Sky Blue, Ocean Blue

by purplegirl761

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

32. Truce

~I'm back at last!

This chapter sponsored by the Better Bismuth Bureau. *ducks rotten fruit*

Love you guys! :D~

Boy howdy, Blue Diamond must have missed her pink friend almost as much as Drakken missed Lapis.

She has transformed from The Queen of All Things Frosty to a tender, melting icicle of a woman who cradles Steven in her hands – hands like the ones that pop up in most of Drakken's memories, so clueless as to others' personal space and yet so sensitive to their feelings, hands that can only belong to a mother. She presses Steven to her cheeks, to her tears, each of which easily exceeds the length of his entire body, enough to supply a stolen weather machine with all the water necessary for a Canada-conquering storm.

"Pink…I can't believe it. You were here all this time?" Blue Diamond sobs her way through the question.

"Sort of." Steven half-nods. "She was my mom," he says for the forty-gajillionth time in the last…the last…well, the last however-long-it's-been-since-the-battle-stopped. "So…I have her Gem." Steven squirms his first squirm in Blue Diamond's grip – not trying to escape, just loosening one arm so he can roll the hem of his T-shirt over what Drakken's geometry-wise eyes can now see as the base of a diamond, hinting at pointier things to come. "And some of her powers. But that's it. I don't have any of her memories. I'm sorry."

He just apologized to them. On the increasingly-long list of bizarre things about today, that has to be near the top.

Blue Diamond cuddles Steven closer.

Beside her, Yellow Diamond looks less huge and formidable than she does huge and awkward, a Superman action figure crammed in a dollhouse. Her face sucks in at the center, as though she has just taken a long drag of lemon juice and stained herself an even-deeper shade of gold.

Shego's eldest and largest brother, the one whose black-and-blue color scheme can be swapped for normalcy with relative ease – a fact Drakken envied back in his less secure days – also has an air of awkwardness surrounding him, unfamiliar with not being the biggest person in the immediate vicinity. Or even the third-biggest person. "So," he says, glancing up at Yellow Diamond and poking out a chest that doesn't need to be poked out any, "I suppose you're wondering how we humans came by our powers."

Yellow Diamond's head-shake is absent, inattentive, the sort of gesture Drakken has always loathed with all-consuming fire. Of course, she is the one who dashed Lapis's body to smithereens, so all of her gestures will always be hideous, as far as Drakken is concerned. "Not really," she says. "You aren't the first species to be struck by a comet of many colors."

The brother droops, so dejected that Drakken falls into laughing hysterics. With emphasis on hysterics. His nerves are shot – what a strange phrase, and yet that's exactly how it feels, like someone has come in with a BB gun and peppered his nervous system with pellets.

"What I do wonder is how any of you are here." Yellow Diamond turns back to the Crystal Gems, rubbing her frown-lines, and Drakken cringes in anticipation of a fork-scraping sound that never ends up happening. "We killed everyone."

Except for trace elements of confusion, her voice is clean and straight as a line, as if she's announcing that she just vacuumed the staircase. (Although, come to think of it, she's still not as excited as Drakken gets about vacuuming his staircase. None of his evil lairs ever had carpeted steps before!)

Drakken stares at the horizon, which jumps like crazy in his vision, refusing to settle, matching the condition of his insides.

Steven swipes at the rainstorm Blue Diamond has cried all over him. "You didn't exactly kill them," he says, slow and careful.

Yellow Diamond's cobra-brow puckers. "Meaning?"

"Follow me and I'll show you," Steven says.

He nods to Blue Diamond, who lowers her hand to the porch and allows Steven to hop off. Her movements remind Drakken of a forklift, only softer somehow, as if the metal joints are padded with foam at the ends. Anyone arriving on the scene now would never guess those graceful fingers were firing energy streams at Steven earlier in the day.

Across the porch, Drakken hears a hurricane-huff, and he turns to look at Bismuth. She slams her eyes down into slits, folds her arms, and, with deliberation, turns her back on the Diamonds. Wherever Steven is going to take them, Bismuth doesn't intend to follow, and Drakken doesn't blame her.

Or, well, he wouldn't blame her if he were farther along in Operation See Bismuth As A Person And Not Just The Fist Who Smashed His Girlfriend.

Steven leads the Diamonds and his friends – including Drakken and Connie – to a warp pad behind the cliff. Actually, Drakken's mind is working away, trying to figure out if that includes the Diamonds now too, if Steven already considers them to be his friends. This is, after all, the kid whose adoption of a lion went more smoothly than Drakken's cable installation.

(Hey, it's rather strenuous to get sucked into an alternate dimension where the shows are real – not to mention be stripped of one's ponytail and subjected to a makeover by people who apparently never learned that the point of clothes is to cover your skin!)

Drakken squeezes Connie's hand as they and the Crystal Gems crowd onto the warp pad, hoping to give her some comfort – and, all right, to receive some in return. The trip he loves, an entire roller coaster condensed into one lightning-bolt of a moment, over too soon to frighten or nauseate. But it can be disconcerting to watch your companions evaporate as you lift off and then rebuild from the feet up as you touch down. Drakken's free hand dives into his pocket and strokes the droplet of a stone that holds his girlfriend. Can she feel it? He hopes so.

Without even needing to exchange glances, the Diamonds step forward and, in perfect two-part harmony, each of them extends a toe onto the warp pad and rests it there. The remaining ninety-nine percent of their enormous selves won't fit on its circumference and have to settle for hunching tight around its edges. Steven sticks out his arms and transports the group, Diamonds and all.

Wow-wow-wow-wow-wow! is all Drakken has time to think. The sky forms the ceiling and then the walls and then the floor, and his stomach levitates, swaying back and forth, and the next thing he knows, quick as they shift the background behind a weatherperson on TV, he is landing – with a gasp, on teetering legs, as wonder-stricken as on his very first encounter with a warp pad. Drakken rolls off the silver-gleamy surface and thuds to the grass. It tickles at his face, which Drakken barely notices, too busy marveling at how the process only takes a second, how it affects humans but can't be triggered by them, and how the warp pad knew to bring Steven here when there's clearly no place to input a command.

He does notice Steven waving everyone else forward, though – which deserves as a congratulatory self-hug when you take into account how pellet-pocked his nerves still are. Drakken jumps to his feet and jogs after them, managing to keep pace with Amethyst.

A rusted-up old spaceship that bears a notable resemblance to the U.S.S. Enterprise looms in front of them – well, it probably doesn't "loom" in front of the Diamonds, who are staring down at it.

Semantics aside, this is where Steven stops them. He slaps his palm onto a keypad beside the door – obviously Homeworld tech, because keypads on Earth haven't been around long enough for one to decay this badly – and as the doors grind open, Steven reaches inside and pulls out what appears to be a long, thick, black cable.

Except it has legs. And jaws that clink together asymmetrically, like a pair of crooked salad tongs. Those jaws stir now, and Drakken creeps forward, fascination overriding fear, craning to see if this creature has a mouth inside its mouth the way Fuchsia Fusion did.

No. In the center of where its throat would be, it sports only a single, blistering, neon-green eyeball. One look at it, and Kim Possible's and Peridot's and even Shego's eyes seem faded and weak.

Drakken takes another step closer, puzzling as to what this bug is mutated from – not a termite; he knows all too well what happens when they turn radioactive – and why Steven is showing them a mutated insect at all. And then he sees Blue Diamond's hand swoop in to cover her mouth, and he understands. This thing isn't a mutation, it's a Corruption, which is a thousand times worse because that means that it isn't a "thing."

Or at least it shouldn't be.

It – she – gives a groggy squawk and nuzzles her head into Steven's shoulder. Drakken suddenly has trouble swallowing.

"We did this?" Blue Diamond's whisper is like a cool breeze, which would be refreshing if Drakken weren't already going cold from the toes up.

Steven nods as if it's painful to do it. "You Corrupted them all. My mom saved Pearl and Garnet – and herself, of course – under her shield." He nods to Pearl, who wears an about-to-faint smile, and to Garnet, who has stepped back and retracted her neck at a curious angle, so neither of the Diamonds can look at her straight on. "Amethyst was safe because she was still in the ground, and Bismuth was bubbled."

Two thick lines appear between Yellow Diamond's eyes, making Drakken think of wings. Not Lapis's nice little watery wings. Bat wings, all leather and deadly spirals. "And the Lapis and the Peridot – defectors from Homeworld, I suspect?"

Lapis, Peridot, defectors – Drakken isn't sure which word sounds filthiest coming from between Yellow Diamond's curling lips. Actually, yes, he is. Lapis's name is so coated in grime that it leaves no room to focus on anything else, crushes all his thoughts down from selfless wishes that she can't hear this conversation to strings of villain jargon that translate, roughly, to I'll defect you from Homeworld!

No one should ever sneer her name that way.

Drakken's own lips part, but Steven cuts in before he can speak. "Refugees, actually," he says, and even if Drakken could have yanked something coherent from his throat, he never could have been that pleasant about it.

"Hmmm," is all Yellow Diamond says. The bat wings deepen, and a second pair digs into her forehead. What that face means, Drakken can't guess, only that it's very, very good at giving him those something-crawling-up-my-leg tingles.

"Anyway. The Corruptions? I've tried to heal them, and it helps a little. But not enough," Steven says. His words are matter-of-fact, but his tone aches with it all.

He slurps his hand and rests it, dripping, on the back of the corrupted Gem's head. She flails for a moment before the spurs on each of her spiky joints smooth down, her scorpion limbs ratcheting back into cute little nubbins. A whimper drools from her, much quieter than her earlier hisses.

Steven glances wetly up at the two Diamonds. "See?"

Yellow Diamond's expression is blank, impassive (a word Drakken is proud to know), the exact way a villain's should be at all times, the exact look that Drakken practiced so studiously before a mirror and became quite good at – even though he never lost the feeling that he was clipping it on with a clothespin over his actual face. Nothing on her moves save for one gargantuan arm that snakes out, a scary-big hand landing beside Steven's plump, saliva-sticky one.

Her touch works faster than a back brace, eliminating the Gem's spinal curvature in one swoop, so effectively that Drakken's own tender lumbar region barks its jealousy. The extra limbs shrivel and disappear, leaving her to stand on two and hang two more at her sides. When she blinks her giant green eyeball again, it has migrated from the inside of her mouth to its proper position atop a collection of oddly-arranged – but not off-putting – features. It lifts, regains its focus, stares at something far above them and far beyond the scope of Drakken's vision.

And then she lets out a hot, harrowing scream.

It's the kind of scream that heralds the apocalypse, the kind of scream that – here Drakken has to stop and swallow away the tang of his own guilt – that rises when a person has just watched a Diablo crush a skyscraper with its foot. Drakken's hand wanders to his pocket, to the stone his girlfriend is folded into for recovery. It feels smaller than the obstruction in Drakken's airwaves. He hopes with all of his plant-enhanced might that Lapis can't hear in there.

How – how did he ever live with such screams? Much less live for them?

"Oh, skies above, no!" the Gem cries. "They wouldn't! They couldn't!" Her arm jerks as if it wants to swing forward but makes no actual progress, her body jittering but frozen, having a stationary seizure. "Look out! Stop! No – they can't – we're all going to – we're all going to – we're all going to –"

Yellow Diamond presses her hand tighter.

The screaming Gem loops back to "Oh, skies above, no!" like one of Cousin Eddy's old beaten-up vinyl rock records. At first Drakken can't fathom what she's looking at, why she's hollering so loud. But then he sees the tears spill their glistening ways onto Pearl's cheeks, and he understands what this poor little Gem's mind is doing – reliving its last few moments of true sentience. He has to cover his own mouth and snatch breaths through his nose and jerk his gaze away.

Yellow Diamond pulls back, too. The screams cease, and the Cyclops-Gem shrinks back to her former mutant-bug state.

Which is rather grotesque, but at the moment, a whole heck of a lot less disturbing than listening to that.

Yellow Diamond scowls the bat wings into place again, only they come back more wrinkled than rigid this time. "She may be too far gone," she says. It's the type of grave, detached statement Drakken remembers hearing from that doctor in that soap opera as he declared that he had no way to get poor Felicia and Brock back into their own bodies in time for the wedding, because no one had invented a working brain-switch machine yet. (Drakken would have cried over that scene, except he was too busy smirking because he had built a functional brain-switcher.) He's greatly tempted to spit at her, but would prefer to stay alive.

Blue Diamond covers Yellow Diamond's hand with her own – and, if Drakken isn't mistaken, squeezes it. "Gently, Yellow," she says, and the kindness Drakken hears in it punches pause on his own anger.

Her long blue fingers slip around Yellow Diamond's wrist and guide it forward to meet Blue Diamond's other hand, which creeps toward the mutant Gem with what Drakken's throbbing mind would ordinarily view as teeth-grinding slowness.

