~Hi, everybody! Hope you've all had a great Thanksgiving and are getting ready for the big holiday season.
So this was a fun/challenging chapter to write, because most of what happens now was achieved through song and visuals in the movie, and I had to make it work in print. And of course Spinel is going to keep Drakken hopping. But I'll shut up now so you can read the actual story. ~
Between the retrieval of Amethyst and Peridot's bouncy giddiness, Dr. Drakken has almost started to feel optimistic.
And then Lapis makes that sound. It's not a big sound or a loud sound – no sound that comes out of Lapis Lazuli ever is – more like the sound of the last of an Alka-Seltzer fizzing away.
But it's been said (though by whom, Drakken couldn't tell you) that the world ends with a whimper, not a bang, and this is most certainly a whimper.
With one hand, he takes Pumpkin from her, and with the other he takes her wrist, cautiously, not wanting to make it worse, whatever "it" is. "Lapis? Are you okay?"
Drakken wants to kick himself as soon as he asks it. Of course she's not okay.
And of course the first words out of her mouth are, "Yeah. I'm all right." He must frown, because she is quick to continue, "No, really. I'm okay. But the ocean isn't."
"The ocean?" Drakken repeats.
"The poison's gotten to it." Lapis grips the migraine-spots on her temples. "Everything's dying."
Her voice breaks like the lead off a pencil when you jam it too hard against a piece of paper because you're so excited to get started with the blueprints for what is sure to be your greatest invention yet…
FOCUS, Drakken, he can hear Shego snipping in his mind. So he tries.
Steven sucks in a pained gulp of air, but he's all seriousness – and surprisingly grim seriousness, at that – when he says, "That's terrible, Lapis. We've really got to get this stopped, and fast."
"Do we ever."
Drakken whips around in the direction of the somber little mosquito-voice. Peridot has joined them at the bottom of the hill, her tablet balanced precariously on two shaky hands. She can't go pale, Drakken assumes, but the tension is rubbed all over her face, making it look even smaller than usual. An out-of-nowhere chill blows across the back of his neck.
"What'cha got for us, Peri?" Lapis asks.
"I have just finished my chemical analysis of the substance," Peridot says. "And based on its current rate of dissemination and the approximate volume of the Injector's storage capacity…"
Drakken knows those words, scientific words, words in a language he speaks, words that have always comforted him. Why aren't they working now?
Peridot answers that question easily: "…I estimate the substance will cover the entirety of the Earth in a little more than seventy-two hours."
The calculation translates itself in Drakken's genius brain before he can even consciously tell it to. "That's three days!" he says.
Three days until he doesn't have a home anymore. Three days until he doesn't have a him anymore.
"So, figure this out within three days, or the whole planet's dead," Steven says. "No pressure or anything."
Drakken blinks at him. He's used to sarcasm being pitched at him from every direction, but he's rarely heard it from Steven.
Lapis sets her hands sternly on her hips. "But we can do it," she says. "You guys already got Amethyst back, and it's only been, what, a couple hours? We'll find a way out of this." She nods to the Injector.
Drakken turns his open-eyed attention to her. She stands straight and brave, with no sign of the full-body hunch he'd watched her assume so many times. It doesn't necessarily surprise him anymore to see her like this, but it still carries him into a state of awe.
"That's right!" Peridot, too, turns to look at the Injector. "I bet I can use my powers on that thing!"
"Peridot, I'm not sure if that will –" Lapis begins.
But Peridot doesn't listen. She shoots up the hill and plants her feet in front of the Injector, arms spread wide and face angled toward the sky, a dramatic supplication. "Metal, obey me!" She pauses, then adds, "Please."
Lapis snorts, and it comforts Drakken when science can't.
The machine gives a moan of the just-threw-my-back-out variety. Its sides crunch inward, and the purple-black glinty panels that march up and down their length begin to creak and crumple, eventually wadding up like aluminum foil and falling away. Black rectangles gape from the places where the panels used to be and then waste no time filling with pink poison that gushes out from them, splashing down over the hill at a more rapid pace and killing every flower in its path. Professor Dementor would have a field day with how relieved Drakken is when a butterfly perched on a wildflower takes flight and survives at the very last second.
That comfort he felt says never mind and disappears.
Drakken can't see Peridot's expression, but he hears her say, "Yikes!" and watches her arms wave desperately above her triangle head. The panels smooth themselves back out and close in over the rectangles, so that any poison that wants to leave has to wait its turn at the tip of the needle.
"Okay, that won't work either," Peridot says once she rejoins them. "Ugh. Homeworld! HOW DARE YOU BE SMARTER THAN ME?"
Drakken's throat clenches in sympathy. The sentiment reeks of far more than wounded pride.
Lapis doesn't giggle this time. "So really our only choice is to get Pearl's and Spinel's memories back."
Drakken shoots his hand into the air. "I can keep working on Spinel," he volunteers.
Because he's already made a great deal of progress with her. He's discovered she knew Steven's mother, and that's a good thing, right? The can't-fail, can't-fail, can't-fail refrain pounds in his mind more frantically than it ever did in any of his efforts to appoint himself Earth's overlord.
"Pearl might be trickier than Amethyst," Steven says. "She never showed me her Kindergarten, and she was probably made on Homeworld anyway, right?"
All eyes turn to Lapis, currently the oldest and wisest of the group, Drakken thinks with a start. She shakes her head. "No, Pearl would have been made on Earth. Or at least on a planet with an ocean."
"Another ocean girl, eh?" Drakken smiles widely at Lapis, hoping to charm that fairy-sparkle back into her eyes. He's not successful.
