tonic was that Mother made him drink when he came down with a cold as a child, "but you don't know the Elite."
The stupidity gushes over Drakken, and he holds up both hands to prevent himself from being swept away. "No, I don't," he says. "But I know Lapis, and that's more important, because she's the one we're actually talking about!"
(Oooh, that one was even better!)
Bismuth presses her lips together. If only they weren't so somber. If only there was a smirk resting on them that he could at least daydream about vine-slapping off!
"Look," Drakken continues, "I know her story –"
"You know her side of it," Bismuth cuts in, and she as well have cut his thumb, too, right there in the tender spot where paper can slice as shallow as can be and it will still hurt-hurt-hurt-to-the-hundredth-power-hurt.
Everything on Drakken begins to bunch, led by the skin beneath his eyes. He has never had to defend his girlfriend's honor before, and he's a nervous ball of… well, nerves, afraid, somehow, that he might scramble it the way he has with so many other goals before. "Are you kidding?" he snaps. "To hear her tell it, you'd think she was the bad guy!"
Bismuth folds her arms. Drakken gets the distinct impression she is barely holding herself back from saying something along the lines of, She was.
He's so busy huffing and puffing that it takes him several seemingly-longer-than-normal seconds to realize someone tiny has slipped up beside him and curled her fingers around his, which don't normally get the opportunity to dwarf someone else's this thoroughly. Itty-bitty, cold, and Ruby-red.
"I'm gonna have to side with Drakken here," Ruby says. Her words seem to squeeze from that high, rough place left behind after a major coughing fit, and Drakken wishes he could offer her a glass of water for her troubles, though he's fairly sure that's her natural sound. "Because, I mean…I fell in love with an Elite, too."
She smiles across the rest of the gathering at Sapphire, who smiles back. Their glances are so wordy and weighty that Drakken feels like he's eavesdropping on a private dialogue just by watching them.
Bismuth ratchets up a smile, too. It's probably not the same smile she broke into when she belted dear sweet Lapis in her buttonless belly, but it resides on the same mouth, and the only thing keeping Drakken from stopping up that mouth with a laser is that he doesn't have one on him. (Weapons are generally unwelcome at weddings, Drakken has learned, even if the invitation doesn't specify that you can't bring them.) "Darn it, Ruby," she says, soft and slow. "Why'd you have to go and make sense?"
Moments pass, a ker-thumpity or two of the drumbeat in Drakken's inner ear. That's all the time it takes for Bismuth's face to go mean again. "But do you know what she would have done?" Her tonic-tone flows around Drakken, rushes him, offering to cleanse him of Lapis's influence. "What she would'a run back to Blue Diamond and done if I'd let her go?"
An unseasonable and uncharacteristic sheet of ice coats Drakken's center, migrating up to slicken his tongue and out to yank up the fine sprinkling of hairs on his limbs.
No. He doesn't know. Lapis has shared enough details for him to gather it wasn't exactly charity work she was here to do, which of course left his imagination to run pig-wild on its own. Her surveying Earth through the lenses of a would-be subjugator – a perspective Drakken remembers all too clearly. Her wings glistening as they carry her back to Blue Diamond, the Blue Diamond she's so afraid of now, the Blue Diamond he still can't picture. Her wearing a caught-a-whiff-of-skunk expression as she watches ancient humans, possibly his ancestors, hunt and gather. The Atlantic and Pacific mobilized behind her…
Yes, he has imagined all these things and more, but Bismuth's insinuation that they happened boils the ice right off Drakken, sulfuric acid rising to take its place, and he juts his jaw even farther forward at her, hoping she might be fooled into seeing it as fiercer and more angled than it really is. "Nggghhh...BLEGH…it doesn't matter!" he stammers.
"Doesn't matter?" This time Bismuth is the one who smells a skunk.
Drakken blinks up at her, still boiling, and realizes in that instant that he has lied. He of all people should know that a dark past remains, continues to create concentric circles – ripples, to the less mathematically-inclined – that will linger in spite of apologies and reparations and all manner of regret.
But if anyone has ever worked harder to overcome her past than Lapis, Drakken has no idea who she could be.
