~Shorter chapter here with a bit more KP-related content. Hope you all are having a good summer!~
It is the first day of your meepmorp class, and there are more Gems here than you would have expected.
You stand in the shadow of the central tower, cautious, as you survey those who will soon become your students. The sight of them threatens to overwhelm you, yet you hold the speech you crafted the night before; you feel it pooled at the back of your mind the way you feel water resting at the edges of your consciousness whenever any is nearby.
Whether or not you are ready, now is the time.
You step out of the shadows and cross to face a gathering of Gems as varied as the life inside a tide pool, all colors and shapes mingled. Some sit straight and careful with their legs folded in front of them and the blank pieces of paper Peridot passed out to them positioned in their laps, while others recline on their elbows, faces lifted to the sky, papers almost forgotten in the grass beside them. You glance at your fingerprints and tap on the green board behind you, where Steven has written "Meepmorp 101" with a stick of limestone sediment.
A dry fear pinches the center of your gem for a moment. The only other times you have stood in such authority were when you conferred with other Lapises on the best way to drown a planet.
This, however, is no army awaiting your instructions. This is made of neighbors, Gems you are beginning to trust, and they have chosen to be here rather than elsewhere in the universe. They watch you with the sun at their backs and questions in their eyes.
"Hi, everybody. I'm Lapis Lazuli." You lift your hand in a wave and let the words trickle down from your mind and up from your gem to meet in your mouth, where they find their way out. "And now that you know that, you probably know what my Purpose on Homeworld was, too."
A murmur like a brook travels through the group, the sound of what you believe to be sympathy.
"Yeah, I was created to destroy. And I was way too good at it. In fact, I was sent here five thousand years ago – to destroy this." You gesture to your surroundings, not trying to hide the shame in your voice. "Obviously, it didn't work out that way, but we don't need to get into that. The point is that I ended up meeting Steven, and he taught me how evil it was to sacrifice other species for our own glory.
"A lot of you figured that out way before I did, and that's why you joined up with Rose Quartz in the first place." You look without enmity at the Gems you once considered traitors. You were not on different sides of the war, you realize now, as much as you were fighting entirely different battles. "But all of you figured it out at some point, or you wouldn't be here.
"Anyway, the longer I stayed on Earth, the worse I started to feel about all those other planets I'd helped destroy. And I didn't know what to do with that. Then I found out that on Earth, they let you create things, too."
You hold up a hand. "Not out of nothing – it doesn't work that way. But you can use things that already exist to make something else that didn't exist before. That's what meepmorp is all about. Peridot said once that it's like making music, but with things.
"I thought that sounded a little silly at first, but then I realized that's exactly what meepmorp is. It's a song that you write for yourself and whoever else you want to share it with. And it doesn't matter if you sing it well or not. What matters is that you express yourself – that you get to understand yourself better.
"It changed everything for me when I saw that I could make stuff. I started to see that I could be more than Homeworld Taught me to be; I could do more than all the things I remember doing. And I know I'm not the only Gem with bad memories."
Butterfly, the Aquamarine who delivers the Gems' mail, has not taken her eyes off you since you began to speak. You have guessed most of her story, which is similar to your own. Others you do not know, and there are still others of which you have heard only pieces in passing; the Gems come to Steven or Garnet when they need to relive the pain, not to you.
"Meepmorp is a great way to deal with it. And there are so many different types of meepmorp that it's insane. You can sculpt things out of mud or clay. You can cut out pictures you like from old papers that people throw away and stick them together to make something new. You can paint something you find a whole different color. Today, I thought we'd start with the simplest meepmorp I know about. The drawing."
You nod toward the plastic bin Steven has filled with old meepmorp instruments: the shorter, thicker ones in colors rich and scrubby; the long slender ones whose slivers of color are paler but more defined; the slick ones that need to be capped at the top to keep their tips wet and shining.
Topaz, the fusion who served under Aquamarine, lifts her arm. "What are the rules?" she says.
You almost laugh. You have spent all of this time defending meepmorp, and now you are being asked to define it.
"Well…" You pause. "I almost said that the best thing about meepmorp is that it doesn't have any rules. But then I remembered that that's not such a good thing for us, because we're used to be told exactly what to do all the time. So I can't give you rules, but I can give you some suggestions.