Not today, though. Today he won't process, refuses to process, anything else ugly, and Blue Diamond becomes nothing more (or less) than the picture of patience. Drakken is so busy staring at her – so busy wishing Lapis were here to watch her former leader inch her way toward a Gem too damaged to speak, reach forward with fingertips as visibly nimble and light as a pair of chopsticks held by someone who actually knows how to use them, compassion pooling and sagging beneath her eyes – that he almost misses what happens when both Diamond hands join Steven's.

Almost, but not quite. It would be well-nigh-impossible to miss this. The Gem's face rearranges itself once again. Lips replace the ragged jumble of stalactites and stalagmites and open into a smile instead of a scream.

"Nephrite! Facet-413! Cabochon-12!" Her single eye focuses bright, beaming admiration straight up at Yellow Diamond. "My Diamond! I thought – I thought – well, it doesn't matter what I thought." She – Nephrite? – gives a crackly chuckle. "You're here now, and that can only mean we've done it! You've won! You've avenged Pink Diamond! Defeated Rose Quartz!"

There are at least twelve factual errors in that outburst, but Drakken fears that correcting her will trigger a black hole opening inside her head or some equally troubling cosmic event.

Three gazes meet over their neighboring holds on Nephrite. It surprises – and impresses – Drakken how well Steven's holds its own staring down the women who were on a mission to snuff him out like a candle wick just a few endless hours ago. All three hands lift.

With the sound of a tire being punctured, Nephrite deflates back to a hissing heap of legs and stalactite-stalagmite jaws oozing lime-tinted drool. A line of it dribbles onto the ground, wilting the grass in one second and corroding it in the next. By the time the acid-burn sound has receded, it's left behind a slithery tunnel that could have come directly off the set of The Killer Earthworm Part VII.

Gosh, Drakken thinks, he hasn't seen any of those movies since dropping out of college. Do they even sell them anymore? Did they make the cut to be converted onto those newfangled DVDs because VCRs are apparently going out of style already, and –

And his genius is pounding on the walls of his skull from the outside, begging to be let back in. Drakken presses both hands to his temples in hopes that those doors will open and his thoughts will form a straight line again.

Nope. Just the conversion of every bodily organ into a pipe organ, blaring and groaning and rumbling and not a single one in the same key.

Between that and the terrible stillness of his girlfriend's gemstone – plus the fact that his emotions have been pureed about fourteen times over today – Drakken bursts into sobs. Embarrassing, to be sure, but it's as natural and unavoidable a reaction as the fizz of vinegar against limestone. Especially when he's still hearing the happy chirps of the Gem-named-Nephrite who writhes around now in multi-legged monster form and wondering if she was a friend of Lapis's back on Homeworld –

Garnet offers his shoulder a quiet rub. It so cleanly pushes the pain aside and pours relief in its place, leaving it to set, that for some stupid reason Drakken cries even harder. Things have gone hazy, fuzzy and yet hyper-clear the way they do in that period between ramming headfirst into a wall and awakening to a narrow beam of light needling your eyes in the back of a police car, that period where you can hear Shego grunting as she attacks Kim Possible and where you can see your doom ray in the middle of the room, fully charged and prepared to strike, but the ground beneath you is a water bed and everything gets farther away from you the closer you get to it.

"This isn't going to –" Yellow Diamond begins.

Blue Diamond cuts her off. No, not cuts. Cuts implies sharp, pointy, Shego-esque. Blue Diamond's voice drapes over Yellow Diamond's, more softly than Drakken's worn old bathrobe brushes his knobby knees. "Pink's right," she says, and it takes Drakken longer than it should to realize she's referring to Steven. "It's not enough. We need White Diamond."

As Steven gawks at the two of them, Drakken turns to the only person within three yards who isn't taller than him – Amethyst – and whispers, "There's a White Diamond now?" Well, he whispers to the best of his ability, which is apparently still loud enough to reach Pearl, who treats him to a strangely uneasy glance.

Amethyst shrugs and pokes a finger toward the rusty side of Nephrite's spaceship (darn it, he'd feel a lot better if he could just forget her name – something that has never been hard for Drakken until now). A faded symbol still manages to stand out from the peeling wall of gray, the Diamond symbol Drakken recognizes from the green hand-ship he saw on the news a lifetime ago, where Lapis was held prisoner by Jasper – and Peridot, of all people. The thought would be laughable if Drakken's respiratory system weren't on the fritz.

He sees the yellow and blue Diamond outlines splayed off to the side like elbows. Dead center beneath them is a pink one Drakken doesn't remember seeing before. And riding above it all, the angel topping the Christmas tree, is a Diamond of pure, copy-paper white.

Drakken gulps as his knees begin to wobble. Why does it have to be so much higher than the others?

"We'll have to go to her," Yellow Diamond says, bat wings at full operating capacity. "White hasn't left Homeworld in eons."

With Gems, that's probably no exaggeration. Drakken's legs grow weaker still.

"Will she help us?" Steven cranes his nonexistent neck forward, and Drakken recognizes the posture of someone yearning to be coddled, just a little, at the end of that one-explosion-after-another kind of day.

Blue Diamond and Yellow Diamond exchange glances. Drakken can't see any information being passed, let alone any emotion, but they seem to understand each other anyway. That's also not particularly comforting.

"Perhaps," Blue says, faint and faraway. "Once she discovers you survived, Pink." She floats a cloaked arm in Steven's general direction, and then a frown digs trenches around her mouth. "But how will we get back to Homeworld? Your friends destroyed our ships."

She doesn't snap the words like an accusation, which is the only thing that keeps Drakken from firing back at her. Okay, well – he grasps two fistful of Amethyst's shirt as a cyclone of dizziness tries to knock him off his feet – maybe not the only thing.

"We'll have to use Pink's ship," Yellow Diamond says. "Do you remember where you left it, Pink?" she asks Steven, even though he's already told her – twice – that he isn't called Pink Diamond anymore and doesn't have access to her memories, and agggh! Don't they ever listen?

Steven merely shakes his head.

Blue Diamond stuns Drakken with a laugh – a bubbling, lightweight sound, but rich as the ocean, not fluffy or flaky. If not for its beyond-alto depths, he could close his eyes and mistake it for Lapis's, and it runs a feather over Drakken's heart. "You and that leg ship, Pink," she says, giving Steven a fond look that he squirms under, because how could he not?

"I believe the last place I saw that ship was in the desert," Pearl speaks up. Her head ducks forward in a strained bend Drakken has never seen from her, and though the graceful firmness still underlines her voice, her manner is shyer, more characteristic of Lapis. She has been awkward before, but this is the first time there has been nothing pretty about it. "Near where we found Lion, Steven."

Steven's face lights up.

Drakken's is too tired to join it. Garnet ends up having to half-carry him to the warp pad, and as the background blips from woods to wasteland, the Gems' bodies pixilating all around him, all Drakken can think is that he has, indeed, gone soft. Lost his villain-stamina. There was a time when he could stay awake for three, four days at a time, fueled by lattes and excitement and an itchy desire for revenge, power, and sole ownership of every chocolate refinery in the world. Now he's grown accustomed to seven-ish hours of sleep a night, three roughly rectangular meals a day, and a much lower dosage of pulsating stress.

Strange how that has made him both weaker and stronger. He could vine-fling an enemy into the next state should one pop up in front of him, yet his eyelids are as droopy as his powers are alert, like he might collapse into a nap with or without a bed to cushion his fall.

This desert turns out to be unfamiliar, even sparser and drier than the one where they once fought Jasper. Gritty wind tosses sand into every one of Drakken's orifices but doesn't so much as tousle Yellow Diamond's crop-of-solar-rays hair. How is that fair?

Drakken's legs are like two globs of banana pudding, barely holding him up, and even in the secret fifth-or-sixth dimension inside his neck, his vines, too, ache as if they've been shredded by Shego's glove-claws. It doesn't help the feeling that clings to him – the feeling of being puny and decrepit.

Steven has changed back into his usual casual ensemble, a blurred shirt and denim shorts and sandals that kick up sand behind them as they jog. Drakken squints after him, wishing this mysterious ship would come into view and wishing even more than he'd remembered to bring a bottle of Saline. There's nothing but heat and drought and dust everywhere he looks.

Even Steven can't keep his spirits elevated very long here. He runs, searches, digs, his kindly ruddiness graduating to an ever-more-alarming red, and finally sags against some tower whose pink tip peers timidly out of seven layers of sand. "It's not here," he says. "Nothing's here except for those two pink rocks."

Connie stifles a giggle. As genius-caliber as it is, even Drakken's brain takes a moment in its taxed state to register that said rocks are a burning-hot pink that doesn't belong in this pale wash of sand and almost-matching sky.

"That is the ship!" Blue Diamond exclaims. For an instant, she actually appears happy, and it's amazing how that dials down her intimidating manner. Almost seems to make her smaller, even.

Pearl raises her hands, and twenty seconds and a great whoosh of air later, the sand has been whipped into a faithful recreation of a cyclone. (Would that be called a sand-clone? Drakken wonders, and then shakes his head. No, that makes it sound like you're trying to clone sand, which anyone with an eighth-grade education could tell you can't be done, as sand doesn't have DNA.) Her movements are small and subdued, especially compared to her normal gracefully-stretched ones, and Drakken can't figure out why.

Yellow Diamond glances down in Pearl's direction. Drakken cringes – and freezes halfway through the cringe, puzzled, because Yellow Diamond isn't looking at Pearl with the lingering residue of betrayal, the way you would expect someone to look at a war criminal. She isn't looking at Pearl at all – she is looking through her, like she's transparent, like she's a window instead of…Pearl.

Drakken squirms, itchy in some unreachable place, and snakes a hand down to check on his pocket-girlfriend. Lapis's gemstone lies just as cold and lonely as it did two minutes ago, and two minutes before that, and two minutes before that… and so forth. Anyway, there are a thousand questions he wants to ask her, starting with why the Diamonds' gazes discard Pearl as soon they find her, and why it's so much more disturbing than if they were mad at her.

Eventually, the last of the sand is reordered into thick stacks surrounding a pair of sharp pink metallic legs that outdo any runway model Drakken has ever seen on The Style File. They are attached at the top to…well, exactly what you would expect legs to be attached to. Propriety demands Drakken look away.

So he almost misses it when Amethyst herds him and Connie over to the warp pad and zaps them back to the beach house where it all began – the whole "hot mess," as the teens today would dub it. The world spins even after the warp stops, and Drakken stumbles on his hop down from it, ankles quaking. There are other people on the beach – Connie flies into the arms of a couple who have the same brownie-batter skin she does – and at least one lion, but they have no place in Drakken's vision. What he sees are the cracks appearing in Peridot's visor, Steven lying stiller than any kid should ever be, Nephrite staring up into the sky and screaming at something visible only to her.

And Lapis – Lapis is everywhere, her bravery and her anguish swimming together like the sour and the sweet in lemonade. The eyelet-stitch stone she's resting in now bumps importantly against his leg as he walks. It is the only thing that prevents him from throwing himself tummy-down on the sand and trying to catch a few ZZZs before the next crisis erupts.

The pink leg-ship lands, Steven, Garnet, and Pearl piling out. Blue Diamond floats behind them. Yellow Diamond comes last, glaring directly into the sun without so much as blinking, which only serves to make Drakken feel punier and decrepiter.

Beside him, Shego's eldest brother is speaking into a cell phone. "No, Dr. Director, you can call your agents back home. The threat has been nullified," he says, his voice as proud as if he "nullified" the threat himself. Upon flipping the phone shut, the man claps Drakken on the back – gently, thank goodness, because the guy's hands are bigger than just about any of the bones Drakken keeps over there. "Give Shego our love," he tells Drakken.

Drakken pictures Shego hissing up to twice her usual size like a cat someone thought it would be funny to dunk in a swimming pool, and he shudders a tad. "I'll try," he says, openly and honestly.

The man smiles at him, the look of someone who profoundly understands how hard it is to care for someone who won't let herself be cared for. That's a puzzle Drakken has never managed to solve – all he ever wanted in his life was to be loved, even when he had himself deluded into believing that cold, subservient fear from the general populace would be far more nourishing. Why would someone reject that? Beats him.

Once they leave, Drakken wraps up in his own dangly-gangly arms to hold himself steady, hands cupping elbows. He can't let himself so much as sink down into a sitting position on the sand, for fear that he will catch the next train to Dreamland and forget to purchase a round-trip ticket that will bring him back in time for the next round of intergalactic warfare or diplomacy or whatever stage they're in now.

Must. Keep. Moving!

Drakken paces in a lopsided, geometrically-imperfect circle that leads him dangerously close to Blue Diamond, only she doesn't even appear to notice him. Though her arms have disappeared into those swingy cave-sleeves, her face has softened and Drakken sees hints of Lapis in it.