"There's this place called the Reef," Lapis says. "But since she never went there with any of you, it wouldn't help her remember herself any, and it's probably infected by now anyway. It's pretty close to the surface."
Judging by how those last few sentences fade, Drakken expects her to be wilting when he looks at her again, but she still stands like a soldier, shoulders back, chin out. His gaze returns to the Injector and the pink goop that slithers down the hill in snake-trails, attacking the plant life until it withers in surrender. Funny how nasty planetary domination looks from this side.
Steven fishes around in the pocket of his jacket and manages to hook his cell phone. "I could get help from Dad. He knew Pearl before I did, back when he and Mom were dating." His voice isn't quite cheery, but it sounds closer to Steven-normal.
"Great idea, Steven," Lapis says.
Drakken studies the tree branches rocking in the breeze above him. Before he got his superpowers, he would have plucked a leaf from one of them and shredded it into confetti while he pondered the situation. Now he doesn't want to distress his vines and flowers – although if they don't come up with some way to shut the Injector down in the next half hour, the tree's going to become mincemeat anyway. Well, trees don't really have meat, so more like mince-wood…
I'm scared, Drakken realizes, and the admission (admittance? He was never quite sure) sends his heart into a tailspin that he doesn't know what to do with. He stares over Lapis's head at the too-pretty creep of poison, so vividly pink it almost hurts his eyes, though only half of his occipital lobe is processing the sight correctly. The other half is seeing the ugly red numbers rolling backward on Warmonga's countdown-to-doom timer, the timer he made his, and all the other things he would take back if only he could.
He finds himself staring harder at the ooze, finds himself asking Peridot, "So – what can you tell me of its chemical composition?"
Golden-green intelligence shines in Peridot's eyes. "It would take a very long time to explain. It contains elements that are not even found on your human periodic table."
The words hit Drakken right in the nerves, and everything else fades away: the doubts, the uneasy tummy, the mental returns to the day Warmonga gave him what he needed to destroy the world. Entirely new elements. Never before seen by human eyes. His legs draw him toward it with the same eagerness they would approach a buffet table or an open mike – no, even better, because this isn't just something lovely. This is a reminder that the universe is enormous and at least seventy-five percent unknown, and if he, Dr. Drakken, can know a portion of it that no one else of his species does…
It's with something warm beyond comfort, secure beyond security, that Drakken bends down and aims to dip a gloved finger in the ooze.
Lapis smacks his hand away. Well, it's more of a swat than a smack, but Drakken can still feel the strength she packs somewhere in her little self. "That stuff will kill you!" she says. "Are you crazy?"
Drakken twists his lips around and waves a hand from side to side noncommittally.
Lapis gives him the tiniest of smiles and the tightest of hugs. He rests his chin atop her head, and if she can feel the way his pulse is going crazy, trying to run everywhere at once, it doesn't appear to offend her.
Not too much later, Greg pulls up in his van and honks the horn, and Drakken knows he must return to probing Spinel's brain, trying to come up with whatever hurt her badly enough to lash out at an entire planet. His arms are stiff and sore as he balances Pumpkin in them, even though there's no way they could have cramped already.
"I love you," he tells her. Just in case and because it's true.
"Love you too," she says. She still doesn't sound afraid.
He tries to hand Pumpkin back to her, but she shakes her head, her bob thwacking against her cheeks. "Keep her with you," Lapis says. "I don't want her anywhere near this stuff either."
Right. She's organic, too. Drakken peers down at the gourd-dog in uncertainty, but she wags her vine-tail at him and curls trustingly against his elbow.
Drakken turns and strides to the van in as confident a manner as he can, considering how watery his legs suddenly feel.
Back on the beach, Greg sets up a fold-out chair, which Pearl insists on sweep-cleaning with her bare hands before she lets him sit in it. He thanks her with something less than his usual jovial…ness…and when she responds with "Anything for you, My Um Greg Universe," Greg looks like he's trying to chew a super-sourball without wincing.
Drakken can barely hold back a flinch himself. This is who Pearl was when she was first made? If the Bebes had been even half this subservient, he could have menaced the mocking straight out of the eyes of his college posse.
Steven has his hands clamped behind his back as he paces a path in the sand, just like how Drakken would stalk the floors of his many evil lairs – although this kid's lucky enough to have legs that let him make longer strides. Sweat sparkles on his forehead, and Drakken isn't sure it's entirely from the heat. Drakken kind of wants to pace with him – his own calves have that internally-itchy feeling that only a good hard stomping can relieve – but with Pumpkin snuggled in his arms and Spinel needing supervision as she runs in circles, that's out of the question.
"I know fusion was a big part of helping Pearl figure out who she really was." Steven's pitch climbs to the heights of prepubescence and then falls back down. "But it wouldn't be right of me to fuse with her when she doesn't even know what's going on."
An image of the hand-shaped bruise on Lapis's wrist shoots through Drakken's mind, and he does worse than wince. He's pretty sure his actual flesh literally crawls.
"Music helped a lot, too," Greg says from his chair. "Maybe it'd help if we took her to the concert."
He points toward a large wooden stage at the far end of the beach, dark against the horizon where the sun has finally started its nosedive, bookended by black amplifiers that look as tall as Drakken. It appears to have constructed itself when he wasn't looking, but it couldn't have because objects at rest stay at rest until faced with an outside force. And said "outside force," a young man whose hair looks like a smear of butter slicking from his head, carries an electric guitar and a miniature techno-piano across the stage. An audience not quite big enough to be a crowd is gathering in front.
"Ooh! A concert! Who's playing?" Drakken asks. He can't help hoping for the Oh Boyz.