The rage quite literally blossoms into a lovely purple flower that shoots across the deck toward Bismuth. Steven steps in front of Bismuth and catches the flower gently, scratching between the second and third of its five petals in its very favorite spot, mellowing it and inviting Drakken's pulse to do the same. It doesn't, but it does begin to pound a bit more musically as Drakken studies Steven. He's never seen his flowers react that way to anyone else's touch, and – oh, yes, Steven has plant powers. How could he forget?
"It does matter," Steven says. With those few words, he jeopardizes their alliance and the very ground Drakken is standing on, but with the next few, he restores them. "But there are other things that matter more."
Bismuth makes a crisp sound in the back of her throat – no, not a snort. A snort is Lapis's thing; it is copyright Lapis, and Bismuth would need her written permission to use it. "Like what?" she says.
Steven's voice lowers, gaining proportionally in strength what it loses in volume. "Like…Lapis doesn't care about who's a Quartz and who's a Ruby and who's a Pearl or any of that. She hasn't ever cared, the whole time I've known her. I didn't even know she was an Elite until just now." He shrugs, though only an idiot would take it for informality. His never-hard eyes are firm on hers, and he directs a frown – the Steven-equivalent of a cocked fist – at her. "She never mentioned it.
"Bismuth, you're the one who was so happy that my mom convinced you a Bismuth didn't just have to be a forger and a Quartz didn't have to just be a soldier," Steven continues. "Why can't Lapis be someone other than who Blue Diamond made her to be, too?"
Bismuth shakes her head. In disbelief. In honest-to-goodness disbelief that this could be true. Drakken forces himself to focus on the perfect synchronism of the rainbow-sorbet worms as they slither back and forth, and even then it only taunts him with the urge to ruin that synchronism, one clenched-handful at a time.
Vines sprout from either side of Drakken's neck, and tense up next to him, supplemental muscle on a body that would – eh-heh – probably be the underdog if this argument were to come to blows. Then again, who doesn't love a good underdog story? The contender everyone bet against, the one they thought they were being extremely generous to by even calling him a contender, pulling through to win at the last minute – the drama, the pathos!
Drakken glares at Bismuth and runs through every punch and every wrestling move he remembers from growing up in the same suburban subdivision as his cousin Eddy. Right hook, left hook, flying roundhouse, headlock… They all sound far too good for her.
That thought must accidentally grant the vines permission, because they all but shove Steven out of the way in their race toward Bismuth. Drakken is thiiiiiiis close to giving in to his acid-eaten instincts, to wrapping Bismuth up in a vine and flicking her away like a toe booger.
And then he sees Ruby, now cuddled up to Sapphire.
Drakken wouldn't have thought that someone named Ruby with the skin to match would be capable of flushing, but there are two round splashes the color of good mahogany furniture high on her cheeks. She looks ready to cry. The white bud strapped to her square haircut quivers.
The plea reaches Drakken's vines and then siphons to his bloodstream, in fuzzy abstract letters, like hieroglyphics he can somehow translate. (Without the Rosetta Stone or anything!) His flowers pull back, and his hands drop to hang level with his rib cage. He isn't sorry for almost attacking Bismuth, but he is sorry for almost spray-painting his anger across the elation of their big day.
Lapis's image flits through Drakken's mind on her spindly legs, so graceful as she dances and so coltish as she runs. A memory now, and it's unfair how memories work – how she is still near enough to do such damage to his chest cavity whenever he thinks about her but not near enough to be reached and comforted. "Look, I know the system on Homeworld was broken," Drakken says, watching in satisfaction as Bismuth's eyes stretch wide in astonishment and nearly having to gag up his next admission, "and that wasn't your fault. But it wasn't – hers – either!"
With each word, Drakken stamps his foot, surprised when he's finished that it hasn't left its impression in the wood. A step backward requires major reconfiguring, but he takes one anyway, fretting his hands through the spikes and over his sweat-leaky forehead.
Bismuth's lips part, but Pearl stops her with a white, pristine hand. "Bismuth," she says, "can we please drop it for now?"