On the strength of that, he marches forward until he is standing directly in front of the spot where Blue Diamond's cloak stops just short of dragging the ground. He gives his throat the biggest, boomingest clearing he can without turning its lining inside-out, fingers and toes crossed that she will take notice of him. "Hello…hello there. Can we talk for a moment – you know, blue to blue?" he asks, flaunting the grin that Mother has always claimed is too charming to resist.

(It has been known to fail him with people who aren't as loving as his mother – which is just about every person everywhere – but what good will it do to dwell on that at this point?)

An unmoving blue stare. "I have no idea who or what you are." She doesn't hurl it at him like an accusation. She just skims it across him.

This is it. This is when his flair for dramatic oration goes from a trait snickered over to the team's most valuable asset, when it spares the life of the woman he loves. In a flash of imaginary lightning, Drakken realizes that every single one of the villainous monologues he delivered to a should-have-been-helpless Kim Possible was merely preparing him for this moment.

"I am Dr. Drakken!" he announces. "And I am here to plead on behalf of the heroic and noble…Lapis Lazuli!" Drakken strains to stop himself from reaching for his pocket, strains so hard he breaks out in a sheen of sweat across his forehead.

"She threw a building on my head," Blue Diamond says.

"Yeah, and I can see how that would look…bad." Drakken feels around for petals, finds one, plucks it, and hides it behind his back. "But a traitor is the last thing she would want to be! Why, when I first met her, all she could talk about was how badly she longed to return to Homeworld! She loves her people….and I love her…so much." He stops, coughs, blinks and blinks and blinks. "And – and you know who else loves her? Pink – Pink Diamond over there," Drakken adds, indicating Steven with a sweep of his arm.

Blue Diamond frowns. "So it was Pink who swayed her?"

"Yes!" Drakken begins to nod and only ceases when he's too dizzy to continue, his heart thundering in his cheeks to go with the lightning, a whole storm beneath his scar. "It was him – I mean her!" Sorry, Steven, but it's for the greater good. "You see, Lapis was imprisoned during the war – they thought she was a rebel Gem – and she – he – your friend there was the one who freed her! So ever since then, Lapis has loved him – I mean her – more than anyone – gaaah, I shouldn't have phrased it that way, but, please, I beg you…don't punish Lapis!" He peers up at her through slick-feeling eyelashes that he hopes are damp enough to be entreating but not so damp as to be humiliating. "You're not going to hurt her, are you?"

Blue Diamond lifts a hand, lost in the sleeves. "She was a loyal member of my court for thousands of years," she murmurs. "This wretched war has already cost us so much. I will show mercy, if only because it's been too long since I've done so."

Pure warm relief goes rushing through Drakken, mending all the rips and torn-apart places in his composure – and then wadding up that same composure and tossing it aside as he falls down at Blue Diamond's feet, sweat dripping onto the sand. "Thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you…"

He is on his sixteenth thank-you when he realizes Blue Diamond is no longer there. She has walked back to Yellow – in only two steps – and taken her aside. The two of them whisper in that same intense, exhausting-to-witness way they do everything else.

Steven, Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl have gathered in a bunch farther down the beach, next to the leg-ship. At a narrow-but-significant gap across from them, Connie gives both of who are presumably her parents a kiss on the cheek and darts to join the huddle. Drakken limps – funny, he doesn't remember ever hurting his foot – to a position between them and Greg.

On Greg's other side stands Bismuth.

Instantly, Drakken's body sheds all of its sleepiness, clenching into resolve instead, setting his nerves atingle and his reflexes afire. It is as if an enormous broom has been pushed through his mind, truly sweeping away every last bit of grog and distraction and whatever else is not in the neighborhood of don't-you-come-near-Lapis-again; don't-you-ever-ever-touch-her-again-ever! His resentment dangles a consent form in front of him, and he stands there, pen shaking, afraid of what will happen if he doesn't sign.

"You coming, Dad?" Steven says.

Greg shakes his head, chuckling a little. "No, Schtewball. I think I'd just be in the way."

Drakken gapes at Greg in awe. That is something Drakken would never be able to admit about himself. And here Greg has just done so without even flicking an eye. How has this man not been knighted yet?

"How 'bout you, Bismuth?" Steven says.

"No way! I'm not going to go be part of some – some Diamond entourage!" Bismuth's emphasis thickens, to such an extent that Drakken expects her to hock a loogie on the nearest person, Gem, or lion. Before her hatred can gag Drakken, it warms a billionth of a degree, a measurement only discernible by the most brilliant of chemists. "Look, I understand why you've gotta do this. And if it helps my old friends, I'd be the last person to stop you. But I can't do it, okay? I'm stayin' here."

Shego would have some witty remark for the occasion – oh joy or the like.

Drakken's well of sarcasm, however, is quite a bit shallower and not in much of a state to refill itself anytime soon. His tongue comes alive without brainpower behind it for a minute, and he calls out, "Grrkkkll…gnnn….nkkk – I'm staying too!" He stabs his hands onto his hips and stares at Bismuth. "I'm not leaving you alone with my girlfriend!"

Bismuth's head pulls back, chin nesting into her neck again. "Yeah, it'd be really weird if you were okay with that," she says. Mildly. So mildly.

Drakken has the sudden flash of her chilly weight coming down on him, knocking aside the vine that had become a conduit for the same power that tore Lapis to pieces, solid as a concrete wall between him and Yellow Diamond. He isn't sure how that coexists with what she did last year or what she did five thousand years ago, if it counters it any, paints over the cruelty, or merely sits there in ugly discord, like a big black square replacement button smack-dab in the middle of a shirt among its nice, neat, roundy originals.

Wordlessly, Garnet disappears into the house, as if she needs to take a bathroom break before heading into deep space, though Drakken's experience with Gems has taught him that this is unlikely. In a few minutes she's back, without an explanation or even a shrug, and even Dr. Drakken's spacious mind scarcely has room to speculate, fast as it's filling up.

The Crystal Gems – well, the Crystal Gems who still have functional bodies, that is – amass beside the gigantic pink leg-ship. Steven stands in front, which would be terrific if they were planning a group photo. Slightly less terrific when they're charting a course for another galaxy, to try and reason with an all-powerful recluse who wasn't on any Earth citizen's radar screen before today. Steven looks so small next to the Diamonds.

(Of course, Drakken thinks, Goliath himself would look small next to the Diamonds.)

Pearl turns to Drakken and Greg and Bismuth, and she strains a smile at them, the movement forced but not the sentiment. "Wish us luck," she says – a request Drakken would graciously honor if his lips weren't suctioned shut.

Bismuth laughs, a short, harsh huff. "Who needs luck? You proved you're still really good with that spear." Her dreadlocks seem to whisper-add, Just like old times?

The puckered skin around Pearl's gemstone relaxes a notch. "Well, if we're lucky, I won't need to be," she says, and as nervous as the words are, she still sounds like she's singing them.

Bismuth holds her palm up flat. Pearl hesitates a beat too long for her response to be classified as automatic or effortless, but she does slap her hand against Bismuth's and squeeze her twice-as-big-as-Pearl's fingers. When Pearl pulls away, Drakken could swear he sees tears in Bismuth's eyes.

Drakken's own are brimming, for entirely different reasons. The fact that he taught Lapis how to high-five means that it's not something they do on Homeworld – ergo, someone would have had to teach Bismuth, too. Who would that have been?

And why does he care?

Steven marches into the leg-ship, followed immediately by Garnet and Amethyst. It's strange, Drakken muses, that all of the Diamonds' spacecrafts take the form of humanoid limbs. Stranger still that Steven's mother received a leggy ship rather than one in that long-arm-of-the-law shape. Then again, the law needs legs, too, or how else would it run after the bad guys –

Realization leaps with a Sprroooing! into Drakken's brain, and for a luscious instant, everything is clear as a well-maintained swimming pool. Why, it's all so obvious – why did he not put it together before?

(Literally put it together.)

"Oooh! Oh!" Drakken cries, waving in big, elaborate sweeps to get Pearl's attention. "If this is a leg-ship and those are – were – arm-ships – does that mean they can fuse together to make one giant whole-person-ship?"

Before Pearl can answer, Yellow Diamond's eyes drop to Drakken with the neatness of a candy bar falling from a vending machine (if one is lucky enough to get a vending machine that actually releases candy bars and doesn't just eat one's money alive). "Why in the cosmos would you ask her?" she says.

Drakken blinks at Her Royal Golden Cobra, stares at her, studies her, because sometimes he misses sarcasm, and surely that's what this must be, because it makes no sense otherwise, only there isn't even a trace of mirth in her expression, an expression that could have been plucked right out of a deep freezer. "Um, because she's really smart?" His voice creeps a tad too high, but Drakken doesn't care. "Like, almost as smart as me and maybe even a little bit smarter when it comes to Gem stuff?"

Pearl's back is turned, so he'd need X-ray vision to see her expression, but he notices her left elbow, cocked at a stiff ninety degrees, sags to a more open, sloping angle. A little lamp of I-did-something-good-for-someone lights up in Drakken's chest.

The ship swings shut behind its last passenger – Blue Diamond, the merciful. The legs then proceed to bolt down the length of the beach, pumping to get enough momentum for takeoff, therefore turning the beach into an actual runway (as opposed to the ones at the airport that would be better named coastways or flyways). Its ankles bunch low for a crouch that lasts nearly no time at all before the ship has taken to the sky and zoomed away like a pair of disembodied polyester '70s pants. Drakken knows the ship isn't what's putting the roaring in his ears, considering the two arms made no noise at all when they were airborne and that it persists long after the pink pants fade from view.

Beside Drakken, Greg sighs and skims a hand over his bare scalp. "Phew! I don't know about you two, but I think I'd like to sit down."

Drakken becomes painfully aware of his own shaking knees, and a failsafe of left-over-from-his-villain-days pride locks into place around his heart. "Not me!" he exclaims. "I could do this for hours."

The next thing he knows, the sand is tipping up to meet him.

Two big arms – Drakken can't see them, but he can tell they're too cold to be Greg's – grab Drakken's waist, hauling him upright, and a heavy voice mutters that hours must be a lot shorter here on Earth. The feel of that arm around him is almost nauseating, but Drakken isn't about to jerk away and fall flat on his face and risk crushing Lapis in his pocket just to spite Bismuth. He has learned a few things since his reformation.

The eyelet-shaped lump in his pocket matches the one swelling in his throat.

Greg comes around and props Drakken up from the other side, and together they half-carry Drakken up the wood steps, across the porch, and into the cozy little house. Ordinarily, Drakken would be protesting, but right now he's too quivery-to-the-core to even recall the recipe for a protest, much less rustle up the ingredients. He sinks gratefully against Greg's sunburned shoulder.

Above the couch hovers a pink bubble, slipped gently around a triangular green gem that almost seems to grin at Drakken. Sleepily, he realizes that must have been what Garnet's last venture into the house was for. It looks like Peridot is suspended in a big puff of bubblegum.

Bismuth goes up and catches it with baffling tenderness. The bubble pops as soon as she makes manual contact with it, and Drakken ducks, expecting snaps of gum to explode onto the walls and into his hair, pasting each individual strand to the one next to it, leaving it in sticky clumps while his scalp's distress signals go unanswered.

That – eh-heh – doesn't happen. Why would it? All that happens is that Peridot's tiny gem falls into Bismuth's wide palm, and before Drakken can even collect enough energy to panic, Bismuth has ironed out a couch cushion with her other hand (just smoothing it, that is, not by turning her hand into an honest-to-goodness iron, which Drakken strongly suspects she can do if she wants to). She rests Peridot-in-stasis in the center, the stone hardly making an imprint.

The sight briefly soothes Drakken's full-body tremors. Taking advantage of this unafraid, un-trembly moment, he reaches into his pocket and retrieves the gemstone six-million-and-six times more valuable than any Doomsday device he ever hugged and believed would win him control of the planet, sends up breath-sized prayers for an extra helping of coordination since his usual rations can be pretty skimpy. His undoubtedly flinty gaze clacks against Bismuth's like a marble knocking a competitor, and to Drakken's surprise – and not-at-all dismay – hers is the one knocked out of the ring. She backs up from the couch, in the same respectful way Commodore Puddles will step aside when Drakken (and Drakken alone) reaches for his food dish.

Drakken lowers Lapis to the couch cushion, positioning her as close to Peridot as she can get without touching her. He doesn't exactly know how this works – okay, so he doesn't know at all – if they are being held in the same cell, awaiting release. But he can't imagine Lapis appreciating Peridot's spirit poking hers while she tries to remake her body.

He hopes he recognizes them when they come back. Sometimes he has trouble remembering people. Like that boy…whose name escapes Drakken's mind no matter what security measures he employs…

"And now we wait," Greg says from behind them. His voice is dry – not mean-dry, not Shego-dry, just a long flat wall of sympathy, saying he hates to wait almost as much as Drakken does.