"Sadie Killer and the Suspects," Steven says.
Drakken decides to go ahead and blurt out, "Who?" Steven has never been the type of child to scorn him for his ignorance of pop culture.
Steven nods down the beach again. A short, solid girl takes the stage – Drakken has seen her around somewhere, he's pretty sure, though he can't remember her name and he doesn't think the ends of her blond hair were seaweed-green when he first saw her. The audience is approaching crowd status as more and more people show up.
And by "people," he means both humans and Gems – Gems of every color and shape, faces comfortable, interspersed among the humans. Drakken knows most of them from Little Homeworld, but he can't recall their names. Can't recall anyone's name right now. If Kim Possible's husband were to teleport to him this very instant, Drakken would have no choice but to admit that he's drawing a blank.
Steven's forehead furrows beneath the sweat. "I guess it's worth a try." His voice still has that tired sound to it that, as far as Drakken is concerned, shouldn't be there.
Spinel breaks into a run for the gathering that has definitely become a crowd, and Drakken practically throws his back out sprinting after her, Pumpkin's mouth hanging open in a happy pant as she rides in his arms. He ends up behind a tall Gem whose shoulders eclipse everything in front of her. She turns to wave an orange, speckled hand at Steven, and Drakken sees the horns poking through her mess of dusty-pale hair, and he shivers in his own skin again. The other Gems don't call her Jasper and she isn't the Jasper, the one who bruised Lapis with a single touch, but the sight of her always terrifies him for a second.
Greg comes up behind them, Pearl tagging along like a second shadow. Steven tugs at what little sleeve Pearl has and gestures to Not-Jasper and a few of her equally-large buddies. "See these Gems, Pearl?" He has to shout to be heard over the butter-haired boy tuning up his porta-piano. "These are your friends. You fought to make Earth a safe place for them."
Before Pearl can answer, the girl onstage hollers into her mike, "Are you ready to rock, Beach City?"
"Yes!" everyone in front of Drakken calls back. The sound echoes in the walls of his chest.
Pearl surveys the stage, her eyes as wide and scandalized as if someone has dragged her into the Bermuda Triangle Nightclub that Drakken tries to never think about. She hurls herself in front of Greg – to protect him from the dangerous thumps of the music, Drakken assumes.
The girl begins to sing, loudly, frantically, as if she's trying to communicate a coded message:
I was always the kid who did whatever they told her
I thought I'd be able to relax some when I got older
But they kept pushing me down and holding me back, but now I have awoken
To the truth of this: Some rules were made to be broken!
Drakken frowns to himself. He decides she must not be talking about the types of rules he's thinking of, the ones like looking both ways before crossing the street and kindly refraining from enslaving the world's population no matter how much they hurt your feelings.
"Don't box me in," the girl sings.
Only when Drakken takes a backward glance at Pearl does he understand what she is talking about: bad rules, Homeworld rules, rules that told Pearl she was less than everybody else.
Steven looks hopefully at Pearl, too, but Pearl's still wearing a lip-pursed expression incompatible with approval. The kid's eyes fly up to Drakken's, and he shakes his head, and Drakken can almost feel the words passing between them: We've got our work cut out for us.
And that's only a good thing when you're making a collage.
Spinel, on the other hand, has already decided she loves it. She sways to the side and bumps a turquoise-colored Gem roughly seven times her size, who retaliates with a hip-check that sends Spinel flying across the beach, her arms over her head to catch the breeze. Drakken moves to intercept her, but his feet decide to crisscross then, and he's too busy securing Pumpkin to secure himself. Spinel ends up being the one to grab him and prop him up.
Drakken feels his ego clench, but he manages to grind out the words, "Thank you, Spinel."
She dips down and then back up as if she's curtsying, and Drakken finds himself smiling more from reflex than anything else. He still has yet to figure out what will embitter her future self so – what her "ish," as Kim Possible would say, is – and the sensation of failure is almost worse than a blister on his heel. A sigh pushes from his throat. Empathy is a lot easier when you can actually relate to what the other person is going through, but since they've already exhausted every inch of backstory he can understand, his only option is to plunge into territory that he doesn't.
Drakken reaches out and grabs her Slinky-esque elbow before she can ram Big Turquoise again. "Easy, there, Spinel," he says. "Don't start another Gem war."
Spinel twists her neck toward him, and her stringy little brows crawl together. "Another war? What are you talking about?"
"You know. The war that Rose started," Drakken says.
"Rose who?"
For the first time, Spinel's body stands still, no jerking or stretching or springing. In that moment a lost, confused little girl stares back at him.
The sight strikes Drakken and fries him like a bolt of lightning, and he wishes he could stop this conversation on the spot, except that wouldn't help her any, and it wouldn't get them anywhere closer to saving the world. "Rose Quartz," he says.
"Oh, yeah, the Rose Quartzes!" Spinel says. "Boy, they're big, aren't they? Yeah, we were observing a whole Kindergarten full of 'em, and there were going to be more soon. But they grew down here on Earth, so I never really met them."
But-but-but-but bashes around in Drakken's brain like the mosh pit Spinel almost started. He searches for more volunteer words and comes back with, "But wasn't she your best and only friend?"
"No, silly!" Spinel appears relieved to be able to laugh again. "All the Rose Quartzes were made by my best and only friend. She was in charge of them all."
The girl onstage reminds them again not to box her in. It takes Drakken almost a full minute to realize that the gusting in his ears is his own heartbeat. It drives all of his other thoughts into hiding, but with them silenced he can access the clear, coherent place in his head, telling him, She didn't know Steven's mother as Rose Quartz. So she must have known her as –
"Pink Diamond." The name darts out of Drakken's mouth as fast as it darted into his brain, and he watches the dawn break in Spinel's eyes.