"Sure." Bismuth's vacant head-shake doesn't seem to be directed at anyone in particular. "I was just gonna say that I already promised Steven I'd be on my best behavior anymore. So you don't have to worry about your girlfriend."
The hatred-pyre surrounding Drakken burns itself out abruptly, and he dwindles to ash – a chemically fragile state where one wrong breath can mean the difference between being preserved and being scattered on the wind. "Shows what you know," he snips, and oh, gosh, this feels rotten, this feels terrible, and he's reaching for any last vestige of villain-bravado as if it's an anesthetic. "I'll always worry about her. I love her."
To his surprise, Bismuth doesn't jeer or jam her finger down her throat. Her neck pulls in until the front of it dents and the back of it pokes out a hump. "'Course you do," she says. There's not a shred of sarcasm or a drop of venom in it.
Drakken punches his face toward her again, anyway. "And you shall have me to reckon with if you ever try to poof her again!" His verbal boom has been replaced by a wet fizzle, a dud firecracker whistling back down.
Bismuth has no answer for that. The only response he hears is a horrified screech from behind him. Drakken whirls around, head almost touching the ground, certain at any moment he will pinpoint the baby mouse whose tail has been stepped on.
He's looking too far down. This baby mouse's head, shaped like a corn chip tilted on its side, stops just short of his waist. And her eyes are green – unusual mouse color – and round, and disillusionment is not a strong enough word for what is taking place behind them.
Peridot's tiny hands squeeze, crumpling the metal cans she carries. "What did he say? She did what?" Soda pop runs between her fingers, which she doesn't appear to notice as she tears to Amethyst's side. "Did she poof L-L-Lapis?" Peridot demands.
"Apparently," Amethyst says, her arms in an I'm-not-comfortable-with-this-at-all cross.
Peridot flashes her kitty-cat fangs – fangs that can't possibly pose a threat to Bismuth, yet she backs away from them. "You clod!" Peridot cries. "You absolute, rotted clod!" She fires herself off the deck and straight toward Bismuth, her sure-to-be-sticky grip falling several inches short of any point on Bismuth's burly frame. "Why would you do that? Why would you ever, ever do that?"
"It was during the war," Bismuth says. No, it can't possibly be Bismuth talking, not with that tremble in it, Drakken thinks. There must be a different explanation.
He hasn't entirely ruled out the possibility of ventriloquism when Peridot shrieks again. "During the war? During the war, she wasn't even tough yet! You attacked a civilian Gem who was unarmed, unprepared, and absolutely amazing! How could you?"
And though the words are feeble, Bismuth flinches as though they have the power to raise welts on her. Looks like she has some concentric circles herself.
Drakken isn't sure if he likes the smirk he can feel settling on his spirit, vindicated and validated and victorious.
Any triumphant "v" words disappear quickly. Peridot sinks to her knees, her dress a lemonade stain on the deck around her, and begins to heave up sniffles. Betrayal rolls off her like waves of radioactivity.
Bismuth shifts to the left a little, uncomfortably, as if she's suddenly come down with a bad case of hives. Drakken wishes them on her – hives and hangnails and acid indigestion and all those other things that Gems probably can't get but that she deserves.
Suddenly, the crushed soda cans rise up from the deck – and to Drakken's amazement, he doesn't see any wires connected to them, not even when he squints – and begin to pound Bismuth with repeated fury, striking the top of her head and the back of her neck. Peridot lies there prostrate, squeaking like a baby bird who hasn't found its song yet. With each squeak comes a new, harder blow, so Drakken knows she must somehow be the one behind the aluminum assault. Bismuth just stands there and takes it, body hunched over, trying to fade into itself.
A part of Drakken revels in it, but it's the part of him that wore rhinestones in his suit and evil in his smile that terrible, terrible night his wrath erupted on the world in the form of Diablos. He grapples frantically for the flora-bedecked person who stood on the bow of the hovercraft and commanded his vines to crush Warhok and Warmonga's death machines to smithereens. Finds enough of him to propel him toward Peridot, to bend him over and let him scoop her small-as-can-be self into his arms and carry her into the house. In the doorway, he stops and aims one last glare back at Bismuth, letting her know that he isn't, and he never has been, and he never will be, on her side.