Almost. Because no one could possibly hate waiting as much as I do! Especially now. Oh, this is worse than giving the cookies ten minutes to cool before you can eat them!

Drakken takes two steps backward and collapses to the floor immediately. When he was a supervillain, he would have sprung upright almost before he finished falling, boomeranged to his feet to show he was every bit as resilient and hardy as his less disaster-prone compatriots. Now, having expended his pride out on the beach, he can barely feel his legs beneath him, and he doesn't even bother forcing them to do anything other than fold, criss-cross-applesauce, while his backside shakes against the floorboards.

Bismuth strikes the same pose across from him, and even her lap seems too big, too strong, too formidable, but he doesn't have it in him to be frightened. "Okay if I sit here?"

"Mmmmgk," Drakken replies. He's too tired to chase her away, but also too tired to fake being pleasant.

Oddly enough, she seems to be able to loosely translate that. Her hand goes to the back of her neck and rubs, and her eyes move away from Drakken's. "Look, I know you don't like me very much," Bismuth says. "Right now, I'm not sure I like me very much. If it had been up to me, we'd have pretty much shattered every Gem who didn't join our cause, including the one" – she stops rubbing her neck and presses it, hard – "who saved my life today. The only friends I've ever had are still trying to figure out if they can trust me. Rose didn't even think I was worth telling them about."

Her words are gruff and soggy. Drakken tries to eye her from under a scowling, furious eyebrow, but doggone it, he can't shut off that ever-churning brainpower of his.

Bismuth was scorned by a member of her posse and promptly forgotten about. It clawed her up inside and left soot marks on her soul. She was hurt, she was angry, and all that heat warped her. She ended up trying to destroy the posse member's child, who had never done a thing other than try to prevent her from wreaking havoc on the innocent and guilty alike – on the whole world –

Sounding familiar yet?

Drakken clutches the sweat-soaked hair at his temples, fights back the urge to yank it out at the roots. No. He doesn't understand Bismuth. He doesn't want to understand this despicable creature who hurt his girlfriend! Even if she's also the almost-noble creature who defended him against Yellow Diamond, he wants to stay mad.

But that resolve– that fervor – it reminds him a little of batting away a cold compress that someone, probably Shego, is trying to swab his forehead with to bring down his triple-digit fever.

Fervor. Fever. Maybe his seventh-grade self was right all along, and those two words are interchangeable. And phooey on all the teachers who chopped off points for that!

Drakken looks at the woman across from him, with her fists that can cause so much damage and her personality like a Halloween night – crisp and pleasant, but also cold and teeming with scary things that can pop up with no warning. Glances, oh-so-longingly, at the stone resting on the couch, remembering how his girlfriend paid such a price for Bismuth's prejudice – more exorbitant than any fee even that shyster Jack Hench ever charged for a service. Pictures her swinging her hammer-fist up over her shoulder, grinning as she realizes that Lapis, in all her restraint, is not going to fight back. The memory cinches tight around him like a rope, and it isn't even his memory, but he can't release it, even though it barely leaves him enough air to breathe.

Drakken's fingers grapple for each other across the slick surface of his forehead, where the veins underneath are already pounding out a hard, unforgiving rhythm. This is it. This is one of his absolute greatest fears and has been ever since his reformation – that he has only been Photoshopped into the ranks of the good guys, that he does not truly belong. That he will, in the end, never be able to let go of his grievances. And suddenly, Drakken's mind is like a lightless forest, thoughts as tall and dark and gnarled as trees planted everywhere he turns, and it isn't a place he even wants to visit, much less get lost in.

A thin, glimmery remnant of goodness wiggles at him from between the branches, showing a way out. Drakken reaches for it, if for no other reason than that if he stays this bitter, he is going to become violently ill all over the floor, and he'd hate to do that to Steven's living room. If a plank floor can be friendly-looking, this one is.

"You got a headache, too?" asks someone Drakken forgot was even here. Greg. He nods in Drakken's direction, and Drakken realizes he has hunkered down on the floor, assumed the position of someone who needs to hold their own head on.

"Not just a headache," Drakken moans. "A full brain-ache." The words clack his jaw too hard on the way out.

"Don't they have potions for those these days?" Bismuth's voice, still sounding slushy.

Greg must be able to tell that Drakken's ability to speak has gone down the drain, because he replies for him. "Well, I know Tylenol can work wonders."

"Where does that grow?" Bismuth says.

Her face comes closer to Drakken's, and he no longer needs to hire a cartographer to read that. It's wrinkly, tender, concerned.

Concerned. She's concerned about his brain-ache.

Drakken props himself on his knees and squares off with Bismuth, staring straight at her and trying to sort her out. Blue Diamond's declaration – I have no idea who or what you are – rings true and fitting in Drakken's roaring ears. On the one hand, Bismuth is a biped, with a turned-forward face and opposable thumbs. On the other, her drizzly-sky skin, the snakes that hang to her shoulders in pastel rainbows, and the dent of her gem that brings new meaning to the term chest cavity are all traits of something foreign and frightening, something that has slammed into his girlfriend's wispy frame and knocked her right out of it.

And beneath all of that, somewhere inside, a heart. Not an actual, fist-sized aortic pump – unless Drakken has badly misunderstood Gem biology – but a personhood, swimming in cruelty and compassion and, above all, confusion.

Bismuth cocks her head to one side, the same tilt Drakken finds himself using whenever he encounters a fascinating riddle he wants to solve, a glorious collection of circuitry he wishes to understand. She is trying to figure this out, he concludes with a start. Does that matter?

He isn't sure. He can't roll over and forget that she is guilty of crimes against one of the few people Drakken has no trouble considering more important than himself.

But if she wants to understand Lapis, Dr. Drakken is clearly the best person she could ask!

Drakken pulls himself up to a halfway-kneel and rests his weight on his ankles. His heartbeat goes wild, those forehead-veins gasping for oxygenated blood that seems to have made a detour to the roof of his mouth. "All right!" he declares before he can talk himself out of it. "You and I" – he motions to Bismuth – "we need to have a talk!"

With Bismuth gawking back at him, her neck tucked, Drakken draws a fortifying breath and proclaims, "You tell me what the Elite are like, and I'll tell you what Lapis is like!" His fingertips can't stay still, fiddle at his waist as if they are trying to tickle each other. "I want to promise I won't yell at you, but that's not something I'm ever going to be able to guarantee when I'm discussing something I really, really, really care about! So – consider yourself forewarned."

Bismuth gives an absent nod, probably already plotting her first argument – a thought that squeezes sweat from Drakken's palms. Her face tightens, grows mean, as she dives into something deep-deep-deep-down and painful, like a plantar wart you almost forgot about until you tried to walk on it.

"Elite are entitled," Bismuth says. "They think they exist in this universe to get whatever they want, whenever they want it. Ain't no shuttin' them up until they get it. And the rest of us?" Bitterness spews from her like tar and smoke out of a cigarette. "Our job is to give it to them. Period. End of story."

For a moment, Drakken attempts to imagine Lapis lounged on some lap-of-luxury chair on Homeworld, her hands fanned around her head, lazily issuing orders for caviar and hand-fed grapes. But it's like trying to imagine two parallel lines intersecting – a really good movie director with a huge special-effects budget might be able to make it look realistic, but it could never actually happen. And in a rush of disorientated anger, Drakken is overwhelmed by the urge to throttle whoever was in charge in those optical illusions, whoever made Bismuth believe them.

"That is so not true of Lapis," Drakken says. Even with the teenage slang hanging onto it, the confident boom that issues forth is a pleasant surprise even to him, finding its way out of an exhausted body barely big enough to support it. "She hates to be a burden. She hates it so much! If you ask her how she's doing, she always, always – well, ninety-five-point-eight percent of the time, which rounds up to always – says she's 'fine'! Even if she's isn't 'fine'! Even if she couldn't possibly in a hundred million years be 'fine' – she'll tell you not to worry!

"And she's just now getting her to the place where she'll say 'Thank you' if you give her something." Drakken thrusts his hand out before Bismuth can say a darn thing. "As opposed to, 'I don't need this,' or 'You shouldn't waste this on me, or 'I don't deserve this." He hears her say those things again, in their fragile little casings, as she hides behind her bangs, and he has to wait for the acid rain in his throat to subside before he continues. "Why, she told me once that she didn't want me 'pampering' her, so she wouldn't go back to being 'that spoiled little prissy Homeworld Gem she used to be'!"

Bismuth looks at him with nothing short of astonishment. Drakken gorges himself on that expression until he feels he might burst at the seams. His thoughts grow full and sloshy with something that isn't as tasty as he remembers it being, and opening his lips and releasing some of the smugness is as much a relief as a much-needed burp. "Whatever she did or didn't do on Homeworld, it's made her feel very, very guilty! I think – I think there was a point where she didn't like herself at all."

Drakken squirms forward, locking his eyes with Bismuth's not-quite-as-skeptical-as-they-were ones. His own, he knows, are begging her to empathize. She closes hers, as if she needs a minute to edit an entry in her mental encyclopedia.

It gives Drakken just enough time to shudder. Lapis's past is like the water the Titanic went down in – you yearn to know more about it, yet it's too frigid and inhospitable for you to stick an appendage in for longer than five seconds. Thinking of Lapis existing somewhere in those frigid, inhospitable conditions threatens to freeze his insides solid.

"The Elite travel in swarms," Bismuth finally says, eyes still shut but with no doubt to undermine her next charge. "Like predators. Whenever one of us crosses their paths, they pull together and start all gossiping and snickering. Every single one of them."

Her eyelids jerk, and Drakken knows what she's seeing because he sees the same thing, or at least a translation of it – those catty girls back in high school, tittering over Drew Lipsky's zits and his chin that was never visited by the Hairy Fairy and his glasses so thick they elevated him from the proverbial deer in headlights to just the proverbial headlights. Lapis's bubbling-brook giggle is not even the same species as theirs, and the idea of anyone comparing them sparks and fizzes in Drakken's head like the old Pop Rocks and soda reaction of urban legend. Only unlike the Pop Rocks story, which only a scientific ignoramus would have taken seriously, this feels as though it truly could explode, blast out the back wall.

"We-ell," Drakken warbles. This one is more intricate, requires carefuller handling. "Lapis has whispered to me some secrets about the Crystal Gems that she found out while she was in that mirror for five thousand years." Okay, so that last part was unnecessary, but being completely magnanimous to this woman reminds Drakken of Alpine skiing in the summer – in its impossibility, if not its kamikaze nature. "But who was I going to tell? And she said in a friendly way…like a friend…talking to a friend…about other friends."

Bismuth wrinkles a look at him that doesn't seem entirely convinced.

Drakken dislikes that look, dislikes it with a fervor that borders on fever. He folds his arms and leans forward, eyeing Bismuth in the way he remembers eyeing Kim Possible in his last few months as a supervillain, after she saved him from a burial at sea before he was even dead. His nervous system (which was "nervous" in more than one sense, as a general rule) had always viewed her as its single biggest threat, and then all at once it couldn't decide whether or not she counted as an enemy anymore. Most perplexing. "So? What else is so bad about the Elite?" he says in his best latent-volcano tone, the one that always got the henchmen jumping to obedience.

Unfortunately, Bismuth does not intimidate as easily as the henchmen.

"They're snobs," she says – promptly, as if she has had this list written up for a long time and could recite it even if a tornado were ripping apart the landscape outside. "Elite hang out with other Elite. Elite only acknowledge other Elite. Everyone else is beneath them."

Drakken laughs, the way he would laugh if someone told him fleas were the most intelligent life form on Earth and had been manipulating historical events for ten thousand years from their hideouts on doggy derrieres. Although that would explain a few things….Nevertheless, it remains illogical. Illogical to the point of absurdity. The kind of thing so ridiculous that – his psychiatrist has reminded him over and over again – any energy Drakken could spend getting angry could be put to better use slapping his leg.

"Wrong again!" he hoots – and, yes, goes ahead and slaps his leg. "Look, Lapis hangs around with Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl. Unless, of course, you mean to tell me that they'd all be Elite on Homeworld, too!"

Oooh, he has her there! For Bismuth, that must be the equivalent of slandering her friends, and it almost prickles Drakken with guilt. He sure hopes the rest of the Crystal Gems can't take offense from ten zillion lightyears away.

Sure enough, Bismuth lets out a sound that less closely related to a chuckle than a pickle, soaked in vinegar, brined until crunchy. Even Drakken, pickle-lover that he is, finds it less than appetizing. "Garnet isn't supposed to exist, according to Homeworld, 'cause she's a fusion of two different types of Gems," she says.

