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.

56. Lapis

~Okay, so I know this chapter took a ridiculously long amount of time, but I really hope it was worth it. (I mean, I think it was, but I'm a little biased. :P) Hope you all enjoy and are having a good spring! Yay long and warm days, boo allergies!~

Peridot offers to go with you.

You turn her down, now that you know whom you will be facing: Gems with smooth blue skin and smug smiles and teardrop-shaped souls. You have seen how they look at Peridots, heard how they talk about Peridots, and those were full-sized Era One Peridots who did not speak out of turn.

Disappointment shades her eyes, but she nods as if she understands, though you hope she does not. "Steven says he is prepared to leave as soon as you are ready. Dr. Drakken has also been informed. Our sources report that Planet 2 has a nitrogen-and-oxygen-based atmosphere, so he should be perfectly safe." Although her face is a portrait of rationality and certitude, her voice shakes.

"Guess I better get going, then," is all you can say.

Peridot reaches out for you and curls her fingers reassuringly around yours, which feel as stiff as dead branches. "You're going to do amazingly, Lapis," she says, and while her words shiver, you hear no doubt in them.

"I hope so," you say.

She presses herself against you, her nose buried in the thin strip of skin above your pants. "I know so."

It is hard to pull yourself free and walk away from her, but one glance at her innocent face tells you that you have done the right thing. She should not be anywhere near them.

The door to your house closes behind you without a sound, and you remember, suddenly, something else you learned about birth at the shower. Some of the women in labor are given medicine engineered to transform pain into numbness. You feel as though you have taken some of that medicine yourself. It is an ancient, faithful companion that should not feel alien as it drapes your limbs and wraps your spine. Your body becomes difficult to move, but not from heaviness. You are light and insubstantial, made of vapor and mist.

You pick your way across the beach, stepping over tidal pools and the shells of nomad crabs. As if from a great distance, you hear the ocean's tender mutter trying, like Peridot, to bring you peace. Grateful as you are, it doesn't help.

Steven sees you coming and opens the Temple door before you can knock. The sag to his eyes and the rough breath he blows out are all you need to verify Peridot's information is correct. "Hi," he says. "Boy, am I glad to see you."

You arrange your arms into the Diamond salute. "Lapis Lazuli, reporting for duty." You are able to sound playful when you look at the boy who broke you out of the mirror, who flew you around the world until you found a place where you wanted to stay.

He doesn't laugh. "Lapis, I'm sorry." He takes your cold empty hand between his two life-warmed ones. "I know this is probably gonna be really hard for you. It's just – without you, we won't stand a chance in a fight against them."

"You're going to fight them? Not talk?" you say, repulsed by how appealing you find the idea.

"I mean, of course I'm gonna try to talk to them first. But you saw how well that worked with Bluebird."

"Hmm," you say, your back a streak of cold. You would rather fight them than talk to them. You would rather fight an army of Quartzes than talk to them. Lapises can do something when they speak with you that no other Gem can; they can climb inside you and twist everything up, rearranging it as they see fit.

"And if it does end up being a fight," Steven continues, "I think you'd be the only one strong enough to stop them. Remember the night you stole the ocean?"

"How could I forget?" You roll your eyes.

"Right. The Crystal Gems and Dad and I – none of us could beat you then. And there was only one of you, and you were hurt, and you were probably holding back!" He pauses. "We really need you, Lapis."

You take a step back. "I'll go get Drakken, then."

"Meet at the Little Homeworld warp pad?" Steven says.

"You got it."

You walk to the warp pad as though rowing against a current. You are not ready, but you will do this for Steven.

Dr. Drakken stands on his front porch waiting for you, pacing back and forth the way you have seen Lion do when he knows something is amiss. When he hears your wings on the breeze, he jerks his head up, and at the sight of you he tries to smile, but tension packs tightly around his mouth.

"Lapis! Hi!" he says. "What up, girlfriend?"

You do not answer his question because you know it is not a question; it is a strike against fear, both his and yours.

"We probably better get going." You can scarcely hear yourself.

He is quicker than you and not as frozen. In a matter of Earth-seconds, he closes the distance between you and winds his arms around you, careful to position his forearms well below your gem. "Everything's going to be – going to be – well, I don't know how everything is going to be!" he sputters. "But I'll be right there with you the whole time, okay? I've got your back, all right?"

A vine slides from his neck, and the flower at its end takes your chin and nudges it upward. His eyes are awash in concern.

You glance at the timepiece on his wrist. "Aren't you supposed to be at work?"

"I begged off for the day. Told them there was a family emergency and I needed to go to another planet."

His honesty does not come as a surprise to you anymore, and yet you rest your head against his chest and laugh. You allow yourself a moment to remain here with him, his goodness and his humor, the nervous feel of his sweat in his sleeves, and then his heart pounds like the surf and reminds you.

"Steven's waiting." You take his hand and steer him to the warp pad.