The door rattles shut behind them, clipping Drakken's toe. He yelps – not a very masculine sound, but oh well, that's the very least of his worries. The door opens again as Steven slips through it and then snaps it closed behind him with uncharacteristic sternness.
Drakken crouches to the floor, taking care to divert most of the weight from the foot that still feels the pinch, and opens his arms. Peridot rolls herself out of his hold and into a small square of sunlight that stretches through the door's screen. The pink gnome-shoes splay in the air at parallel angles.
"How…how…how…?" Peridot hiccups. Her hands clench in the material that flounces at her waist. Except for the blazing eyes, she could have wandered right out of a catalogue selling children's formal wear. Well, a catalogue that's progressive enough to feature green alien children in addition to the traditional towheads.
But it's her next question that stings Drakken, that finds the delicate places in his skin and slides its way in. "Why?" she says.
Drakken shakes his head. "I don't know!" He has to sift his voice through his teeth to keep it from flooding the room, to keep him kneeling at Peridot's side when everything else in him wants to sprout thistle-vines and flog Bismuth with them until she finally knows his girlfriend's pain.
And he doesn't know. The idea that anyone could look at wispy, quiet-eyed Lapis and want to do her harm is unfathomable. Drakken willingly immersed himself in villainy for decades, gave into his selfish-jerk side and tried to embadden himself (or whatever the term is) for years, and this…this is still more alien to him than Lapis's watery wings are.
The almost-dimpled folds over Steven's knuckles pull tight and white. If it were anyone other than Steven, Drakken would classify it as anger. "I'd just about convinced myself that maybe it would be okay for her to be here," the kid says, and it's hard to pinpoint whether he's talking to Drakken, Peridot, or himself. "That I could get over the whole Breaking Point thing someday." His sigh is soft and exhausted, like an old chair. "And now this."
"Why is she here anyway?" Drakken demands. Even he is not expecting the blare of his harshness, which almost shoots him backward, and he tries to cool it for Peridot's sake. "Not in an existential way – why is she right here? And right now?"
Steven glances away, glowing a bit pinker around the ears than usual. Without a quark of resentment, he recounts a story of retrieving Bismuth's bubble from deep in the heart of the temple, planning to set it up behind the reception line in honor of all the other Crystal Gems who couldn't be there – all what other Crystal Gems who couldn't be here? Drakken wonders, but he doesn't dare to ask. Dropping the bubble. Popping it. Bismuth emerging without her hammers a-blazin', and his decision to let her stay for the wedding.
Which…Drakken can appreciate the sentiment behind it, and it's good to know she was not brought back on purpose. Still, those are lukewarm comforts when he pictures the fear percolating on Lapis's face the day she forgot to say goodbye to him. The picture of her in his head is wearing at the edges – he can't quite focus on the turn her nose makes at the end – and all of that rushes into his throat as a big glob.
"And now this," Peridot repeats from the floor.
"And now this." Steven stares through Drakken, the way all great geniuses will stare through you when they have such serious matters weighing down their brains. "It isn't just that she made a mistake, you know. She – she has hate in her heart. And I hate hate."
They are silent for a moment, stricken at confronting the vicious presence of something even Steven finds difficult to forgive. It makes Drakken feel a little less like a relapsed villain-in-recovery, at least.
Peridot gives Steven a worried, shiny look, the tears in her eyes frozen over. "Yeah, well, don't be mad at me or anything, but I think I hate her!" Her voice has the same sharp, ragged, perfect-for-cutting-yourself-on edge as the lip of one of those soda cans.
Drakken finds himself nodding along with her.
Steven puts his arms around Peridot. Their chins are on about the same level, though Peridot's mountaintop of hair rises above his curls, and for a moment they truly resemble two grade-schoolers comforting one another on the playground. "Nobody's mad at you, Peridot," Steven says. "It's normal to feel that way when people hurt your friends. You just have to make sure it doesn't take over, like it did for her."
Peridot's turn to nod.
Every one of Drakken's internal organs contracts. "So – what do we do, then? Put her back?" Drakken says. The words leap out of him, too eagerly, and he flinches – even to himself, he sounds ready to jump at the chance. He may not be a villain anymore, but he still has one inside him, gnawing away at his impulse control, feasting on images of how he could make her pay.