Well, Drakken has no idea what the point would be in two of the same type of Gem fusing, but he nods her on anyway.

"Amethyst? She's a Quartz. They're valuable – as grunt soldiers. Plus, she's about ten times smaller than she's supposed to be, which would make her 'defective' to the Elite."

Drakken's jumpy fingertips relax enough to press together, and he taps them levelly against his chin, relishing how urbane he must look. "And Pearl?"

Clouds pass over Bismuth's eyes, and Drakken worries for a second that that tornado just might come sweeping through and rip the house off its foundation after all. He immediately regrets asking, regrets feigning composure as only a true egotist can do when he has clawed his way to the top and must remain there at any cost.

"'Pearls' are common servants," Bismuth says. Hisses, as though there's a reptile lurking behind her gnashed-together teeth. "They're the absolute bottom of Homeworld's food chain. Up there, you don't hang out with a Pearl. You own a Pearl."

Shock. Half of Drakken's cerebellum goes into it just hearing Bismuth drop the word "Pearls," even though he knows by now that most Gems come in multiples. It's the way she pronounces it, the way Drakken pronounces "Diablos," like she must soldier through pain to reach it. The other half of Drakken's cerebellum quickly follows when he calls Pearl to mind, her pokey nose and her bright, sharp eyes and her voice that could easily be a long-lost Beethoven symphony, and tries to find a place where she and slavery meet and make sense together.

Drakken's thoughts crawl back into areas he usually doesn't let himself run through. Dark images – things he had planned for his enemies once he was Overlord of the Planet Earth and things he's blocked out from history classes over the years, things too much for even his dastardly mind to dream up. They muddy even the usually-clear place until he has no idea what the proper response is. He wants to cry for Pearl, he wants to stomp his foot and scream at the implication that Lapis was ever part of this, he wants to open a valve in his overloaded head, and he wants to make it all right somehow.

At last, Drakken swallows (seven or eight times), clears his throat, and stares Bismuth right in her furious mug. "Bismuth, I swear to you – Lapis has never treated Pearl like an object." He should probably try to hush his voice, only that isn't something he's ever been very good at it, and maybe it's better this way, anyway – maybe she needs to hear the earnestness shaking in it. "They haven't always gotten along perfectly, but it's not because Lapis has ever looked down on her.

"Pearl can corroborate this," he adds. For the first time ever, Drakken is grateful for all the time his former self spent in courtrooms.

Bismuth just stares down at her hands so hard Drakken half-expects them to burst into flames. (Hey, for a woman who takes showers in lava, surely that's not out of the question!) He's glad they don't, though. He doesn't know where the fire extinguisher is in this house. He's not sure where anything is in this house.

This house, which Drakken is only now realizing looks pretty beat-up itself, the windows blown out in glass shards across the floor, beams exposed that should be hidden away in secret, plaster spilling from splits in the walls. When Greg walks into the kitchen and opens a cabinet, Drakken fears – in that vague, distant, weary manner of an uncomfortable dream – that it will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Or, to be more accurate, "the straw that breaks the cabinet's backing," and it will tear loose from the wall and bury Greg in a pile of rubble.

Drakken glances frantically at the ceiling directly above the couch, above Lapis, as if he can pin it in place with his eyes alone. He doesn't need to worry, though – at least not too much. That's one of the few places where the ceiling doesn't threaten to cave.

A yawn begs for release in Drakken's throat, but he denies it. Catches his eyelids on his fingertips as they begin to droop. He can't let himself feel sleepy, much less doze off, until Lapis is back in her body, stronger than she looks and capable of defending herself.

And if he can stay awake for three whole days attempting to conquer a particularly irksome jar of pickles, then by golly he can stay awake for someone as important as Lapis!

One look at the two wonderful stones on the couch, and that's all it takes. A rocket of inspiration blasts off from its launching pad in Drakken's oh-so-clever brain. Of course! Why didn't he think of it before?

Drakken rocks forward on his knees, undeterred by the ominous creak of the floorboards beneath him. If they hold Bismuth, they'll hold him. "What about a Peridot?" he says, and only a trace of guilt chafes him – sticking "a" in front of a name will never rub him right. "Would a Peridot be Elite?"

Bismuth huffs again, eyes rolling. "Are you kiddin' me? Peridots are about as far from Elite as you can get without being a Pearl! No Elite would ever –"

Drakken will hand it to Bismuth: she catches on much quicker than he would have expected. Her eyes abruptly stop rolling and snap to the couch, where Lapis and Peridot are hunkered down in their gems like a pair of little girls in sleeping bags. "These two?" She breathes it the way any true scientist would when discovering something new that cannot be reconciled with any of the natural laws she leans on.

"They're best friends," Drakken says. He can't keep a slightly smug smile off his lips – one of the few parts of him that aren't sore-throbbing. They do feel too loose and slippery somehow, though, as if they might fall right off and land in his lap if he isn't careful, and careful isn't a thing he can achieve right now.

One side of Bismuth's mouth curves the tiniest bit, like a miniature comma. Drakken half-expects her to begin making the churny, grindy noise of a struggling-to-recalibrate machine, a sound that isn't anywhere near Drakken's list of favorites because it means you got it wrong the first time and iced your front door rather than the midriff-baring girl a few feet away.

Just as quickly, however, the comma drops into a frown. Bismuth's gaze travels to her hands again, as if she's finally become aware of how much damage they can cause, have caused. "Peridot," she says. "I really liked her. But she's not any fan of me, not after what I did to Lapis. How is she gonna be my little buddy now?"

Her sudden wistfulness is so incongruous with the suit of armor she wears, Drakken is surprised that the chain mail doesn't go peeling back and expose tender flesh, scraped-up and susceptible to splinters. His flesh can't decide whether to go angry-hot or stricken-cold and instead settles for squirming like there are live caterpillars beneath it. Reverse silkworms, maybe, because he can feel himself slowly unspooling with every vivid flash of Lapis's reflections – the fist driving into her own bared midriff, the puff of blue smoke that replaced her. Remembering how Peridot tackled him, arms locked tight around his waist, this very morning doesn't calm him any.

When Drakken peers back at Bismuth, he sees every bully he ever shared a cafeteria with, whether the food is school-issue-foul or prison-issue-foul. Waiting for the weaker ones with punches and cruel words. Only none of those bullies have ever looked back at him with near-sadness in their gaze – have ever looked him in the eye, period.

Greg returns from the kitchen and pads on surprisingly light feet over to Drakken's side. Without so much as a word, Greg curls five of Drakken's fingers around a glass of water and sticks two Tylenols in his other palm. Drakken shoots him a look of gratitude and receives a soft smile in return.

Hands shaking, Drakken gulps the pills down with nine or ten long swallows of water instead of knocking them back with a single sip the way steel-abbed hunks in action movies do, because that only works for steel-abbed hunks in action movies. (At least, that's what Shego told him after performing the Heimlich maneuver on him.) They (the pills, not the fictional hunks) squiggle their way down his esophagus, unfazed by the myriad of lumps in it, one for each emotion flailing him.

The question Bismuth just asked hangs between them like a kite stuck in a tree – How is she gonna be my little buddy now?

Part of him just wants to jeer it away. Another part of him, a part that Drakken almost can't believe exists, wants to explain.

If he turned around and glanced at his reflection in one of those glass shards, Drakken knows he would see his eyebrow flattened over his eyes, drawing the skin beneath them into black folds. "Maybe she can't," he says, jaw membrane-tight, scarcely able to move. "At least, not right away. Once you hurt someone, there are consequences – even after you're sorry. I should know. I've hurt enough people."

"You?" Bismuth points at him, her fingertip squared-off and terrifying. Any other time, Drakken might scurry away from it.

"I used to be a supervillain," he says instead, "and try to conquer the world."

Bismuth blinks. "Would not have guessed that."

"Me neither," Greg says.

Drakken holds his breath and waits to receive a heaping dose of judgment. But none comes. The air is empty where it should be filled with disgust. It reminds him of opening a gallon of milk that you're sure is long past its expiration date, cringing as you wait for the pungent smell – and then, instead, you just smell milk.

And it makes him both braver and kinder, a vitamin for his goodness level.

Drakken looks at Bismuth again. "In my experience," he says, almost not recognizing the consoling tone as his own, "most people can forgive. Eventually."

Bismuth nods. She all but simmers with relief and regret and remorse and a bunch of other words, some of which might not even begin with "re."

For an instant now, as Drakken eyeballs her, he gets the feeling he is looking at her as one ex-con to another, both fighting their way back into a world that has every reason not to trust them. And in that instant, Drakken is actually grateful for the dreadlocks that snake down to her shoulders, because there was only one guy in Cell Block D who had dreadlocks, and he was a nice guy. Not that they exchanged friendship bracelets or anything, but he had never so much as laid a fingernail on Drakken or spoken a syllable to him. Even Drakken can't associate him with panic.

"Got anything else about the Elite, Bismuth?" Drakken says.

"Oh, I have plenty," Bismuth says. "Elite are conceited and cowardly and selfish."

Another flash invades, dragging with it the fear on Lapis's face as she poofed into smoke. Another band tightens around Drakken's stomach. He turns away – he can't look at Bismuth anymore.

"She! Saved! Your! Life!" Drakken hasn't broken into a banshee-shriek like that in a good long time, and it scrapes on its way out. Usually he warmed up first with a nice villainous cackle.

"I know!" Bismuth shoots back, throwing her arms up. "That's why I'm confused!"

Her pain is almost palpable, but this is as close as Drakken can get. He closes his eyes and bites into his middle knuckle until his own pain overshadows hers. Not a hard state to get to for him.

"Most of the Elite think they're too good to fight. Think that should be everyone else's job. Most of them don't care enough about anything to fight. Anything besides themselves." Bismuth's voice thickens, but Drakken doesn't turn back toward her. "They thought they were –"

Something spills from the clear place in Drakken's brain before he's even checked it over. "They thought they were all that – but they weren't?" he blurts.

"Yeah," Bismuth says. "Exactly that."

Drakken tilts his head back and inspects the ceiling again, as well as he can through a ripple of tears. Their joints and edges look the way Bismuth sounds – secret places stripped without warning of armor, unpolished and scratchy as if they're fresh off the tree. "Raw" wood, Drakken has heard furniture salesmen say, although that's never made any sense to him. It's not as though anyone cooks wood. Burns it, yes. Cooks it, no. (Chemically, those are very different processes.)

Yes, puzzling over that is much easier than recalling how vibrant and full of life Lapis and Peridot were just a few hours ago – wait. More time has passed since he last thought that. What time is it? Is it tomorrow already? His watch is no help, its crystal smashed, its big hand frozen between two and three and its little hand gone AWOL. Probably somewhere in the debris of the barn that his brave and selfless and non-Elitist Lapis hurled on top of Blue Diamond.

"But do you think they were born – I mean, that they believed they were 'all that' from the beginning?" Greg asks. "Or do you think they were told that so often by so many people that they finally just started believing it?"

The question is so well-phrased that it makes Drakken momentarily jealous. But a larger portion of him is glad, because there is no accusation in the way Greg says it, whereas Drakken knows his own voice would be weaponized.

Bismuth shifts, as though she has some silkworms unraveling under her skin too, and Drakken tries not to lick his chops at the sight. Anyone who uses "Lapis" and "selfish" in the same context deserves to be uncomfortable, as far as he is concerned. "I suppose it could be that," she says to her hands, her tone so dulled that it, in turn, takes the edge off Drakken's joy. It leaves behind the clear place, bursting with evidence that Drakken could use to win a court case against Perry Mason himself.

"Let me tell you a story, Bismuth." Drakken gives his fingers a ghost-story-appropriate wiggle. "A completely true story about something that happened last year! It just might change your mind!"

Bismuth sort of grunts, but she motions him onward.

"The reason Peridot knew so much about the Cluster was that she was the Gem assigned to go to Earth and keep tabs on it! Once she figured out there were other Gems still living here, though –" and Drakken is just now putting together the fact that the Diamonds truly did believe there was no more Gem life on Earth, that they didn't purposefully lie to Peridot – "she was appointed a bodyguard. Her name was…Jasper." Even after all this time, saying her name still stings him like a briar bush. For a number of reasons.

"Jasper? Let me guess. The only Jasper to come out right in her whole Beta kindergarten?"

Bismuth sounds desperate to get rid of the words, as if they are lemonade that she forgot to add sugar to because she was too busy contemplating her new dog whistle and wondering how its sneaky, inaudible notes could best be harnessed as an instrument of world domination. She must have met Jasper in the war, Drakken realizes. When he nods, her eyes slit.

For the first time, Drakken feels that he and Bismuth might be on the same page – or at least on the same general double-page spread.