"Just pick up whichever one of these you want." You lift a moist-tipped purple stick from the bin to demonstrate. "And then draw something about the life you had before, or something you're afraid of. You can draw what you did back then, or you can draw what you wish you would have done instead. Or, if you just want to make big angry red slashes all over the paper, that's fine too! With meepmorp, you can't hurt anybody, and you can't do something wrong."
Several brows furrow. They expected something solid and exacting. You wonder if they are more relieved or disappointed.
"Well, come on. Let's get to work." You drop the purple stick back in the bin and take several steps back to invite the Gems forward.
They surge toward the bin, and you back away further to avoid being caught in the crush. Now that your speech is finished, your knees feel oddly weak, though your back is strong enough to keep you upright.
Some Gems retrieve a writing instrument, grunt in satisfaction, and bend over their papers with their faces set in concentration. Others hunt through the bin, tossing aside every instrument their fingers touch, growing increasingly frustrated before they finally select one and stare at it like they would a sample from an unnamed planet that could be toxic. All around you, you hear caps popping, fat sticks rubbing against paper, and sighs of exhaustion and regret and contentment.
"When are we done?" one Ruby asks.
"When you feel like you've said everything you need to say." You smile. "Or when you run out of paper. Whichever comes first."
Somehow, the Gems understand this. Those who feel themselves finished beckon you to them and ask you to check their works, as though your assessment will determine whether they have done well or not. You tell all of them that they have, and it is true every time.
Nephrite has created a series of panels like the ones you see in newspapers, depicting the Corruption Bomb in the sky and a green Gem with one eye scrambling for the warp pad only to stop and search for her crew as the Bomb comes closer. It hits with a brilliant combustion of black and gray against white, and the Gem falls apart, rearranging herself into a creature with flailing, slithering legs and acid hissing from her mouth. Butterfly has used blue, in every shade and from every form of instrument, to draw a boiling, turbulent world where sky and sea meet without land to keep them apart.
When you approach Topaz she crouches over her paper, her body shielding it, and glances at you with wary eyes. "Is it okay if I don't show mine?" she asks.
It hurts to see her look at you like an Elite instead of an ally, but you have to nod. "Of course. It can just be yours."
The loosening of her shoulders is a song in itself.
Biggs stares down at a drawing you cannot see and shakes her head. "I think I finished it. But what if I don't feel good about it after it's done?"
"That's totally okay, and it's normal," you say. "Steven told me once that the kinds of meepmorps we're doing are all about working through your feelings, and a lot of the feelings you've gotta work through aren't good ones. So some meepmorps might make you feel bad, too, but they're still important."
As you say it, you think of how Peridot displayed her broken tape recorder as a meepmorp, the blue ribbon on top as torn and tattered as the darker ribbons of tape unraveling from its wreckage, a reminder of the apology you not only rejected but crushed in your fist. Every time you see it, you remember how the metal felt as it crumpled and how easy it was; compared to overpowering Jasper for so many tides, it seemed to take no strength at all. It makes you feel bad to look at it, but it also prompts you to be someone different than you were then.
You stand in the summer breeze and turn your eyes toward the ocean, and in the midst of its beauty you feel the shared Purpose that still bleeds into your dreams many nights. Those reminders have not dimmed so much as other things have brightened.
You turn again and watch the Gems before you, some postures loosened from the working and others pulled tight, their shadows unfolding in front of them. You did not realize it was this late in the afternoon. There are times when Earth still seems to move unnaturally quickly to you.
All around you, Gems murmur and exclaim, but within you a reverent silence grows, even when you spy Peridot behind the rows of students and hear her calling your name. She waves wildly to you with one arm while the other clutches her tablet to her waist.
You walk up to her. "Hi, Peridot. Were you watching?"
"I saw the whole thing! Well, almost the whole thing." Peridot peers at your face, her eyes enshrining you. "Lapis – you were magnificent."
"Really?" You try not to sound as if you are scoffing at the idea.
"Uh-huh and absolutely. You said so many things!" Peridot says. "And you weren't nervous at all!"
"No, I really was."