"Yeah! My Diamond!" she cries. "She's the greatest! We do everything together. I was literally made to be her best friend!"
But-but-but-but becomes uh-oh. If this Gem was assigned to be Steven's mother's best friend, how can Steven and the rest of the Crystal Gems have never heard of her before? The question makes him feel like he should be wearing surgical gloves instead of the scientific black ones his mother gave him; to get to the answer, he'll have to do something difficult and invasive and messy.
Still, he owes it to his conscience – not to mention the entire rest of the world – to at least try.
It's going to be tricky, though. Especially considering she doesn't even remember the war, for Pete's sake.
Drakken takes a breath and shifts Pumpkin onto one hip, the way he's seen guys on TV do with basketballs. "So, you and Pink Diamond were pretty tight, huh?" he says, and then frowns. He's not sure which generation "tight" comes from, but it isn't from hers. Come to think of it, it's not even from her millennium.
"I don't know about that," Spinel says – well, chirps. "But she's the greatest." She flings out her arms and then just keeps flinging them, until they're as thin as telephone wires, her hands flopping at the ends. "Anything she does, I'm right there beside her – her best friend, Spinel! Me, and her, and Pearl."
Moisture returns to Drakken's tongue. A-ha! This is new information!
He puts a hand over his eyes to shield them from the sunlight that's lowering to just about their level and searches the mass of people for Pearl. It doesn't take long to find her, worrying her hands together as Steven puts an arm around her waist and leads her to a miniature sand dune, a tentative distance from the crowd. Drakken knows there are other Gems on Homeworld named Pearl – and somehow this doesn't confuse them – but she has to be talking about the Pearl, the one whose memory she wiped. If she isn't, this is a laughably improbable coincidence.
Except Drakken's not laughing; he seems to have misplaced his chuckle somewhere. With any luck, Spinel will be able to bring it back.
"Pearl? You mean her?" Drakken points over Spinel's tilty head at Pearl, who's watching Greg and nodding at whatever Steven is telling her like he's fluently speaking a language she only took two semesters of in high school.
Spinel rotates her head a full 180 degrees, which doesn't help the anxiety thrumming in Drakken's veins. "Yeah, that's her! That's My Diamond's Pearl!"
She readies to make a running leap toward them, startling Drakken from his assessment of the words "My Diamond's Pearl" – they seem to be a homogenous mixture of affection and ownership – and he manages to reach out with his Pumpkin-free arm and grab the back of her first-grader blouse before she pounces.
"Wait, Spinel!" Drakken says. "I don't know if she'll remember you!" To his surprise, his voice comes out firm and fierce, the way it used to when he was explaining a fiendishly clever plan that Shego had yet to make fun of, and he watches Spinel's face freeze, as if it doesn't have a way to express what that makes her feel.
"Her memory got erased, too?" Spinel says.
"Yes."
"Because of me?"
Drakken nods.
"Oh," Spinel says. It's tough to tell in that one syllable, more an involuntary sigh than a word, but Drakken doesn't detect the note of playfulness he's used to hearing from her.
Onstage, the girl with the seaweed-dipped hair sing-screams the last line of her song into the microphone. The sound rolls through the crowd, all but colliding with them and knocking them over. Not-Jasper lets out a feral scream.
It doesn't scare Drakken – honest, it doesn't, not much – but it makes him feel less keen on standing here alone with Spinel. He tucks her rubber-glove-textured hand between his and tries not to notice the fact that hers is a fraction bigger and fast-walks across the sand to Steven and Greg and Pearl.
"Did you like the song, Pearl?" Greg is saying when Drakken gets there. Even his scalp seems to shine hopefully. She nods, and he adds, "Did it make you wanna do something? Something a little different?"
Pearl smiles at him. "Why, yes. Whatever you would like to do, My Um Greg Universe." The entirety of her bearing – her posture, her inflection, the look in her eyes – is smooth, so smooth that Drakken feels like he's trying to climb a rock wall without any helpful crevices.
Hope disappears, and Greg appears nauseous, which flips in Drakken's own digestive system. "What I'd like," Greg says, carefully, "is for you not to call me that."
If Drakken thought Spinel looked stumped earlier, she has nothing on Pearl now. The skin around Pearl's eyes crunches tighter and her chin pulls in, as perfectly as if it's on a master puppeteer's string. "I'm sorry," she says. "Have I not been serving you well?"
"You've been serving me fine!" Greg says, and this time there's a tinge of frustration in it. "I just don't want you to be my slave!"
"I…I don't understand." Her words flutter like waking-up eyelashes, and Drakken hears an echo of the Pearl he knows in them.
"Let me see if I can explain." Steven steps forward and looks up at Pearl, though not nearly as far up as he once needed to. "Pearl, in my time, where you know me, you serve everybody really well. You're kind and you're helpful and you take really, really good care of all of us, especially me. But you don't do it because you have to or because someone's making you do it. You do it because you love us and you know it's the right thing to do."
Pearl takes her eyes off Greg for probably the first time all evening. Goose bumps blossom on Drakken's arms, and he has the sneaking suspicion they've brought his floral accessories with them. Sure enough, when he paws at his neck his fingers clutch silky petals between them.
He plucks them, without the anger he used when they first became a part of him. If he hadn't landed face-first in that puddle of Hydro-Pollinator fluid, the Lorwardians would have won, full stop.