Steven sighs again, with what Drakken surmises is more confusion than anything else this time. "I don't know. It's hard. 'Cause she has love in her heart, too."
He jerks his head toward the line of windows someone has nudged open to let in the summery-springtime outdoor air. Bismuth squats on the deck beside Ruby and Sapphire, mouthing questions, listening, rapt. Something about her stance, about her expression, must be meaningful to Steven, but all Drakken can see is the cruel grin Bismuth flashed as she punched through his girlfriend.
"And just for one day, I'd like to only think about love," Steven says.
Oooh – vision going blurry. Easy for you to say! If I think about love, I think about Lapis…
Peridot leaps from the floor and scampers to the window. "People are coming!" she reports, practically throwing herself through the glass. "Humans, I mean! Lots of them!"
"Really?" Drakken joins Peridot at the window. He will do this, he will take full advantage of his ADHD and distract himself from the fact that he misses Lapis so much it breaks him up inside and from the fact he just wants more than anything to encircle Bismuth with vines and squeeze her out of existence, the way he did for Jasper.
The humans outside the window certainly prove distracting enough. The diminutive brown woman Drakken remembers asking for directions on the day he met Steven and the Crystal Gems walks briskly down the beach, a whole family trailing behind her. A few steps away, a girl only a few inches taller shakes a short mop of soft-serve blond hair at the older version of herself who pulls off a mail-carrier's cap at the last minute. A spiky-haired boy lopes beside a red-cheeked man whose hairline and air of authority are both receding but still noticeably there.
And off in front is a boy with one of the strangest heads Drakken has ever seen, and that is saying something. His hair oozes out in fat hunks that hang over each other and lie scrambled across his scalp. If Bismuth's dreadlocks are worms, this boy's are night crawlers – a thought that should be utterly unappetizing, except that their yellow-orange color has Drakken tasting noodles dripping with cheese.
"Hey, who's the kid with the macaroni hair?" he calls back to Steven.
A crack of laughter comes from the front porch. Drakken follows it to Bismuth, who is also eyeballing Macaroni Hair. "How'd he do that with his hair?" she says. "That is awesome! I've never seen a human with hair like that!"
For a second…she could almost be a different person.
"That must be Ronaldo!" Steven answers them. He charges for the door, pushing it open with the heels of both hands, and skids down the steps, giggle-chuckling the whole way. "The guests are coming! The guests are coming!" he cries like a miniature (and much happier) Paul Revere.
Greg leads the pack, dressed in a shimmery black tuxedo that soothes the painful look out of his apparently-perpetual sunburn. One look at the balding mullet and the scruff around his mouth, and a strange safety runs through Drakken, as though he's standing beneath a wide umbrella as rain plinks all around him. He took Lapis out on a boat once, Drakken remembers, and didn't pitch a hissy fit when she sank it saving his son.
Steven grabs Greg's hand and tugs him in Drakken's direction. "Dad, do you remember Dr. Drakken?"
"Sure do." Greg chuckles, too, warming Drakken from the stomach outward. "Lovely day for a wedding, isn't it, Dr. Drakken?"
Drakken gazes around him, at the people picking their way to the folding chairs set up on the beach. Pearl hastily but carefully picking her way down the steps with a four-tiered cake balanced in her arms. Peridot bouncing on her heels as Amethyst brings her a basket of flowers who call a friendly greeting to Drakken. Ruby's face shining again as she watches more and more Beach City residents arrive. Even Sapphire's calm look – the beauty of it all hurts Drakken, kicks at him harder than Kim Possible ever has.
He nods for a moment before trusting himself to speak. Actually, it's not so much a matter of trusting himself as it is of knowing that he can't leave this unsaid. "I just wish Lapis were here to see it," Drakken confesses.
Greg rests a St.-Bernard-paw of a hand on Drakken's shoulder. "Don't we all?" he says.
Operation: Distract Himself is still a go, but after that exchange, Drakken doesn't even bother to keep himself from crying.