"Yeah, but no one could tell. Anyway, the reason I missed a few minutes of your magnificent performance is that I received a 'video call' from…your boyfriend," she says with a grin. "He asked if you could please come over to his house as soon as you were done. Said it was urgent."
"Urgent how? Is he hurt?" You only partially understand why you picture a wall of water tumbling down on him.
"No, I don't believe so." A thoughtful ripple forms above Peridot's visor. "It seemed to be a positive 'urgent,' not a negative one."
"Well, at least there's that," you say. Even when it is good, Drakken's urgency tends to well up until it overtakes sense; it would be best not to keep him waiting for long. "Thanks."
You come to stand in front of the green board again and tap your knuckles against its hardened surface. A multitude of gazes looks back at you, and you focus on Peridot and try to pretend that you are addressing only her familiar pointed face. "Okay, everybody," you say. "I'm gonna make this class officially over, because I've got to go be somewhere else now. But you guys can keep working on your meepmorps as much as you want. You all did great today."
"How do you know? You haven't even seen mine yet," cries a Ruby from the back of the group.
You smile at the insecurity that clings to her words, remembering how it used to cling to yours as well. There are still many things in which you feel unconfident, but meepmorp is not one of them. "As long as you got out there and expressed yourself, you did great," you say.
Angel Aura Quartz blinks at her paper, filled with heavy shapes and blaring colors. "Gee," she says, "that was easy."
"Sometimes figuring out your feelings is easy," you say. Not wanting to scare them, you do not add your next thought: and sometimes it's harder than anything Homeworld's ever asked you to do.
You ride the warp pad to Middleton and fly to the familiar blue-splotched house. Your finger has not even left the door-chime when the door is flung open by a long form immersed in blue, topped with a pleasant smile and round eyes which grow even rounder upon seeing you.
"Lapis! Hello!" Drakken's head bobs, his tail of hair swishing across his shoulders. "Oh, at last you've arrived!"
"Hi, Drakken," you say. "Is everything okay?"
"With me, yes. Except for the fact that I've been going out of my mind for the past few hours ever since Kim Possible and" – Drakken's eyes go vacant for a moment as he searches – "her…husband…"
"Ron Stoppable," you tell him.
Drakken's fingers click off each other. "Yes! Him! I can always count on you to remember that.
"Anyway, they called me a few hours ago – did I already say that? – and they said they had something they wanted to tell me. So I said, 'All right, tell me,' and they said that they would rather tell me in person, and they'd like for you to be there, too. All of which does seem slightly ominous, now that I think about it, but she sounded so happy –"
"Don't forget to breathe," you say.
"Can always count on you to remember that, too." Drakken pauses and pulls in a deep, blustering breath. "Anyway, I think it's good and I can't wait to find out! I have their new address here…somewhere…" He rifles through his pockets, expelling candies and coins and a piece of adhesive paper scribbled with the words Caution: High Voltage. Please Knock.
"Oh, wait, now I remember!" Drakken rolls back his sleeve, and you see that black ink smears his arm like the black semicircles smear beneath his eyes. "I'm pretty sure I double-checked the digits and made sure everything was in the right order."
That he can decipher the smudged figures at all is a kind of magic in itself.
"Onward, to see our friends!" Drakken laughs, a surprisingly light sound. "Why does it feel so good to call them my friends?"
He is probably not expecting an answer, yet you give him part of one anyway. "Probably for the same reason it feels so good to call Bismuth my friend now."
He looks at you for a moment, his mouth tender, and he nods.
Drakken takes to his hovercraft and you take to your wings, following his shouted directions until you arrive at the house where Kim and Ron moved after their wedding. It looks like most of the other houses in the neighborhood with square eaves and noble bearing, its walls the color of sandstone, its section of grass slightly overgrown with a scruffiness that reminds you of Drakken's hair. The path you walk to their front door is made of rock crushed, pushed together, and then glazed; it passes roughly under your shoes.
He presses the door-chime, and the front door opens to Kim and Ron. They wear smiles – Kim's small and tidy and sweet, Ron's wide and almost bubbling at the edges – and there is a continuity to their smiles, as though they run into each other. Rufus, the small pink creature, stands on Ron's shoulder.