Drakken is so mesmerized with his thoughts that it takes him a whole minute to realize that there's no glove-hand in his anymore. He whips around and doesn't see her anywhere in the general vicinity. His temples howl in pain.
"Spinel!" Drakken runs down the beach. "Spinel!"
There's nothing firm or fierce about his voice now. He is an aerosol can, spraying her name in all directions. It doesn't attract any stares, however, likely because there's a rock concert happening about fifty yards away.
"Yaaarf!" Pumpkin calls from Drakken's arms. That must translate to "Spinel!" in Pumpkin-speak.
He skids across the sand, searching everywhere, anywhere for a flash of pink, a flip of rubbery limbs. "Oh, great job, Drakken," he groans. "You had to go and get distracted, didn't you? You should have known better than to take your eyes off her for three seconds!"
Pumpkin licks Drakken's wrist, her tongue soft but studded with seed-bumps, and Drakken wishes its tickle could reassure him. His feet crash into the ground, over and over again, and heavily, even though they only have 150 pounds of body weight behind them. He realizes with a jolt that they're trying even now to outdo the concert, be louder, stronger, better.
"Spinel!" Drakken calls again.
And then he sees her, sprawled on her belly behind the leftmost amp, her legs kicking in mischievous rhythm behind her.
"There you are! You can't just run off like that –" Drakken begins, and then he notices that the amp's back has been unscrewed, its mechanical insides vulnerable to the world beyond. "What are you doing?"
Spinel stretches a hand into the backless amp and idly twirls it. "Figuring out how this thing works. I couldn't find any buttons on it, so I figured the magic must be on the inside. Wanna help me with it?"
The correct answer is no. The truthful answer is yes. Disassembling something, rebuilding it, finding the purpose in every component: the prospect thrills him, and the open inner workings are his invitation, just like his mother's blender in the earliest picture of his mental photo album. There's a wire smack in his line of vision, curled around a corner, a lovely green wire the shade of Shego's eyes, and he wants to know what it controls and how, and he wants to know it now. The longer he looks at it, the closer he comes to forgetting the fact that the entire planet could fall over and die in less than three days.
But then, in his mind, the wire grows Shego's face, and he can hear her snarling at him, How is that a GOOD thing, Drakken?
And, as usual, she's right.
Drakken takes a hard step back from the exposed, tantalizing wires and folds his arms. "No, Spinel," he says. "We can't."
"Aww, why not?" Spinel says with a pout.
"Because we're guests at this concert. And guests don't take apart their hosts' equipment…at least, they're not supposed to."
Spinel stares at him through squinty lids.
Drakken draws a breath and pulls a trick that he hopes doesn't qualify as dirty. "Besides, you don't want to get too far away from your best friend," he says, nodding down the beach where Steven stands a few feet away from Pearl, saying something Drakken can't hear, his arms working the air in soft, friendly gestures. Pearl studies him like she thinks he might be a desert mirage. "Do you?"
Spinel recoils, quite literally, and her pigtails almost launch themselves right off her head. "No!" she cries. She slaps the ground with one hand and starts to rise.
"Of course not," Drakken says, trying not to let his chest puff out too far. "So let's just put this back together and go join them, all right?"
He gives her a stern look, and he likes to think that's the reason that Spinel rushes to tuck the wires behind their panel once more, twists her fingers into screwdrivers, and secure it back in place.
That done, she stretches her legs and covers the distance between herself in Steven in two strides. Drakken has to jog to keep up with her. Playing nanny to this little crazypants, as Kim Possible would call her, wasn't exactly what he had in mind when he envisioned needing to save the world again. By the time he catches up with her, lungs heaving, he's sure his face is as purple as the sky.
Hang on. Since when is the sky purple?
Since now, apparently, beginning just above the hill where Spinel's poison needle sits. It's not the lifeless lavender he saw in the Kindergarten, closer to the shade of the shirt Kim Possible wears when she goes out on missions. A lovely color really, but it doesn't belong in the sky.
Pumpkin whimpers and squirms in his arms as if she knows something is wrong, too. She probably does. Animals can be very perceptive about things like that. Although technically Pumpkin is a plant…
Drakken gives his head a shake, knocking his thoughts back on track. They've been starting to wander, wander off to places that are less frightening to him than this one right here.
"The Rebellion," Steven is saying when Drakken crosses over into earshot. "Do you remember the Rebellion at all, Pearl?"
"Rebellion?" Pearl curls her lip like she's smelling spoiled milk.
"Yeah, the big Gem Rebellion," Steven says. "Gems like you rose up against Homeworld so you could defend the Earth. And so you could make your own choices and live your own lives and not just do whatever Homeworld told you to do." He picks up a piece of driftwood and rolls it from one hand to the other. "Who would you want to be if nobody could make you be just a Pearl?"
Pearl wags her head from side to side, as Drakken expected, although – and this could just be his imagination – the wag is slower-paced than anticipated, and it looks more thoughtful. Her wide, bright eyes might as well have question marks stacked up inside them. She runs a hand over her pink hair, which for the first time looks like it needs to be patted back into place. It's a little longer than he's used to seeing on her, a little scragglier, and when Drakken realizes it reminds him somewhat of Lapis's, warmth streaks across his chest.
The lining of his stomach is on fire with the whole watch-and-wait routine, but something deeper inside him knows he shouldn't interrupt them.
"What would you learn if you could?" Steven continues. "Would you learn how to build things? Learn how to fly spaceships? Learn how to – fight?" He lunges for Pearl with his stick outstretched. "En guarde!"
Either Pearl speaks French somehow or she is just good at picking up on context clues, because her body twitches into a defensive position. She meets Steven's stick with her spear almost before Drakken notices her retrieving it from her gemstone.