Peridot crashes the door open, and Drakken can see her eyes shining, even inside the thin sheet of her glass visor and the greenish-pink puffs that have formed around them. "Does this mean it's time for the wedding?!" she says. Twelve decibels too loud, but who even cares?
"Yeah, baby!" Amethyst scoots around Bismuth, giving her an even wider berth than she needs to, and turns her hand toward Peridot with the knuckles out.
Peridot bumps her own knuckles off them and then begins to hop on her heels, bouncing her ruffles into a frothy tangle that matches her giggles. An instant later, she glances up at Drakken. "I need to go procure my flowers," she says with the utmost seriousness and follows Amethyst back into the kitchen.
In that moment, the bitter ache inside Drakken disappears – no, wait, no, it doesn't disappear exactly, just sort of blacks out the way a computer screen will do if it's been left idle for too long. All it would take to revive it, Drakken knows, is a jiggle of the mouse. But Ruby and Sapphire have been Garnet, and Garnet has always been good to Lapis, and he is not going to jiggle the mouse and risk spoiling her…wedding…to…herself. Or whatever this is.
He dodges Bismuth – don't look at her, don't look at her, don't look at her – and takes the steps down to the beach two at a time.
From behind Drakken, Bismuth gives an annoyed little huff – a huff that hovers dangerously close to the aforementioned figurative mouse. "Already?" she says. "Man, I didn't even have time to shower in lava!"
"She does that," Steven confides to Drakken in a whisper.
Oh. Darn. Drakken crosses pour lava on her head off the list of things he would be all too happy to do to Bismuth.
Sand kicks up behind him as Drakken jogs away from Bismuth and the things she makes him feel, into the crowd of Beach City residents who have come trickling in. It's a crowd of a lot of people. People he doesn't know. People who don't know him and how wonderful he can be. And he's squeezed by it, that old familiar urge to rush into the throng with an invention or a new scientific discovery, to be the most impressive person in the room – or on the beach, in this case.
Drakken stops behind the last row of fold-out chairs, whose box-top-like headrests reach only slightly higher than his waist, and digs his fingers into one. Today isn't about him. He closes his eyes and fills himself with the memory, centers his whole self on Warhok and Warmonga and the Hydro-Pollinator and the gold medal and his ultimate victory. He gives his self-esteem a big squeeze hug, holds it for ten-fifteen-twenty seconds, and at twenty-five he is able to let go.
Bismuth treads down the aisle, dressed in – a suit of armor? Has she been wearing that all along? And if she has, how did Drakken not notice? And if she hasn't, where did she get it and how did she manage to change into it so quickly? And wouldn't it be satisfying to get an enormous can opener and –
No. He's not jiggling the mouse, he's not.
Still, Drakken sinks into a seat as far away from Ms. Brute-in-Shining-Armor as trigonometrically possible, just to be on the safe side.
He cranes his neck to make sure he still has a good view of the makeshift stage from this point – he does, yay. Makes sure there's nobody too short behind him – there's not. Rearranges his legs into their most manly cross. The whole time, his hand stays fanned across the empty seat beside him.
Three more rows of people have filed in before Drakken realizes what he's doing – saving it for Lapis. Lapis, who won't be coming.
Doy, as Shego would say, although Drakken likes to think that even Shego wouldn't be cruel enough to scoff at him right now. He slams his eyelids shut again. The backs of them sting, gritty and white-hot, as if he's just emerging from a dust storm.
Removing his hand from that chair is like trying to peel off a Band-Aid you'd forgotten about on your elbow because it was usually covered by your lab coat and so you let it sit for a few days, and then you have to tear it away from your now-scabbed wound and – oh gosh, this hurts! He may have taken back the executive order to keep those tears in, but he wouldn't mind until they at least waited until after the wedding starts so no one will question them.
In a blink, the empty seat is filled. By Greg. Who gives Drakken's hand a moist squeeze, and it doesn't feel born of pity. Just understanding.
Of course. How long did it take for him to stop automatically saving seats for – for – what was her alias again? The Gem Formerly Known As Pink Diamond? He can't remember the name of the person she jumped into in order to escape herself, in the same way Drew Lipsky was so eager to escape into Dr. Drakken.