"Greetings, all." Drakken bows low, his arm flailing. "Dr. Drakken, as requested!"
"Hi, guys," you say. "Good to see you."
"Great to see you, too," Kim says. She steps back from the door and gestures for you and your boyfriend to follow them into the house.
You pass under an entryway with its ceiling arched and vaulted, which earns a grunt of approval from Drakken, through a short, narrow room that contains appliances you recognize as the ones that clean human clothing, and into a sweeping, sun-streaked kitchen. A refrigerator mutters quietly in one corner. On its glistening white surface, attached by a set of small magnetic charges, hangs a brightly-colored papered object about half the width of a book.
"Can we get you guys anything to drink?" Kim says.
"Just-milk-will-be-fine-for-me!" Drakken says, his voice cresting, a wave about to break. His chin pulls inward until it nearly joins with his neck, and he bounces on the tops of his toes as he does when he needs to use the bathroom.
Kim starts for the refrigerator, but Ron pushes her back down into a chair and nearly stumbles over his own feet to get there first. He swings the refrigerator door open, pushing the narrow paper object closer to you. After a moment, the colors resolve themselves into a drawing of Kim and Ron and, above them, in wispy letters, the words, Best Friends Love Each Other Forever.
It is your card, the one you made for them when they got married. They have placed it upon their fridge and marked it as something precious. Your gem grows warm.
Leaving a few nervous splashes on the table, Ron pours a glass of milk for Drakken, and Drakken clenches it in one fist as Ron shuts the milk back in the refrigerator and returns to sit beside Kim. Drakken remains standing, unable to compress his energy, and you stand with him, finding his fingers with yours.
Ron and Kim pass a look between them, like a whisper only they can hear, and Ron brushes her cheek with his lips, his gaze lingering there. Kim's skin has always been fair, but now even in the clean light of the kitchen you can see it looks wan, almost yellowed. Is she sick?
"Do you want to tell them?" Kim asks Ron.
He shakes his head. "No, you tell 'em."
"Somebody tell us! You're killing me here!" Drakken says, even though they clearly are not.
Kim smiles. She leans across the table and speaks quietly, softly, irrevocably. "We're going to have a baby."
Irrationally, for a moment, you glance about the room searching for some small opening or crevice, anyplace where a tide could slip in carrying a baby, and Kim's hand comes to rest on her stomach, and you remember the book Mama Lipsky showed you. The baby is inside, although you see no evidence of it yet, germinating within her like a Gem below the soil. It is no surprise, then, that she looks pale and, for the first time since you have met her, tired.
Dr. Drakken jolts backward, and you catch his hand to keep him from falling. He gasps and blinks and begins to speak before he is ready, his buoy-words jerking as though in a stormy surf. "You mean – you – they – we – you – there – there's a l – a litt – a little – a little baby – right there?" He points at Kim's middle.
A deep, gurgling noise rises from his throat. He is giggling, and two small sprouts of green peek shyly from the sides of his neck.
Kim nods, her face amused. The pride filling Ron's smile adds more light to the room.
Drakken skitters toward Kim, only to stop a meter from her chair and tilt back and forth, fingers scrambled around each other. "You – uh – are you okay there? Do you – do you need to sit down? Oh, you are sitting down – do you need to lay down? Or sit somewhere…softer?"
You look at Kim. Even with the Heliodor tint to her cheeks, she still exudes strength; she appears weakened, yet she does not appear weak.
"I'm totally fine, Drakken," Kim says with a shake of her head. "But I wouldn't mind moving to the couch, either."
Drakken nods, his eyes still wide and startled, and Ron leads the group into a large room which runs parallel to the kitchen and appears, at this early stage of the evening, to receive more light from the bulbs driven deep into its ceiling than through its east-facing windows. Atop its neat trim carpet are all the objects you would expect to see in a human living area: a television, several soft chairs, and a sofa where Ron now directs Kim. You see him in the oversized blanket printed with pictures of animated characters and her in the calm, almost stern way it has been folded and placed in the corner of one cushion.
You sit on the floor at Kim's feet and gaze up at her, trying to imagine how it must feel to have another living creature taking shape inside you. Infants are an arcane subject to your people, although you have met several since you came to Earth and you understand that every human you know started as one.