"Parry!" Steven thrusts his stick forward, pushing it toward Pearl's face, and the spear knocks it away again with a quick graceful swish, then stands at attention awaiting the next blow.
"How –" Pearl swings the spear in a half-circle. "How do I know how to do this?" Her voice is pretty even when she sounds so baffled.
"Because you taught yourself to do it!" Steven says. "You taught yourself to fight so that you could defend the Earth and the people you love. You fight for your friends, Pearl! And for yourself!"
Pearl begins to shake, and she keeps shaking until she also begins to glow and becomes nothing but a glaring-white outline.
"I do it for her…" Pearl mutters the words the way people sometimes mutter the last of their dreams. The skirt that hoops around her hips changes to pants that press close to her legs, and something delicate floats across her shoulders. The next thing Drakken knows, they are joined by a pair of what he thinks are called "leg warmers," which have always looked to him like a pair of sweats that fell down and tangled around someone's ankles.
"I do it for him…"
The leg warmers disappear, and a little ballerina tutu flutters for an instant before her legs smooth again. A sash trails obediently at her waist.
"I do it for me!"
Drakken jumps at the strength he hears bursting from her. Pearl takes the spear she still holds in one hand and drives it into the sand as color fills her again. She stands before him and Steven and Greg and Spinel in her glossy pants and turquoise-teal top and the matching jacket that melts against it to form perfect ninety-degree angles. Her hair is back to its usual neat helmet with no extraneous strands, and her eyes smile fondly down at Steven.
Sadie Killer sings gruffly, something about haunting a bakery, and the audience screams in amazement, unaware of the real marvel that has just taken place right next to them.
"Hello, all." Pearl's fingers wiggle in a wave, and she nods to Drakken. "Dr. Drakken. Nice to see you again."
Drakken is pretty sure he returns the greeting, although his tongue is quivering with relief and whatever he says probably comes out sounding like a radio broadcast from somewhere across the ocean.
"Pearl!" Steven throws his arms around her and buries his face in her shoulder, which isn't nearly big enough to hold it. Drakken can hear him sniffling. "It's really you! Oh my gosh, you're back!"
Pearl gives Steven a squeeze and then draws back to look at him. "And you're okay, thank the stars." Her gaze combs the beach and comes back with questions stacked in it again. "What in the world happened here?"
Greg sighs and collapses into his fold-out chair.
It takes no longer than a few minutes to get Pearl up to speed, and Drakken only interjects a few times to stress his and Lapis's contributions to the effort. Mostly, he lets Steven tell the story, commencing with the moment where Drakken figures the Gems must have lost consciousness and concluding with the news that Steven can no longer operate the warp pads or keep his shield in place for longer than a half-minute or store things inside his lion's mind, the last of which Drakken never had any idea the kid could do in the first place. Pearl is nodding by the time Steven wraps up.
"She did manage to Rejuvenate you," she says, "but only your gem half, which didn't manifest until around your thirteenth birthday. So your body and your memory have stayed current, but your control over your powers has gone back to where it was when you were thirteen."
Drakken tries not to physically flinch. Having to relive being thirteen is a torture even he never thought to visit upon anyone in his years of villainy.
Steven doesn't seem to take it that hard – maybe he already suspected it, or maybe nothing else about today can surprise him anymore, because he already has his next sentence halfway out. "But who is she?"
"Your mother's personal Spinel," Pearl says. "I haven't seen her since before the War."
And, Drakken realizes with terror riding up and down his veins, he isn't seeing her now.
"Spinel!" Drakken's holler does battle with the electric guitar solo warming up onstage. "Spinel!"
No answer. He groans. That girl may very well be the death of him.
As well as everything else native to Earth.
Drakken runs away from the thought, and the sand feels like concrete slamming against his boots. He's not even entirely sure where he's going – his brain has gone into genius-lockdown, where it can solve quadratic equations like a champ but isn't good for much else. That includes empathizing with Spinel. He can't think like her, like the happy-go-lucky little thing who invites people to laugh at her, who pulls weapons on people she's never met, and whose motive is just as inscrutable as it ever was. He wasn't able to find out what damaged her. He failed.
That makes him run even faster, even harder, even though he feels like his spleen is going to burst as he sprints past the stage. That's when he hears it, a giggle that straddles the line between endearing and annoying. Drakken comes to a halt and spins around, every muscle wound up and yelling, and there she is, taking the back steps up to the stage in hippety-hops that would do a mother kangaroo proud, her legs artificially lengthened again.
He knows his own runty legs won't allow him to catch up with her in time. Fortunately, he has a platoon of floral allies who are just as loyal and far more competent than his henchmen ever were. They process his request without his even needing to verbalize it, and there isn't so much as an uncomfortable twinge to Drakken's skin when the vine breaks through and chases Spinel up the stairs. It finally works its way around her shoe and curls up the back of her leg.
She screams.
Not a shriek of delight. Not Woody-Woodpecker laughter. Not the sound of a clown playing at having hurt herself. She screams, long and uncontrolled and terrified even as the vine slithers back down the steps with her attached.
It strikes Drakken's ears and then cuts into them, not with its volume or its pitch, but with its pain. Pain that echoes through the night even with the rock-concert-thumping bass to outclass it and extends far beyond where it should, like someone has been bruised right down to the bone.
Drakken backpedals, pulling back petals and vine alike, unable to even congratulate himself on his clever wordplay. There's a hitch in his throat so big you could attach a trailer to it.
Oh, doodles! Did I crack her gem?