Drakken blinks back the tears, but they decide to stick around, waiting in the wings for their curtain cue. He fumbles into his pocket for a tissue and combs back only with the bow tie. Instead of turning up his nose at it, he slips into it without hesitation. Maybe it will choke off the tears, the way you can sometimes choke off a fire before it spreads out of control and devours the entire lair…
Nope. Now he just feels like he swallowed a baseball, and he doesn't even play sports that much.
A blurry-edged Steven rushes to the front of the stage, grinning as if it's his birthday and Christmas and Valentine's Day and Easter all fused together. (Drakken congratulates himself on the relevant fusion reference.) With his dress soles tapping on the boards, he nods to Greg, who immediately lifts his guitar and begins to play…something. It's not quite the Wedding March, which now that Drakken thinks about it, might not translate too well from organ to guitar anyway, but it's bright and peppy and soothing and free all at once. If someone could transmute the smell of Mother's cucumber-melon soap to an auditory file, it would be this song.
That is also when the procession begins, down the short, narrow strip of pale, pure beach fringed with chairs on either side. Pearl glides across it so gracefully, one could swear she was walking the red carpet, her arm hung low so it can link with Amethyst's. Drakken follows her stunning poise all the way to the edge of the stage. A moment later, he hears gnome footsteps squishing across the sand and the accompanying cry of "Flowers for you! Flowers for you!"
Drakken turns around just in time to get socked in the clavicle by a bundle of flowers. Black spots at the corners of his vision, wheezy spots at the corners of his breaths, but after a few seconds they clear and he is able to see Peridot stomp her way onto the stage at a march worthy of a wind-up tin soldier. She rests her empty basket at Steven's feet, salutes him, and reports, "All the flowers have been deployed."
It is impossible to keep a smile off his face right now. Even when he pictures Lapis rolling her eyes and shaking her head at Peridot's performance, all it does is make him hug the bouquet tighter. A friendly vine scratches at the inside of Drakken's neck, wanting to come out and get acquainted, but he commands it to wait until the reception.
Much to his astonishment, it does. So he's not a failure as a flower-parent, after all.
Last of all come Ruby and Sapphire themselves, joined at the hands, their short strides slowly carrying them to the stage. When their feet hit wood, they split to flank Steven and to face each other, looking like it takes all their willpower to step away from each other.
Steven raises his hands to the crowd. "Dearly beloved," he says – wait, is this kid ordained? Drakken wonders. "We are gathered here today to join these two Gems in fusion, in matrimony, in mono-GEM-y." He does that finger-clicking thing toward Greg, who finger-clicks back. "Whatever you want to call it, we're here to join them. Ruby? You're on."
Ruby stares straight ahead. In all his years of watching science fiction shows, Drakken thought he knew was a "glowing ruby" looked like. He was wrong.
"I used to feel like I wasn't much good, just one of me on my own, but when we're together, it feels like it's okay to just be me." Ruby speaks above a mutter for once. "So I wanna be me, with you, and – and not even the Diamonds will come between us. And if they try, we'll beat 'em up!" She demonstrates with a Kung Fu move that rivals Kim Possible's in spunk if not coordination.
From somewhere in the sea of chairs, someone starts sobbing in huge, splattering heaves. So intense that Drakken presses a hand to his own chest to make sure he isn't somehow doing it without knowing. No, it's rising and falling as it should – a bit quickly, perhaps, but normally for him.
Drakken swivels for one look, intending to be discreet. In the front row of chairs, Bismuth's shoulders shake, and there's no mistaking it. The gasps are coming from her.
She's….crying.
It doesn't make him like her. It doesn't make him want her to stick around. But Drakken once again experiences a thin, diluted version of how it is to be alone with his frustration and wrongness in a group of happy people, discredited and disgraced as his plan falls apart before his eyes and everyone else laughs. He knows then that Steven is right – he usually is – Bismuth has love in her heart, too.
Sapphire chuckles softly. "Ruby, my future used to look like one single, obvious stream, unbending 'till the end of time." Drakken can't see very much of her, not with her hair pulled down low like a window drape, but her voice is beaming just as brightly as Ruby's face. "In an instant, you pulled me from that destiny, and opened my eye" – just one? – "to an explosion of infinite possible futures, streaking across space and time, altered and obliterated by the smallest force of will."