As did Steven.
You slide backward and wrap your arms around your knees. Rose Quartz lost herself in the process of preparing Steven, and while you would choose Steven over Rose every time, the thought still sends a tremor down your back.
"So…you're having a baby. But you're staying, right?" you ask Kim, and you do not care if the question sounds stupid.
"Planning to stick around, yeah," Kim says.
"Okay." You smile at her. "That is good news, then."
Rufus squeaks in agreement.
"So, is it going to be a son or a daughter?" you say. It feels as if centuries have passed since Dr. Drakken first said the word daughter and longing resonated through the core of your gem for something you could never be on Homeworld, although it has in fact only been a few years.
"We dunno yet," Ron says with a shrug.
You feel a puzzled look come over your face, and Kim rushes to explain. "It's too little right now for us to be able to tell. Once it gets a bit bigger, they'll take a picture of it and figure out which it is."
"Oh." You nod, trying to recall what you saw on Drakken's face that convinced you at your first meeting that he was a man. The foreignness of him, the cheek marked with the mended remains of an old wound and the big ears flapping like boat-sails in the wind, made you realize he was no Gem despite his blue skin, but his features could belong to any human. How, you wonder, did you know to start calling him "he" in your mind?
Now you watch Drakken's eyes drift, as though he is staring at something far away, and when he speaks, his voice is ruminative as well. "Boy, am I glad I got out of the villain business when I did. With your genetics combined….the resulting child will be the ultimate crime-fighter."
Kim's eyes grow warm with amusement again, as they so often do around Drakken. "Yeah, that's definitely why we decided to have kids," she says, yet the playful bend of her lips tells you it is not.
"But just think!" Ron says. "You could've been the kid's earlier-generation arch-foe dude! And instead you get to be Uncle Drakken."
Drakken's eyes return to the present and glisten with what you are fairly certain are tears.
You have heard the term uncle; technically, it refers to a brother of one of the baby's parents, but it is often expanded to mean any man close to the family, regardless of biological relation. You cannot yet picture Kim and Ron's baby, but you know it will sit on Drakken's knee and try to grab his protruding lower lip, unaware of the harsh and tangled history that brought him here.
"And it'll come in…" You frown, remembering the spread of the book between Mama Lipsky's plump hands, framing words you struggled to grasp. "In about a year, right?"
"Almost." Drakken rubs his palms together. "The human gestation period is approximately nine months, although some babies come a little late and some come a little early." Small pink circles have appeared on his cheekbones, but you recognize the exuberance so much like Peridot's, the unbroken delight at sharing information he has memorized.
"And that's nine months from start to finish," Kim adds. "And my doctor thinks I'm already almost two months along." She gives you another glance. "That's about the usual time it takes for someone to start feeling it, so it's way rare to find out before then."
You nod again. You wonder when Rose felt Steven. "So are you going to have it in a hospital? Mama Lipsky told me it's best to have it in a hospital just in case…" You trail off, not knowing how to finish that sentence and not wanting to learn.
"Dude, it totally is," Ron says, eyes wide and emphatic. "And that's where we're gonna go." He picks up Rufus and holds him against his chest as if for comfort. "Provided we can get there on time!"
"Ron, would you relax?" Kim says. "Of course we'll get there in time. I've got the whole thing all planned out already, plus about seven back-up plans. So not the drama!"
She waves a dismissive hand, but you do not miss the shadow that falls over her expression, slight though it is. She is nervous about what happens at the end.
You move closer to her and weave your fingers through hers here in this warm bright room where not even the shadows threaten. She is the same as it is; she does not leave anyone alone in their fear, even if they have tried to destroy her in the past. If there is fear in her now, she should have your hand to hold.
Kim looks at you quizzically, and you look back, hoping she can read in your eyes what you have read so often in Drakken's: that you are offering your support without questioning her strength. "We're probably not the first ones you told about this, huh?" you say. This makes perfect sense to you. You and Drakken were not the first to hear of Kim and Ron's engaging, so it seems natural that you would not be the first to hear of their baby.
"Nah," Ron says. "We told our families first, 'a' course."