"Since Lapis knew about the Crystal Gems, she was taken prisoner." Drakken stops, releases a few ahem!s he's only needed to use a handful of times since his career change. This is the furthest thing in the world from evil, but just like all of his other schemes, it flounders under one detail he forgot to factor in. In this case, how danged hard it is to talk about this. "They brought her to Earth with them."

Drakken has the strange urge to burst into giggles at the thought of the Peridot he knows taking anyone prisoner.

He doesn't, though. He folds his fists and begins again. "The Crystal Gems broke out, crashed the ship, Peridot escape-podded out, and then it was just Jasper about to crush the rest of the Crystal Gems. I guess Garnet was the one who beat her? Because she was thinking about fusion, and she grabbed Lapis – I mean, she had her in a face-lock!"

If Drakken isn't mistaken, Bismuth cringes.

It gives his courage enough of a boost for him to ride it straight into territory where it would ordinarily slam on the brakes. "She demanded that Lapis fuse with her," he says.

"A good Homeworld soldier?" Bismuth says. "Wanting to fuse with a different type of Gem? Man, she must have flipped since the war days."

Drakken ahem!s again. "I don't think her sanity has ever been anything to brag about," he says. "More importantly, Lapis has told me she didn't know what was right and what was wrong and who was good and who was bad at that point in her life. All she knew was that she loved Steven!"

"He's the one who got her out of the mirror?"

It's the first of her responses Drakken has heard without that incredulous snap to it. She sounds almost…whatever the opposite of "incredulous" is. Credulous, if that's a word.

"Yes." Drakken has to clamp down on his tongue to keep from reminding Bismuth how Lapis got into that mirror, to keep from sounding like he wants to remove her scalp, rainbow dreads and all. "She said yes. They fused."

Such short, simple sentences, and yet Drakken has swerve each one around all the lumps as if he is guiding them through an obstacle course. He presses the back of his wrist to his eyes and continues, "And then Lapis sicced her ocean powers on the fusion and chained her up with water! And she dragged her – it – them – however that works – to the very, very, very bottom of the ocean! And she held her – them – there."

Drakken suddenly pictures her – not Malachite, but Lapis, her tiny teeth grinding against the pressure from one side to homogenize with Jasper and on the other to give up entirely. The image is enough to unravel that last loose thread of himself, except that the clear space grabs that thread and begins to weave it into something stark and inescapable with the expertise of a man who has come to accept that he's inherited his mother's aptitude for knitting. Nothing you would hang over your fireplace, this tapestry, any more than you would decorate with photographs of earthquake damage. No, this is the kind of thing that belongs in a museum, as a memory and a work of art.

A meepmorp, Drakken thinks with a twinge.

He has to show it to Bismuth. It's more important than almost anything he's ever done in his life.

"The other Crystal Gems were looking for her, trying to save her from Jasper," Drakken says. "Steven managed to get a hold of Lapis in his dream – don't ask me how – and asked her to tell him where she was. And she refused! She – she wasn't going to let herself be set free if there was a risk of Jasper getting free, as well. She was fully prepared to spend eternity in her own chains to keep Jasper from hurting her friend!" Drakken finishes with a dramatic flourish that, with any luck, compensates for his early stammering.

Not even so much as a whisper of breath from Bismuth. Being a Gem, she has that option, and of course she takes it.

"After six months of this, she collapsed into unconsciousness." Drakken drops to the floor, limbs sprawled, and – ooh – almost nicks a finger on a sparkly bit of broken glass. "Finally, the Crystal Gems found the fusion, took her down, and freed Lapis! But she never – never – told where she was. Steven had to figure it out for himself!

"She sacrificed everything she was to save him," Drakken continues. A sob tries to break loose, and Drakken contorts his lips in the hope that he can keep it from getting past them. Rather silly, he admits, but he's willing to grant himself some silliness on a day when he agreed to go to a wedding and ended up taking part in Space Giants Part IV (and everyone knows only the first two films in that series are any good). "I don't know how you measure selfishness, but where I come from, that is the exact opposite!"

When Bismuth bobs her head in assent, Drakken is sure someone has lifted that old sixteen-ton weight everyone is always singing about from his achy back.

"That's crazy," Bismuth says, running her thumb over a spot of torn wood in the floor. She shakes the snaky hair. "I'd never thought she had it in her."

In spite of everything, Drakken smiles wide enough to throw out a cheek muscle. He scoots in closer – it's bug-bite itchy to be so near to her, but one is supposed to keep one's friends close and one's enemies closer, correct? – and peers into the slits that are no longer slammed down quite so tightly. "Neither did Jasper," he says – gosh, was that too smug?

Bismuth doesn't appear to care one way or the other. "What happened to Jasper, anyway?" she ventures.

This time, Drakken scoffs before even considering if it's a good idea. "She decided to fuse with a Corruption and get Corrupted herself. Actually, she never decided on the getting-Corrupted part, but as my erstwhile teenage nemesis once said, there's such a thing as self-foiling!" Another twinge that surprises him – he hasn't mourned his Brainwashing Shampoo (and Cranium Rinse!) in ages, but maybe it's not meant for him. Maybe there is just something inherently sad about someone doing that to themselves.

"Smart move," Bismuth says, dripping with sarcasm that would do Shego proud.

It also calls attention back to Drakken's headache for some reason. He scrubs at his temples – the hammers behind them are no longer pounding quite as hard as earlier. Which is good, because when he looks at Bismuth and her mammoth fists, hammers are in the running for The Very Last Things He Wants To Think About.

"I'm guessin' it wouldn't work if I told you the Elite practically worship the Diamonds and they'll get any Gem who thinks for herself labeled a traitor?" Bismuth says.

A question mark. They have attained a question mark.

Hope, hope, hope, hope!

Drakken adopts his best imitation of Shego's pointy and unparalleled "droll" look, only without letting the eyes sag. They get to half-mast and they'll fall all the way and probably not open for another six hours (which is long enough for the Apocalypse to begin, if it happens relatively quickly). "You were there when she threw a barn on Blue Diamond's head, Bismuth," he says, basting the drollness over his voice, too.

"Hey, I said I didn't think it'd work."

Drakken startles forward and stares at Bismuth. Just as he thought – her mouth lurks on the edge of a laugh. A friendly one that the vengeful part of him can't explain away no matter how hard it tries.

"I guess the Diamonds are our real enemies," Bismuth says, without seeming to expect an answer.

Gulp. Every weak, selfish instinct Drakken possesses – a list still discouragingly long – begs him to let it go at that, exonerate Lapis and walk away from the rest of a mess that isn't his. But there is another part of him, a part that is a scientist first and foremost, a part that can't let her continue to wallow in her ignorance, that can't stand any more untruths, even ones that are three-quarters accurate.

"Maybe not?" Drakken says.

Heat flares in Bismuth's eyes. "You know something I don't?"

Doubtlessly, but that could keep them here all day. More pressingly, how is he to explain something he himself doesn't fully understand? Steven's brilliant Spider-Man analogy likely won't work on Bismuth, as uncultured as she is.

After an aggravatingly long silence, a thought pokes its green, leafy self out of the clear place – Start with what she already knows.

Double gulp, leaving Drakken's own mouth dry and dissatisfied – unsatisfied? – in spite of the many swigs he takes from his water glass. "You remember how the battle ended today, right?"

"Yeah. They mistook Steven for Pink Diamond somehow." Bismuth's voice twists back into confusion.

A nervous laugh bubbles from Drakken. No, "bubbles" makes it sound a lot smoother than it really is. In reality, this thing trips over his bottom row of teeth and comes sprawling out of him, end over end, along with the words, "It may not have been…exactly…one-hundred-percent….of a mistake."

"What are you talking about?" Now Bismuth bears down on him, squinting with the deliberate disdain of a seasoned DA getting ready to rattle off a list of charges she has memorized. Drakken has to look away from the squint, from the accusation.

What is he talking about? This is information he received secondhand (possibly third- or fourth-hand, depending on who told Steven), and now he is expected to pass it on to someone who nearly killed his girlfriend back before he was even born. His girlfriend whose gemstone lies on the couch, resting and peaceful. How far along is she in the process of revamping her body? He hopes she won't change too much – he likes everything about her just the way it is, and can she hear the conversation they're having, and uh-oh, Bismuth's still waiting for an answer, isn't she?

Well, let her wait! Drakken thinks for a furious instant. The stress of the day has clamped around his head and done terrible things to its contents. His genius brain, which was solid and stable this morning, is now liquid and runny – much more pressure, and it might evaporate entirely, and –

That's it. That's it.

"You know how there are three states of matter?" Drakken begins. He prays she does know that – she is a Gem who bathes in lava, so how could she not know? His mind is too liquefied to think in any language other than chemistry right now.

Bismuth nods.

"Well, there are three states of Pink Diamond, too." Anxiety circulates through Drakken's bloodstream, ordering him to get – this – right. "The first is Pink Diamond. And the third is Steven."

"What? How is that possi –" Bismuth stops halfway through the word that will always be a last name, not an adjective, by default to Drakken. Rigor mortis seems to take control of her face, and she isn't even dead. She unfreezes only enough to breathe, "Rose?"

It's no longer a name to her. It's a secret password to somewhere Bismuth obviously isn't sure she wants to be.

Drakken stops and counts down from five in his mind, the same dramatic mid-rant pause every supervillain supplies before he reveals the most ingenious aspect of his plan. He may be retired from villainy now – yes, still the best decision he's ever made– but that doesn't mean he can't take time to appreciate the finer theatrics of it.

For the duration of two long shivers down Drakken's spinal column, the air is still and so is everyone else in the room. Bismuth breaks the state of cryogenics by leaping to her feet, every enormous muscle in her body clenched. "It makes sense," she says, and she's too quiet, and it's scaring Drakken. "She was so strong even compared to the other Quartzes. Never took us to see her Kindergarten. The way she looked so sad when I would talk about shattering the rest of the Diamonds – finishing what I thought she started –"

Drakken watches as, in that moment, whatever holds all of Bismuth's beliefs in place inside her unbuckles and everything goes spilling away from her. He has experienced that before – the mad dash to collect every detail before it can get lost or be trampled by enemies, the sickening rush to replant it before its roots can wither, the trembling grip on whatever you can salvage as you try to strap it back in, knowing it will never have the structural integrity it once did…and he wouldn't wish that on anyone.

(Well, except Professor Dementor. And Jack Hench. And maybe even Hank Perkins.)

Bismuth drives a punch into one wall, smashing a hole into the already-crumbling sheetrock [?]. If she'd had her hand-hammer out, the whole house would probably tumble. "She kept that from me?"

Fright pours down Drakken's sides in sweaty streams, pasting his lab coat to his skin. "Have you ever heard the saying 'don't shoot the messenger'?" he squeaks. Was going for something a little more commanding than a squeak, but that's darn near impossible when he tries not to look at that hole, tries not to imagine it as Lapis's bare non-navel.

Greg pulls himself up from where he has practically melted into the short-back-long-seat chair and speaks up, in that calm, wise way that cancels out any exhaustion. "If it means anything to you, Bismuth, she didn't tell me either – and we had a kid. Not even Garnet and Amethyst knew about it."

Loath as he is to admit it, Bismuth catches what Greg isn't saying before Drakken does. "Pearl?" she demands.

Drakken is supremely relieved that he can't answer that question for her.

Greg nods, his gaze wandering from Bismuth's. Both the head movement and the can't-look look are gill-stuffed with respect, the kind Drakken tried to chase after with killer robots and Brainwashing Shampoo for so long. It clogs Drakken's throat anew, and he's glad to have something to focus on besides the anger-bomb that's surely going to level what remains of the house once Bismuth detonates it. Which should be any second now.

But – to Drakken's absolute flabbergasted…ness – Bismuth doesn't appear angry at all anymore. Her neck shudders as if a spider has dropped down it, but it isn't fear he's seeing, he knows. It's grief.

It's grief, and Drakken can't get a surge protector up in time to keep from feeling it right along with her.

"Poor Pearl," Bismuth says. She sinks back down to a sit, and she clearly can't form anything as solid as a glare, not behind what must be sixteen fluid ounces of tears. "Having to carry that alone all those years."

Bismuth smears a hand down the length of her face as though she's trying to erase it. She looks so much like a Crystal Gem when she does that. The observation feels like a betrayal to Drakken, though he has no idea of who (or whom, or whatever those ever-changing rules of grammar want him to say).

Drakken wraps his shaky arms around himself and knots them firmly. If he lets go, there's no telling where he'll end up. "So, you see, maybe not even all of the Diamonds are…evil." The word slips without ease or grace from between his lips, like the name of an ex-girlfriend (not that he has many of those). "One of them was your best friend – and – and – and you should have seen Blue Diamond's face when Steven showed her those Corrupted Gems! She looked so – so – guilty!"

"Good," Bismuth says. "She should be." She growls and bounces a fist emphatically off the floorboards.