Well, in terms of eloquence, Drakken decides, Sapphire wins.
"What I mean is," Sapphire continues, "you changed my life. And then, I changed your life. And now, we changed our lives."
Steven's own eyes are two big puddles as they scan the crowd again. "If anyone can think of any reason while these two Gems should not be fused, let them speak now or forever hold their peace."
Because it's too painful? Drakken somehow manages not to shout.
It is. It's too painful to watch all the other puzzle pieces snap together when one piece is lost. And Lapis isn't one of those sky-border pieces whose absence you can ignore at a far enough distance and a hard enough squint. She's one of those center pieces, with the dog's head or something on it, so then your great pastoral picture's ruined by a headless dog.
He's definitely out-crying Bismuth by this point, and it isn't the no-holds-barred triumph it should be.
Steven spreads his arms out, part minister and part…whatever they call those baseball judges. "So, by the power vested in me, I now pronounce you Garnet!" he squeals.
Ruby and Sapphire lean in. Their faces touch, and then, in a brilliant flash of light that would probably scare Lapis even if she wouldn't admit it, they disappear into each other. Into Garnet, who is suddenly there, laughing and regal, arms around her own shoulders. This brings new meaning to the term giving yourself a hug.
"I'm back!" Garnet says, pumping those arms in the air. "Let's party!"
Far be it from Drakken to argue with her.
They party, although the music is a little too loud and hip-hoppy for Drakken's taste, and he finds he absolutely cannot dance without picturing Lapis crouched sweetly on this same beach, watching him moonwalk, reaching her strong little bony hand down to help him after he fell. He stays mainly for the cake, which looks frostinglicious, and the chance to let his nice obedient flower flirt with that cute orchid in the bouquet. And for the fact that Steven whirls by every five minutes to ask if Drakken is having fun, and there's no way you can say no to that grin.
Strangely enough, it is entertaining to watch Garnet mambo across the sand to cheers from Macaroni Hair and Bismuth, and Peridot skip in a circle, her empty basket flailing wildly at the air, at one point smacking into the left kneecap of the important-looking guy with the ruddy cheeks. Drakken is standing off to the side, snapping his fingers to a tune that actually has a tune, when the soft-serve blonde girl comes up to him. "Hi," she says. "Do you not feel much like dancing, either?"
Drat that type of question! Drakken's never sure whether a nod or head-shake conveys his agreement, so he responds verbally. "Not without my girlfriend."
The girl sticks out her hand, which Drakken accepts after a moment's hesitation. It's warm and soft and buttery-pale, and it doesn't hold onto his long enough to spike panic through him. "Sadie. I don't think I've seen you around here before."
It doesn't reek of and I would have remembered you, blue freak, so Drakken nods at her. "No. I live in the Midwest. Dr. Drakken, notorious but reformed mad scientist."
Sadie leans a sturdy elbow against the refreshment table. "So what brings you here?"
"My girlfriend is Lapis Lazuli. We're d-d-dating." Drakken clenches his jaw, firm and fast, to keep from charging the cake and burying his face in it up to the eyebrow. "At least – we were – before –"
It's one of those sentences with no good ending.
"Yeah, I'm really sorry. It might sound weird, but I know what it's like to have someone you –" Sadie swallows as if she's trying to take a spoonful of atrocious-tasting medicine and get it over with. " –someone you really care about get lost in space."
Her eyes are tender, and every part of Drakken begins to go liquid. He's opening his mouth – to say what, he has no idea – when Macaroni Hair yells, "Holy Roswell! What is that?"
Drakken's head jerks upward before he even sees where the kid is pointing. Suspended in the sky – no, wait, they're not suspended. They're lowering. Two huge spaceships shaped like humanoid arms, slipping through all the layers of Earth's atmosphere without burning so much as a fingertip, their palms cupped, the palms of someone waiting for payment to be plunked into them without question.
One blue. One yellow.
It's Drakken's turn to gulp the yucky medicine. He's pretty sure they weren't on the guest list.