"Of course!" Drakken bounces onto the couch. "I bet your 'rents were totally stoked!"
Both Kim and Ron flinch as though Drakken has said something ugly.
Drakken's face cringes back, too. "Oooh," he whimpers. "Which one was it – the 'rents' or the 'stoked'?"
"The 'stoked,'" Kim says, squeezing the top of her nose.
"Yeah. Some people just shouldn't try to slang." Ron nods as if that explains everything.
Drakken's lips roll together until they turn as pale a blue as Sapphire's hair, and the conversation splits apart. You feel it the way you would feel a lie, like a streak of cold water in a balmy lagoon.
You straighten and lock your eyes harder with Kim's. "So…you guys are doing that thing where you tease him because you like him, right?"
"Of course that's what we're doing, Lapis," Kim says.
Ron is not so quick to agree. "Yeah…buuuutt…there might be a little bit of 'ew' left over from when he was just a creepy guy twice our age who tried to wipe us out every other week."
"That's understandable." Drakken's voice is small and uncharacteristically narrow, as if he cannot allow it to widen or anger will tear it open.
Kim peers closer at Drakken, then turns to you. The pale face that steeled itself in anticipation of what is to come is now thoughtful and sweet. "I think the part that makes it so…silly," she says carefully, "is that sometimes Drakken really seemed like he was trying to be something that he wasn't."
"Yeah, he tried to sell that whole supervillain biz for a long time, and that totally did NOT work," Ron says.
Drakken's head jerks toward Kim. She holds up a hand. "It's okay, Drakken. There's actually nothing too weird about trying to be somebody you're not. Remember that speech my dad gave at the wedding? I was a cool kid. I mean, not to brag, but that's where I fit in. But I was almost obsessed with staying cool and making sure no one ever found out there were things about me that weren't cool."
"And I was always trying to become cool," Ron says. "I thought if I could be as cool as Kim was, the ladies would be falling all over me." He pretends to scowl. "That wasn't how it happened."
"Yes. High school tanks," Drakken says. You know tanks is a slang phrase that Kim and Ron use a lot, yet neither of them draws back this time. "But then you found each other. Thanks partially to me?"
Kim and Ron exchange a look, and though only their eyes touch, you feel as if you have watched them kiss. "I mean – we definitely found out you can't impress your way into somebody's heart," Ron says. He nods at Rufus, who nods back at him. "If they don't love you, the real you, it's not gonna work out."
"After all," Kim says, lifting the corners of her mouth at Ron, "somebody doesn't need to be cool to be awesome." She pulls her gaze back to Drakken. "I mean, that's not why Lapis fell for you, is it?"
You shake your head. Slang on Earth changes even faster than the seasons and the leaves, too quickly for you to track. You just use the phrases you have heard and liked; you always thought that was the way it should be.
"It's not like we're the slang police or somethin'. It's just when you say stuff like that, it just comes across like you're still trying to prove something," Ron says.
Drakken's eyes sail from Kim to Ron and then land on his hands, clenched in his lap. "My shrink says it's an insecurity thing."
"Right. And we're so majorly glad that you're over the doom-ray part of that insecurity thing," Kim says. "You don't have anything left to prove to us, okay?"
Drakken swallows, his throat struggling.
"Fine. I'll say it myself." Kim throws her arm around Ron's shoulders. "I still can't fall asleep without the replacement Pandaroo this guy gave me for graduation."
The embarrassment in Drakken's eyes dissolves. "I can hardly sleep without my teddy bear," he admits.
"I can sleep without mine," you say. "But I don't like it nearly as much." You do not know what a replacement Pandaroo is, but for now you believe it doesn't matter.
"Seriously?" Ron says. "I'm the only one in this room who doesn't sleep with a comfort object?"
Kim tugs him closer to her side. "Umm…are you not counting Rufus?"
"Not as an object!" Ron says.
The two of them stare at one another for a moment, and then their mouths burst into laughter. Kim's hands stray to her stomach, which still looks too small to hold life, and cup it the way Butterfly will cup a parcel marked "Fragile." Plans fill her eyes, yet so do dreams, and you know she will be prepared for whatever happens.