Not emphatically enough to break through, however, and Drakken notices that she peeks quickly at the floor as if to make sure she hasn't hurt it before she hardens up again. He looks at her, studies the just-about-blue shade of her, studies the wires now visible in her fierceness, wondering suddenly why she gets to have rainbow hair when all the other Gems he's met have been combined to one coordinated color. Wondering something else, too, something much more vital to making peace.

"Did Blue Diamond used to –" Drakken pulls that question over, works on replacing its taillights and hubcaps before letting it back on the road. (What was he going to say – "own you"?) "Was she – I mean, were you – Ugnnnk. I can't think of a non-demeaning way to say this!"

Bismuth grabs the question and performs a tune-up on it that would do Eddy proud while Drakken is still sputtering. "Was I made to serve Blue Diamond?"

Drakken nods.

"Yes." Bismuth laughs, although there's about as much humor in it as in an ambulance siren (which is to say, pretty much none). "Didn't work out too well."

Drakken's stomach pitches as he watches her lace her fingers in front of her and then pull them apart and lay them flat against the floor. Wires or not, she still looks like she could wrestle a cougar to the ground in the time it would take a spectator to open a bag of peanuts. It's a mystery to him – how could Blue Diamond have raised two Gems as opposite as Bismuth and his Lapis Lazuli?

Then again, one slip in the chemical process of creating carbon dioxide and you've got carbon monoxide instead…

The chair creaks as Greg leans forward, tilting his big brown mullet (that would also make Eddy proud) to one side. Just seeing him is enough to relax the aches in Drakken's back. "Do you think that's part of why you reacted so strongly to Lapis, Bismuth?" he says. "Knowing that you two served the same Diamond, but she had it so much better than you?"

Just when Drakken thought he couldn't admire this man any more than he already did.

Bismuth squints, but she doesn't seem to be staring a confession out of a criminal anymore. Her focus is somewhere beyond the both of them, somewhere near the plaster-drizzling ceiling, and intense, like a mad scientist attempting to assemble an outsourced (okay, okay – stolen) Doomsday device when the only set of instructions he had time to grab before security strolled by turned out to be written in Portuguese. "I guess so," she says.

It's amazing how three words (three words that aren't even "I love you," at that) can clear the atmosphere in a room. The tension slides from Drakken's shoulders, a deep, warm, clean ache spreading through him. Sort of the sensation you get once your flu shot is over and done with, and the needle is thrown away, and you begin to let yourself sort of, almost, trust that the worst may actually be over.

"I just got one question." Bismuth wedges her big self between Drakken and the overturned coffee table, and uncertainty spikes through him.

All right. Check that. Maybe the shot is still yet to come, and maybe Bismuth is holding her hand against the plunger, and maybe they both have to endure the shot in order to fully eradicate the bacteria. Ordinarily, Drakken would jerk away at the very concept, but if this is for Lapis – his Lapis, who has already sacrificed so much – he can find the courage. He's got to.

"Yes?" Drakken says it as coolly as he possibly can – which is not very.

"If your girlfriend's that good, why didn't she rebel with us?"

Oh doodles.

Drakken remembers hearing somewhere that someone's hands can be the best indicators of their sincerity, and even though he can't watch Bismuth's hands without seeing them hit Lapis, his gaze is repeatedly drawn to them, the way a tongue will be drawn to a cord sore, reawakening the hurt over and over again. His own fingertips begin to tap together, matching the panic pounding throughout the whole of his body, and he closes his eyes. He can't hear Lapis's exact words in his mind, only how she held her voice so stiff so that it wouldn't tremble – which she was better at than Drakken had ever been, but still not entirely successful. The truth pokes its bittersweet way into the clear place, and he releases it.

"She didn't want Gems to hurt other Gems," Drakken said, with a pointed look at Bismuth.

Bismuth's look is pointed, too – and also practically weeping with pain, though it remains dry. "Gems were already hurting other Gems," she says.

Drakken has to clamp his lips together to keep from screaming back at her, And that was Lapis's fault?

It's Greg who speaks up then from the chair, his shiny-this-morning tuxedo now a patchwork of sweat and sand. "I guess she couldn't see that yet." The corners of Greg's eyes turn down. "Bismuth…Lapis isn't perfect any more than Rose was. They both tried to do what they thought was the right thing. And both of 'em got it wrong sometimes."

A hush falls over the house – the first one all day that doesn't feel like a doom ray powering up.

Stamping over the urge to kiss this man's feet, Drakken adds, "And she's here now. Not on Homeworld. Here! She said she knew she could never go back to Homeworld after what she'd done to Jasper."

Bismuth quirks her mouth at him, as if she is trying to figure out whether or not he is kidding. It must be the same look he's given Shego countless times in all their years of partnership. "Huh," Bismuth says.

Not as a question. Not even as a statement. Just a brief exhale.

Greg's is heavier as he leans back against the chair. The guitar still sits on his lap, and he lifts a hand and strums it.

No, "strums" is not the right word – too simple, too overused. He touches the strings as if he knows exactly how they want to be touched, an affectionate brush. The sound it brings to life, reminiscent of a rock being expertly skipped across the surface of a pond, seems to clear the room of bacteria and brokenness and the hideous history of the Gem beside him. Drakken wants to prop it up and lean against it, despite his scientist-awareness that that's not how sound waves work.

"That's really nice," Drakken says. He startles himself with a yawn he didn't feel building, a sharp one that leaves his cranium stinging. "I wish my cousin played that nicely."

"Your cousin plays?" Greg says.

Drakken massages the back of his strung-tight-as-a-rubber-band neck. "Air guitar," he confesses.

"What's air guitar?" Bismuth says.

Drakken opens his mouth and then realizes he is too doggone tired to explain it to her. He ends up just ripping at the air with his fingers and screaming, "NAH-NAH-NAH-NAAAAAAAAHH!" the way Eddy taught him when they worked together to construct the Doom-Vee.

"Oh." Bismuth's eyebrows worm together, but beneath them Drakken can see an attempt-at-understanding spark. "So – it's that thing that's like a lie, only everyone knows it's a lie, so it's a good thing."

Drakken is also far too tired to untangle that. He throws his face in his hands.

Only surfaces again when he hears Greg say, "Imagination."

"That's it!" Bismuth snaps her fingers. "Rose told me about it! That was one of the first conversations I ever had with her…"

Her eyes drift somewhere far away and long ago, and Greg's follow, as if they're meeting again at a class reunion, minus the force fields and the ice-blue femme-fatale robots Drakken always associates with that occasion. Drakken musters as much sympathy as he can, most of it for Greg. At least Drakken's girlfriend will come back, even if she is taking an unbearably long amount of time to do so…

"You ever play?" Greg says.

It takes several minutes and finally a nudge from Bismuth's elbow – which may be the hardest thing Drakken has ever felt in his life – for Drakken to realize that Greg is talking to him. "Just air guitar, too," he says. He glances down at his hands, floundering in humility that is so unfamiliar to him. Dr. Drakken may take pride in his accomplishments, but nothing sets him to blustery-boasting like something he doesn't know how to do.

And he knows if he ever fumbles his fingers across those strings, it'll make the sound of a fat rock dropped in the pond – a short, ugly plunk!, only probably without a splash of water to accompany it. Then again, he wouldn't mind getting splashed so much right now, because water usually means Lapis is nearby…

"Ain't nothin' wrong with that," Greg says. "So did I for a long time. 'Make the air your guitar, and the music is never far.' One of my really early songs. It took me ages before I saved up enough to get a real set of strings, and then I hit the road."

Drakken's inner fifteen-year-old, pressed into a straight-laced dress shirt and starched dress slacks of his mother's choosing, lights up with the thoughts of rebellion. "You were in a band?"

"Nah, I was a solo act. Still just me and a guitar, only it was electric back then. I was a real wild child in those days." Greg tucks a strand of hair behind his ear, and as Drakken inches forward, fascinated by this backstory reveal, he notices infinitesimal holes in the cartilage that look like they closed a long time ago. As Shego would say, Who'd have thunk? "Then one day I had a gig in Beach City. That was when I met Rose. She was the only person who came."

His last sentence doesn't choke so much as dissipate. Drakken finds himself clearing his own throat. Exchanging glances with Bismuth, whose eyes are far tenderer than Drakken would have expected.

"Anyway." Greg nods toward Drakken. "You interested in learning?"

With the fatigue banging at the inside of his skull, Drakken's inclined to say no, and if it were anyone else asking, he probably would have. But as he looks at Greg Universe, at his kind eyes, at the mullet he's going to keep wearing regardless of whether or not it ever gets resurrected in the fashion world, something stirs in Drakken's exhausted heart. Learning. The word is – well, music to his ears. (Drakken can almost hear Shego groaning at the cliché, but – come on, it was right there.)

"Do you think I can do it?" It's a question Drakken has never dared ask before. As the supervillain who couldn't afford to buy HenchCo products, who scrambled digits as he transferred his calculations to paper, who was surrounded by winners like Shego and Kim Possible, he might as well have requested a mauling.

"Absolutely," Greg says without hesitation. He scoots over on the chair, pats the space he cleared for Drakken to sit down. "C'mon over."

Drakken sinks down onto the cushion, deeper than he intended to sink. It surrenders under his weight, but the rush of power Drakken anticipates never comes. No power. Just safety.

"I can show you how to play a chord." Greg hands the guitar to Drakken. The instrument that tucked so perfectly against Greg's roundness feels entirely too small balanced on Drakken's lap, and he whips his head around toward Greg so fast a few battle-grimy escapees from his ponytail lash his own face.

There must be terror in his eyes, because Greg chuckles, long and low and comforting. "Relax. It won't bite, I promise. Now, first thing you wanna do is choose which string to hold down. That'll determine what key you're playing in."

Drakken makes a not-too-clumsy grab for the one closest to him.

"Low E! Great choice!" Greg reaches into his tux pocket and produces a perfectly triangular object like a tiny tortilla chip. Drakken is unexpectedly pinched with thoughts of Peridot. "Now – do you wanna see what you can do?"

"Yes!" With his index finger still pressing the string named E flat against the guitar neck, Drakken grabs the triangle (a pick, he thinks it's called) and runs it down the other five strings. The resulting sound is – is – well, to continue with the rock-skipping metaphor, it's a rock that manages to bounce once or twice before plunking a few feet away from shore.

"There ya go." Greg nods in approval.

"That's it? I can play now?" Drakken feels his shoulders puff up inside their pads.

Which reminds him – he's still wearing that stupid bow tie. Surely Garnet won't mind if he takes it off, especially since she's traveling to another galaxy right now…right? Drakken pulls the thing up and over his head – and ngggh, of course it gets stuck in his hair, and he has to wrench it free before sticking it in his own pocket.

A smile floats across Greg's face. "Nah, it's not quite that simple."

Drakken frowns. "Nothing ever is, is it?"

Greg chuckles again, all encouragement this time. "You'll get the hang of it, though. Here, now if can get your other fingers in between those little doohickeys between the strings, we can get started on the basics…"

This is precisely what Drakken does. It's tough to keep strings straight, and adding letters to them hardly helps with his dyslexia and all, but this pick is wonderful. Too little to overwhelm his admittedly-smallish fingers, it only goes flying once – when Drakken swings it down like an ax across all six strings, maybe a tad overly-exuberantly. It pings off the wall and drops to the floor, and Drakken flinches, but Greg is infinitely patient as he bends down to retrieve it and coaxes it back into Drakken's perspiring grip.

In fact, "infinitely patient" is the perfect description of all of Greg's actions. Patient when he positions Drakken's fingers between strings, explaining how he shouldn't directly touch the slatted "frets" there – not because they'll explode, but they will buzz and sound terrible. Patient when he moves Drakken out into the kitchen because it gets "better acoustics." Patient when he takes one of the white whirligigs at the end of the guitar and turns it back to the original position that Drakken accidentally twisted it out of. "Tuning," he calls that.

The chords Drakken wiggles out of the guitar are never recognizable as songs, but they can be identified as guitar music instead of a tomcat screaming to be fed. Bismuth sits cross-legged on the floor through it all and applauds every effort.

And during that time, in between frets and keys and finger placements, Drakken comes to meet the Bismuth who cries at weddings, the Bismuth who would die for her friends, who supplies each of them with nicknames. He'll never be able to look at her without seeing the Bismuth who smashed a brutal fist into his girlfriend, but he can see the other side too. Sort of like that one optical illusion that is a picture of a vase and also of two human profiles, both at the same time.

"Take Bigs," Bismuth says at one point, examining the torn-up ceiling. "She always loved being called 'Bigs,' 'cuz it was personal. Not 'Jasper.' There were hundreds of Jaspers, but there was only one Bigs."

Drakken shivers as he nods. If his name were "Jasper," he'd take just about any nickname offered up to him.