But one look at the intact little heart shape on her chest that matches the tucks of her pigtails tells him it's not going to be anything as simple as that. Something in some vital place inside of her has broken, some place that Steven can't reach with his healing saliva and fix. There are tears in her eyes and on her cheeks, tears everywhere, and she gasps as if she's having an asthma attack.
Drakken's never seen a Gem cry that hard. It reminds him of Mother sitting in the prison conference room, across an unbreakable divider from him.
"Spinel?" Drakken tries her name, the only thing about her he feels fairly confident he knows. His voice comes out thin and mousy, more like Lapis's than his own.
Spinel drags herself to her springy-heeled feet and swipes at the area the vine covered a few seconds ago. Drakken silently and shakily gives thanks it's not there anymore – he's seen arm-swings like that before, from Shego when she gets good and mad. They always end with something being destroyed.
"Spinel?" Drakken asks again.
Too late. She lets out a sob that Drakken's sure everyone can hear even above the pulsation of the bass, bolts down the beach, running to escape whatever it is that's strobe-lighting in her memory, her feet throwing sand behind them that flies right into Drakken's face. He spits and sputters his way after her.
His legs are straining and yawning like the gears of a newly-booted-up Drakken-invention, and he isn't sure how long they would hold (also like the gears of a newly-booted-up Drakken-invention, Shego would snicker at this point). Still, he keeps running, even when something kicks him sharply in the side with every step and a hinge creaks in his back – the thought of failure pounding at his temples won't allow anything less. When Spinel shoots past Steven, Greg, and Pearl, Drakken pauses in front of them, and he isn't certain he can find enough breath to gurgle out their names.
There's no need, though. Steven is already standing up, already calling, "Spinel?", already taking off after her. Drakken follows, despite the vociferous protest of several body parts. If she goes much farther, he's going to have a full-scale revolt on his hands. And probably puke.
Thankfully for everyone, Drakken's little charge stops at the warp pad beside Steven's house and collapses in on herself, her little shoulders shaking. Drakken can't blame her there – he, too, doubles over and listens as every organ he has chews him out all at once. But he still notices when a noise reminiscent of a car door slapping shut rattles in Spinel's chest.
"Spinel?" Steven says again. Strangely, Drakken wonders how many times they can say her name before it stops sounding like a word.
"Spinel," Drakken pants, adding to the tally, "I'm…I'm really sorry if I…got into your personal space. I really hate it when…someone does that to me….and…"
Spinel lifts her face, soaked from her leaking eyes and nose, to Drakken and Steven. "That isn't it!" she nearly spits.
"Oh," Drakken says – somewhat less than brilliantly, he'll admit. He steps onto the warp pad to get closer to her, or maybe farther away, he's not sure.
"What is it then?" Steven asks.
Spinel glares at her hands. "I remember."
Drakken takes an uneasy step forward and an equally-nonplussed one backward.
Steven kneels at Spinel's side. "What do you remember, Spinel?" he says in that soft way that makes pretty much everyone, human and Gem alike, break down and open up to him.
"The garden," she sobs.
"Garden?" Drakken hears himself blurt. "What garden?"
There isn't a word for the sound that comes out of Spinel next. It's too harsh to be a whimper, too fragile to be a battle cry, too long to be a hiccup, and too short to be a wail. While Drakken is standing there attempting to classify it, Pumpkin pops from his arms and flees back to Greg, and Spinel slams both fists down on the warp pad and it activates. The world around him blurs in the same fascinating fashion it always does when Drakken rides it, but this time he barely notices.
Because Spinel's expression, in front of him, is as clear as a microscope slide. And he finally sees it, what he was looking for in her – the type of rage that wants to leave the world cracked open and dying to match the inside of you.
Even if the warp allowed him to move, he probably wouldn't have been able to.
It drops them somewhere else, and its sparkle fades. Drakken takes one look at the black depths of the sky and the winking of stars, like they're teasing, and knows they're no longer on Earth. There must be some sort of atmosphere, though, because his respiratory system isn't encountering any obstacles besides the usual panic.
For only the second occasion in the admittedly-short duration of time he's known her, Spinel stands perfectly still. There isn't even a breeze to move her hair as she stares forward into an overgrown tangle of decay. Drakken claps a hand over his nose, expecting that garbage-can-on-a-summer-day scent to break through any second, but everything here has been dead for too long to reek.
"This was Pink Diamond's garden," Spinel says.
Was being the operative word here. This place may have been a garden at one time, but there's no sign of life on it now. The ground is dirt, broken by faded scratches. Nubbin stumps, brittle and rotted beyond brown, poke their snouts out of said dirt like curious animals frozen half in and half out of the ground. Stalks and vines sprawl in various states of deterioration, some curled outward as though searching for something and others flat, trampled into the dust. It isn't the same kind of desolation as the Kindergarten – everything here died a natural death, as far as Drakken can tell – but in its own way, it's just as grim. The only thing missing is a crow cawing from the shriveled pole that used to be a tree standing beside Steven.
Drakken scrolls through a selection of replies and double-clicks the only one that seems even the slightest bit tactful. "I'm sure it was very pretty. You know, a long time ago."
"It was," Spinel says. "This is where we played every single day. Me, Pink Diamond, and her Pearl." It's Spinel's turn to sport a curled lip, ill suited for the kid-face he's been watching all day. "Pink Diamond used to talk to us about what she wanted more than anything. A colony. And then one day, she got her wish! Blue and Yellow promised she could have Earth."