A brief silence falls, and this one feels comfortable, as if all its cutting edges have been eroded by a kind of a terraforming that you will not protest. The next few hours pass in games and fond recollections and promises from Kim and Ron to update the two of you on their child's future development – or as Kim says, "keep you updated on the baby sitch."
When you warp back to Little Homeworld, a great group of Gems is moving like fish in a school from Bismuth's newly built forge, where she must have instructed them in taking out their anger on nonliving objects, to Peridot's greenhouse. The sight of the building does not seem to warrant its name; it is constructed largely of glass, and what bits of wood hold it together are white. Only what is within can explain it: small shoots of plants creeping from the soil in pots, bins, and jars, bravely reaching for the world beyond them, whispers of life becoming bolder. Some will grow tall like Peridot's hair, some thick like Steven's eyebrows, and some long like Drakken's vines.
You hover for a moment above the crowd, unsure about joining them, when you see Amethyst seated on a bench several meters away from the greenhouse, her hair fallen over one eye as usual as she scribbles on a piece of paper. There was a time, tides ago, when you would have waved at her and flown away, knowing her presence would overwhelm yours. Now you land next to her and prop one foot on the bench. Someday, perhaps you will be brave enough to ask her if the asperity of Jasper's voice haunts her as much as it haunts you.
She frowns, an expression uncommon on Amethyst, yet you do not get the feeling it is directed at you. "Hey, Amethyst," you say. "Is everything all right?"
"Huh? Yeah. You know, mostly." The frown does not disappear.
"Mostly," you say. "So what doesn't that include?"
Her uncovered eye grows wide. "I think me and Steven might've just had a fight."
"A fight?" You repeat the words because you cannot believe them. You have seen those whom Steven has fought: Jasper, the Diamonds, Spinel. He does not fight with Gems like Amethyst, his friends who have known him since he too was invisible inside his mother.
The frown cracks into an uneasy smirk. "Not a fight. Not a whip-and-shield type of fight. Just, you know, an argument. A disagreement," she adds in an imitation of Pearl's pristine voice.
"Still, though." You sink down onto the bench beside her. "That must've been so weird. What was it about?" You shake your head. "Never mind. I shouldn't be a buttinsky."
Amethyst's smirk calms. "Oh, yeah, that's you all right. Lapis the Buttinsky," she says, her words rich with the opposite of what they say, a teasing you have learned well in your time on Earth. "You know I'm the principal of Little Homeschool, right?"
You nod. She is the commander, albeit a benevolent one.
"So it's up to me to help the Gems find jobs, ya know, capitol-P Purposes here on Earth. And I thought I could find 'em jobs that work with the powers they already have." Amethyst finds your eyes with hers, their centers a deep violet tint distinguishable from Drakken's black only at this close a distance. "Like you and your thing with cleaning the lakes. Peridot told me about that."
"Yeah."
"Well, when Steven saw it, he didn't think it was so great. He said I was giving them the same kind of jobs they would've had on Homeworld, when the whole point of them coming to Earth is that they can do whatever they want to do."
"Oh." It is the first part of this discussion that feels right to you. Of course Steven is still going to fight to free Gems from Homeworld's influence, even the pieces of it that are lighter and not as cruel.
"Which – first of all, I got no idea what their jobs would've been on Homeworld to start with. I've been there, like, once in my entire life!" Amethyst flings her hands outward, her elbow pushing the paper from her lap and across the smoothed stone of the bench. "And second of all, who even cares? I mean, as long as the Gems have jobs that they're good at, and they're having fun, and they feel good about themselves, and they aren't hurting anybody – why does it matter what they're doing?"
"Right."
"I tried to tell Steven that. And his eyes got all flashy. He said after all the crud he went through trying to get through to White Diamond, there was no way he was going to let Little Homeschool limit the Gems' opportunities like Homeworld did."
"Steven said that?" You try to picture the plump pink lips forming those words. The image does take shape, but only if he is aiming for White Diamond herself.
"I know, right? So he insisted we switch Snowflake and Larimar's jobs for the day." She looks at you, her face a wry knot.
"And let me guess," you say. "That was a disaster."