Wait – they had a Jasper? I mean – gosh, that sounds awful! A Gem who was also Jasper, but not the evil Jasper? A wonderful and unique person who just happens to be Jasper's…sister or cousin or something?

The thought is chasing its tail in Drakken's brain, and he doesn't think he's any closer to clarity when a single note rings through the room. No, not "rings" – that implies grandness and glamour, the kind of note that wants everyone to sit up and take notice of it. This almost tiptoes, kind of chimes, as though it hopes not to bother anyone with its existence.

As if it could. The – the – he's going to go ahead and call it a chime, and it's pure enough to raise goose bumps on his scalp, to rattle him on a skeletal level. A sound that haunting couldn't have been strummed out of those guitar strings by Greg himself, much less a beginning student, even one as talented and quick-learning as Dr. Drakken. And it came from the direction of the couch.

Drakken flips around so fast it dizzies him. But the whiplash can't compete with the sight of the water-droplet gemstone slowly ascending from the couch, centimeter by centimeter, as if God is tugging it upward with a string. Its edges begin to glow blue-white, and Drakken's lungs hold his breath hostage.

Maybe he will feel dizzy for the rest of his life, and maybe that's okay.

This is the point in a romance movie where Drakken would jog in slo-mo across the kitchen and into the living room and over to the couch, while the wind plasters his shirt to him and the background fades into sun-kissed clouds. In reality, he's already dripping with sweat, and his shirt likely grabs his chest in a less-than-flattering hold, and the sun has already gone down, and he's already at the couch with absolutely nothing in his memory banks to indicate how he got there. But he could be back locked up in Cell Block D for all he cares in this moment.

He positions himself on the arm of the couch, only slipping two or three times, and he watches that glow the same way he always watched the hands of his clock on Christmas morning.

---

You are alive. You are immaterial. You are scattered stardust, waiting for gravity to center and fix you.

The core forms without too much difficulty: the elaborate façade of muscle and bone inside the flat body, the long gangly arms and legs, and the small face. Time has no power in the regeneration-scape, though you hear a sense of impatience running alongside the melody of the universe, puncturing its elegant notes.

At last, blue skin smoothes over you from your forehead to your toes; at last, hair emerges from your scalp, thick and dark, not bothering to tidy itself; at last, eye sockets take shape and quickly fill, and you blink into a greater awareness.

Before you rolls an ocean of possibilities, all the pieces with which you can adorn your body when you return. Clothes, you remember now that they are called.

The first to wash your way are your filmy skirt and flimsy ribbon top. But they are naïve, complacent clothes that deliberately clash with water, clothes that belong to a Gem who laid her powers at Blue Diamond's feet as an offering. They bear the intangible stains of dozens of planets colonized and thousands of species destroyed, and even though they are also what you wore when you first met Steven and Drakken, you have soared far beyond the person you were then.

You give them one last pat, thank them, and let the current carry them away.

Perhaps you will always be meek by nature, and perhaps that is all right; Dr. Drakken has read to you that "the meek inherit the earth," although you have no desire to claim an inheritance from any planet now. Fighting will never be your first instinct the way it is for Ruby. You will never be a soldier like Jasper was. You have become something else entirely, a warrior, determined to do the right thing whether in action or words or silence, and you want your new clothes to exist in harmony with that.

With that thought, a face waxes into your consciousness. It belongs to Kim Possible, Drakken's friend who was once his bitter enemy, and it comes from a paper-of-news picture Ron had on his bedroom wall. In addition to her confident, gracious smile, Kim wore a black shirt, cut away at the bottom to reveal a canal of skin, and solid pants that matched her eyes and the plant life on Earth. You pin this into place just as Ron pinned it to his wall with the tiny, hard-capped needles he called thumbtacks. You pull deeper inside yourself, grab at the ocean with both hands, and you create.

The top is the simplest to form. It has the same basic size and shape as the one you once wore, though you turn away the ribbon tie and any signs of pampering, exchanging them for cobalt straps that converge over your shoulders. The upper half of a black diamond that rests above your waist, anticipating its other half below, brings you to a cold stop.

After your act of treachery against Blue Diamond, it's hardly fitting to continue wearing her symbol.

After your act of treachery against Blue Diamond, it should be easier to get rid of.

You remind yourself, somewhat sternly, that your allegiance has shifted to the Crystal Gems and their human friends, to this planet you once disdained so, and the Crystal Gems have always marked this allegiance with stars somewhere on their bodies. You know what the shape represents but not why it was chosen. All this time, you have somehow been too scared to ask.

The water slips over your shoulders and holds itself at your stomach. Instead of tossing aside the diamond symbol, you take it and rotate it on its side so that a thick point rises toward your chest, and you craft two equal points on either side of it. A half-star now stands, shy but proud, in the space where a half-diamond once sat and merely observed.

Next you move on to the pants to match your eyes. The water laps forward and surrounds your legs, awaiting your permission. You fashion them out of the slimmest material in your imagination, lightweight and porous, sleeking it as close around your body as it can while still flaring playfully. Kim wore a wide sling of a belt around her hips to keep her pants in place. You forgo that for a pair of thin orange strings, which remind you of the braided licorice that Drakken likes to eat but that you have always found too achingly sweet. The liquid cupping your lower body changes into solid fabric, the flare around your ankles first. It is not until the change is complete that you realize what is so remarkable about these pants you have made:

They are waterproof.

For thousands of years, you terraformed planets at the Diamonds' behest, enriching what needed to be enriched, eroding what needed to be eroded, and flooding what needed to be flooded. Water was an inevitable force that would alter a planet's surface and its fate, whether slowly or suddenly, and you were frightened of its potential, frightened enough to put yourself in a skirt that would be readily encumbered by too much of it as a reminder to stay away from what you could do. You were frightened that your tiny hands had the power to control something of this strength, especially after you broke Greg's leg and almost drowned Steven and Connie.

When you and Jasper merged and morphed into her, your powers went from being yours to being hers, one dripping increment at a time. In your collapse, you saw what your powers would become in the hands of someone who truly had no reservations to hold her back.

And, to your great surprise, you can now see the difference.

Oh, yes, water can be a very destructive weapon, Dr. Drakken said when you first told him the story of how you stole the ocean and fought the Crystal Gems when they came to retrieve it. You picture his fingertips pattering off each other in their delightful, nervous way. But you know what else? Nothing native to this planet can survive without it. Nothing – not even plankton or cockroaches! Your powers aren't what make you good or bad, Lapis. That's up to you to pick! And the best part is, you get to pick it anew every single day, even if you messed it up the day before!

For an instant, his grin shimmers from every direction you look.

You still have great respect for your powers. You still wish to use them with caution and wisdom, with regard for the damage they can do.

But you are no longer afraid.

You glance at your bare feet wistfully. You will miss the soft brush of sand and grass against them, but your world doesn't just consist of sand and grass anymore. Broken bottles, angry thorns, and a thousand variations of stone much harder than your own also await you out there, and yet you can't imagine imprisoning your feet the way most humans do to theirs.

It's Steven who comes to mind this time, showing you his happy, pink half-shoes, the bottoms of his feet shielded by durable ridges, the tops free except for a small hook next to the biggest toe. You cannot recall their name, so you simply pour into your consciousness thoughts of security but freedom, security but freedom, and the water begins its work.

When you look down again, you spy a hook between your toes.

The ocean twirls you once and then releases you from its embrace now that you are fully covered. Warm soothing waves split, slipping away until a hole appears, glimmering translucently blue in the shape of a skewed teardrop. It is, you know immediately, your gateway back to the physical realm.

You reach a hesitant hand through it, just to make certain it has no glass blocking it the way it did the first time. At once, your fingers teeter on the edge of a different plane of feeling, one that is no longer safe and fogged, but sharp and vulnerable.

The ocean gives you a gentle splash, asking you a question.

You look up at it and nod. Ready.

For whatever's waiting for me.

Holding the sides of your gem, you push off and swing through. Every facet of you experiences a massive jolt, much the way ice will do when hot water is thrown atop it, and then tunnels through a soft, white blankness that sings to you until you have left it behind.

Your senses ebb back to you one by one. Touch returns first, and you send your fingers out to find the set that you know will be there waiting – fine-boned and slim, branches rattled by every breeze yet somehow snapped by none. They close around yours with a tender, tentative squeeze.

Soon afterward, the smell of assorted chemicals and broken timber makes an impact on your nose, and a deep substance of a voice peeping, its buoys pulled tight so as not to be washed out with the tide, reaches your ears. Sight is restored last, and it does not disappoint you. Dr. Drakken sits beside you on the couch, his face as soft and quirky as ever, his mouth in a wide, open curve, his teeth bright against the mired darkness outside and the disheveled rubble within. Water glistens in his eyes.

There are no Diamonds to be seen. Sometime, you will have to ask him what happened, what drove them away, but you do not want those to be the first words your new tongue utters. For now, you are safe, in a place that you recognize as Steven's house on the beach. It wears the chaos and damage of a battle recently fought, white powder that feels artificial on your skin falling from the ceiling, but it is obvious that battle is now over.

You shapeshift a pair of lungs solely to release a breath, its departure unneeded but welcome. The tension that has kept your powers taut and ready since you left Kanatar loosens its grip.

As usual, Drakken speaks first. "We gotta stop meetin' like this," he says. Tears lose their balance on his bottom eyelashes and slip downward. He does not know your hundreds of methods for holding them back. You hope he never has to learn.

You look down at the hands still holding yours: the hands that dabbed the soft paper against your own tears and made it safe to cry in front of him, the hands that drew into fists the moment he spied Jasper, the hands that unrolled your fingers and introduced you to the prints on the ends that would come to mean more to you than your class-facet number ever did.

With the Earth's atmosphere, light and warm, surrounding you, you inch closer and tilt your head so that your chin better aligns with Drakken's large one. You lean your head further forward the way you have seen characters do on Camp Pining Hearts and clamp your eyes on Drakken's dark, watchful ones, searching for any flicker of fear across them, any sign that you should turn your ship around and land it rather than venture into this galaxy where neither of you have ever been before. "Okay?" you whisper.

Drakken's nod is not his usual sweeping, dramatic gesture. Neither is it grudging. "Okay," he says.

You slant toward Drakken. He slants toward you. Your lips meet in the middle.

It is not like fusion, at least not fusion as you have known it. No struggle takes place; no one vies for domination. It is more like the sea lapping onto the shore: the meeting of two whole, separate things that are nevertheless compelled to return to each other again and again.

His lips are warm and thin and nervously dry, and they touch yours with consideration. You had imagined there would be a sweet taste, given how hard and desperately the kisses on TV tug, but no flavor is there. You are not pinned by another attempt to pull you into someone else's bonds and consume you. This is something kind and sweet, and it is at its kindest and sweetest when it lets go.

Once the two of you separate, you drop back against the couch, grinning. Warmth trickles from the center of your gem outward into every facet of you, both real and illusive, tinting your cheeks and sending a burst of strength down your back, as it did the first time you summoned your wings or the first time you thought of Earth as your home. It is one of those moments when you are sure you know how it feels to be organic: flush with life that beats throughout you and leaves you open to every wonder and every devastation on this fragile planet you have come to love.

Across from you, Dr. Drakken prods the corners of his mouth, as though he must verify that they are still there. If he were upset, you know the pink on his face would be in a long smear, its edges scrubby and uneven as moss. Instead, it rises in Rose Quartz circles, Steven's gem stamped across his cheeks.

"Oh," he says, and he says it quietly, at least by his measures. "That wasn't so bad."

Your grin expands, and you turn it to him. "Yeah. We should try it again sometime."

Although the words you hear are soft, they are also little anchors – they have fastened into the ground and will not be budged, no matter how hard the Diamonds or anyone else tug.

Drakken threads his fingers through yours again. As clumsy as his weaving is, they still fit together like two pieces of ancient human embroidery. "I've been waiting to ask," he says, and his usually strong voice is faint and exhausted. "Do you even have a toothbrush?"

You stare at him for a moment, and then you snort when you remember how you greeted your allies on the beach. "No. But I left some other stuff behind. Like – my pet – and my crops." You glance to the side before returning your eyes to his. "And my boyfriend."

It doesn't hurt to admit it. If anything, it cushions your power, lifting and soothing it until it is no longer a tidal wave or a hurricane but a soft ocean mist.

Drakken lets out a hoarse giggle much more fragile than his typical booming laugh and tips his forehead until it rests, stiff with condensed perspiration, against yours. You do not pull away. "I missed you, too," he says.

The authenticity of it drills into your core, not enough to heal the Cluster already planted there, but enough to bubble it before it can grow into anything worse.

"Oh!" Drakken blinks and jerks his neck around to address a large figure now looming in the doorway. He smiles, and it is a strange smile, wary and hopeful both. "Bismuth," he says, "meet my girlfriend."