A sour taste coats Drakken's tongue. She could have Earth. A promise. A Drewbie, eat all your vegetables and then I'll give you a cookie sort of deal. Something pokes up inside Drakken, and with nausea in his very soul, he recognizes it as jealousy. The same thing he felt when Warmonga and her husband sauntered over to the Milky Way and had his planet conquered within twenty minutes. He lurches on his feet, ready to turn and pace it out, but there isn't time before Spinel speaks up again.
"I was so excited! We'd have a whole new place to play! And then." She stops.
"And then what happened, Spinel?" Steven prompts.
"Right before we were getting ready to go, I was dancing and tumbling for her. And then she said, 'Hey, Spinel, let's play a game.'"
A chill moves through Drakken. Now would be a great time for that cawing crow to show up, he thinks.
"'You stand very still,' she said, 'and I'll be right back.' So I did." Spinel's voice is raspy, roughened by anguish. "I stood there and I waited. And I waited. And I waited. Every day that went by, I got more and more sure that today was gonna be the day she'd come back for me. And she just kept not coming, and I wondered if I was playing the game wrong, if I was keeping her away.
"But years went by. And the garden grew wild all around me. Flowers in my hair, vines around my legs."
Drakken's gut flinches with guilt.
"Then eventually, it died. And she still wasn't back." Spinel swipes her wrist across her sopping face. "She still – wasn't – back. But I didn't suspect anything. Because I WAS STUPID!"
The tears begin to bubble and foam as they pour from her, and her eyes look rabid – not like they're that angry, but like they've actually contracted rabies.
"Finally, earlier today, that thing turned on again." Spinel points to a hunk of purplish metal hovering in the air. Drakken hadn't noticed it earlier, and even now as he moves closer to it, he feels none of the kinship that usually flares up between him and a machine. "The Diamonds were giving a broadcast about you and Earth and Pink Diamond and Era 3." She laughs a painful-sounding laugh, and Drakken hears her innocence snag like a thread on a cheap sweater and come unraveled. "I thought it was still Era 1.
"And that's how I found out. That she didn't exist anymore. That she'd gone down to Earth and made a bunch of new friends and lived a whole different life, and then threw herself away to give her gem to her son!"
The crying is so intense, so frantic that it garbles her words, the echoes bouncing back and forth among the rot. Spinel moves toward the warp pad in trembling, lopsided steps, her knees bent toward each other. "That's how I found out," she repeats, as if every word is a bomb she can't defuse. "Earlier today."
"And the last time you saw her was before the war?" Steven says.
Spinel nods. A tear falls from her jaw, splashes onto the dead vine at her feet.
"But, Spinel" – Steven's eyes are wide now, wide and horrified as they do the math. "That was six thousand years ago."
No, a crow could not make this place any creepier. Drakken squeezes his eyes shut as a memory of his own wrenches free from his mental compost heap – him, in prison, on lockdown, the lights never shutting off, the food never edible, the cellmate never silent. The rest of Cell Block D's population converging on him, beating him down with taunts and swearwords and overdeveloped knuckles. Shego never showing up to rescue him. Him forgetting how the sky was supposed to look without bars slanting through it, coils of barbed wire breaking it up, and wondering what could be keeping her.
Drakken remembers all of that. He remembers the wrath charging him from every corner of his being, breaking down whatever limited scruples he had once had.
And that was only six months.
No, there was no "only" about it – it was an eternity all its own, a black hole, the kind of singularity formed when a life sentence was condensed and compressed into a radius only six months across. Nothing will ever lessen its awfulness.
But to think that Spinel stood there through the rise and fall of the Greek and Roman empires, convinced Steven's mother was going to come back for her eventually – he does not have the monopoly on suffering, not by a long shot.
"Yup. Six thousand years." Spinel's face contorts beneath the tears. "Isn't that hilarious? Isn't it swell? I told you I was stupid!"
Drakken knows his chin is wobbling. Someone in the room is more vulnerable than he is, a situation he used to pounce on with nothing short of ecstasy whenever it arose. Now he has an instinct to do something else, but nothing more specific than help Spinel, somehow, and he can't find words for her or comforting gestures or anything but quadratic equations and the plants that brought back her trauma in the first place. He feels like a tank top facing down an Alaskan blizzard, insufficient to protect her.
In the same instant Drakken tries to move toward her, his hand out to do…something, she levitates, and he could swear her tears turn black. A bit concerning, he thinks, and then he sees the now-familiar glow whiting her out. The light is small but powerful against the blackness of space, and it seems to echo through the stars' lights before disappearing into the void. Only the edges of her are visible, and they don't change in shape or size, unlike the more-dramatic transitions Drakken saw Pearl and Amethyst go through.
When the white light fades and she sags to the ground, Drakken blinks at her, starts to say something, and then has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from screaming.
Six black lines stripe her face, three under each eye, as if she's cried off a gallon's worth of eyelash-makeup, the name of which Drakken can't recall at the moment. Her pigtails have frazzled out of their cute little hearts and stand straight out from her head like they've been electrocuted. Her mouth is frozen in a smile that doesn't look friendly anymore, doesn't even look happy. And leaking out from behind those gritted choppers is a caustic, broken, menacing sound.
Even as Drakken watches, the gemstone-heart in the center of her shirt twists upside-down.
~Yeah, if you've made this far, you noticed: no Steg. Because I just couldn't work him in and, honestly, Steg just felt...wrong to me. Like, I have no problem with the idea of Steven and Greg fusing, but it didn't exactly feel like the most natural plot development at that point with Steven being so physically weak. So that made it kind of seem a little like fan-service, and the fact that he somehow has rugged good looks and a six-pack was just like. . . huh? So, yeah, sorry, but Steg didn't make the final cut. Hope no one misses him too much.~