"If by 'disaster,' you mean a plane crashed and FunZone almost got wiped off the face of the planet, then, yeah, it was a disaster." Amethyst's tone is mild and careless, telling you that no one was seriously harmed. Even she would not laugh at that.
"Ooh. Yikes." You start to bite back a smile, then change your mind and let it through; Amethyst will not mind.
"Anyway, so we sorted all that junk out and got everybody back to the jobs they wanted. And Steven said I was right and he was wrong, and so now we're cool again." Her shrug appears convinced, but her voice has a jagged edge. "The whole thing was so weird."
"I bet." Even listening to Amethyst's recitation of the events makes you think of the paintings you have seen where humans are depicted in the right shapes but the wrong colors, an inexact reflection. "For what it's worth…I think you were right, too. It feels so good to use my powers to help after I thought they were only good for wrecking things."
Things. It is easier to say than planets or other living species.
Your fingers slide over the bench, stopping just before they meet Amethyst's. "Would it help to go listen to Peridot teach everyone how to grow plants?"
Amethyst grins. "Heck, yeah." She is every bit as amused by Peridot as you are.
You select a place before the opened doors of the greenhouse so you do not have to surround yourself with glass, and as Amethyst dives inside and quickly disappears in the crowd, you fly to a height that will allow you to see over the tallest of the Gems who have convened around Peridot. She stands at the front of the room, holding a small clay pot with a flower inside it, the white petals streaked with purple.
"Hello, friends and fellow Little Homeworldians," she says. "Welcome to Peridot's Seminar on Learning to Respect Earth Life through Botany and Horticulture, Phase One, Lesson One."
You snort to yourself. Peridot has never learned how to speak simply.
"Homeworld Taught us to view organic life in a certain way – that it was fragile and simple and therefore of no value. The fact that it could not come back after being destroyed proved that it was not really life at all. How many of us heard that, huh?"
Every head in the room nods, as does yours outside.
"Which is absolutely not correct!" Peridot's chin snaps upward. "There are multiple theories about how life on Earth originated, which I do not have the time to extrapolate on during this lesson –"
At least she knows that.
" – but the point is that these lifeforms got here somehow, and they've been surviving for eons! Quite nicely, I might add. So how can we, even as an advanced and physically superior species, say they don't have the right to stay here? We can't. We just cannot!"
Her words are as sharp and prying as ever, but there is a gloss to them now, encouraging the Gems around her to believe them.
"Yes, organic life is fragile. And that's exactly what makes it valuable and why we all need to work hard to protect it. Behold this plant!" Peridot lifts the flower as far above her head as she can. "One of the humblest and most delicate pieces of life on Earth, but also the most essential. Did you know that if plants didn't exist on Earth, the planet wouldn't be able to sustain life at all? Its entire ecosystem revolves around plant energy and a hierarchy of consumption!"
You do know that they are organisms deep at the bottom of the ocean that survive on underwater minerals instead, but you do not correct her. The ocean floor is not something you like to think about for long.
Peridot sets the flower down. "And do not be deceived by its unassuming appearance. A plant is amazingly far from simple. For reference, I am the smartest Gem I know, and it would take me months to create an artificial lifeform with workings as complex and intuitive as this plant's!"
Her arms spring wide from her sides, the way Dr. Drakken's do, yet you cannot remember the last time her hands groped for something beyond their reach; when she moves her limbs now, they are not graceful like Pearl's, but quick and sure as if they have never known constraint. The Gems in the room lean forward, curious, eager to hear more. A slim river of pride washes down your back.
After her class is over you will tell her of Kim and Ron's baby, and the water in your wings vibrates anticipating her reaction: how starlight will burst through her eyes, how a smile will stretch her small knotted mouth beyond its limitations, how a high-pitched sound both obnoxious and pleasing will leap from her. There will be hugs, and questions, and probably a demand to be delivered to Middleton so she can observe Kim for herself, bringing more hugs and questions with her.
Even Kim is probably not prepared for that, but somehow the thought does not worry you.
You glance at the sky, checking it for the first time today. Clouds scamper over the sun on their way to a destination beyond what you can see. No enemies wait behind them. No one descends from the sky to put an end to what you helped create.
You realize that you have stopped expecting them.