Dr. Drakken squeals as your body is fractured into light and thrown across the stars, dragging his with it; to him, the sensation is still a wonder. You land in Little Homeworld, pieced back together, amazed at how solid you feel when the essence of you seems like it may fall apart.

Steven steps on to the warp pad with you and waves at your neighbors before he lifts his arms.

This journey is far longer than the one to Middleton. You spin across stars large and small; you watch meteors roll by beneath you; you see comets arc above your head. The pad sets you down in a world that smells like plant life, open sky, and a hint of rain.

A breeze hits your cheeks. Peridot was right about the atmosphere, and with one step off the warp pad, you recognize conditions very similar to Earth's: temperate climate and supple soil, ideal for Injecting Gems.

But what Gems? you wonder. The Diamonds have vowed not to colonize other planets anymore. Terraforming this world serves no Purpose now.

The thought is so cold you have to release it. When you do, you find the ocean without looking for it, its consciousness slipping around yours. Its presence is higher, tighter than the Earth's ocean, and it does not yet speak coherently. All you know is that until today it has never met any being strong enough to control it, and now, from its other side, pieces of it are being yanked out of place with hands demanding and unkind.

You shudder.

The rest of the planet, however, does not look like a maelstrom has yet struck it. Trees with thick, shining green trunks burst from the ground and wave in the breeze, their leaves angled upward, downward, and sideways. Moss clings to stones as gray as slate but rougher and stones as white as marble but more jagged. Colors spring forth in vibrant combinations unlike the ones on Earth: purple soil pulling away from turquoise roots, traveling upward into leaves with a bluish tinge.

Dr. Drakken spreads his arms wide and circles around to take it all in, a grin sprawling across his lips. The sight of this makes him smile. It reminds you just what is at stake.

A group of low-hanging leaves rustles, and you hear a quiet footstep. From the leaves crawls a creature that appears to be both animal and plant at once. Like Pumpkin, she has no neck, only a compact, somewhat lumpish body that her four stumped legs seem hardly able to support. Her head forms the shape of a bulb, like a flower or an onion, each side's fold pressed against the ones around it and beside it, so that the top side of her, from above, seems puckered. She watches you with bright, friendly eyes that also remind you of Pumpkin's, floating in a face that could have been shaped from the ocean, slightly more green brine than blue clarity.

You are not as numb as you thought, and you feel as though a piece of you has torn away.

"Aw, hey, little guy," Steven says. He extends his hand and the creature climbs into it, nestling against his palm.

Somehow you manage a smile. "Gee, Steven, it took you a whole five seconds to make a new friend," you say. "You're getting rusty."

Steven swings his arm around, putting the creature within your reach. You hesitate for only an instant before leaning forward and patting her head as you would with Pumpkin, and she rests her face on your hand. A vibration travels through her body like the ones you have heard from Garnet's kitten when she pets it. Despite your resemblance to the Gems currently attacking her home, she bears no animosity toward you.

You can't take your eyes from her; you can't lift your fingers from the shallow creases in her thick skin. "You know, I never used to notice organic life like this. I used to terraform planets and not think twice. I wonder what I destroyed. Life like this is so precious." The creature's eyes strengthen your resolve but weaken the cold moat you had built around it. "I'm going to do whatever it takes to protect it."

"And we shall do whatever we can to help you!" Dr. Drakken's words bounce, quicker and more agile than usual, and you suspect he is trying to imitate Kim, the natural reassurance in the rise and fall of her voice. "After all, that's what we're here for, isn't it? To save these little fellas?"

There is a flick in the air around you, sharp and harsh as a lash of Amethyst's whip, and you recognize the energy at once: a Lapis Lazuli, moving with a Purpose so true and clear that you can still feel its power resounding in you.

Steven runs his hand over the top of his head, glancing about in confusion. "Was that what I think it was?" he says.

"Yeah." You set your jaw. "Let's get going."

The three of you walk for several more meters before the soil turns to Raspberry Quartz mud beneath your shoes. You lift your head, expecting screams and sounds of distress, but all you hear is the murmur of wings, the clap of water against stone, and the splash of surprisingly gentle laughter. It is a song; it is the chorus of terraforming, lovelier than it should be.

You don't let your eyes close, but this time still becomes another time, and this world becomes one of countless worlds colonized in the first thousand years of your life. Above trees that will soon drown, Lapis Lazulis dart back and forth, marked by the same spryness in the air, the same rhythm of the ocean in their movements, the same joy in reshaping the planet. They call to one another like birds in flight, laughing and teasing.

One Lapis takes a swipe at a boulder that obstructs the section of earth where the Kindergarten will be built. "I bet I can level this rock before you can!"

"Oh, no, you can't!" you reply, your voice awash in giggles as you urge the water forward. It collides with the rock and carves a thin, narrow channel straight through its layers. You smile with pride.

Your face contorts, and you imagine that it looks the way humans' faces do just before they throw up.

Before you, the sky is a sweet innocent blue, two small but distinct figures hanging in it. Their shirts leave a gap at their waists and are patterned with the familiar black triangle that arcs upward and splits two blue ones, falsely declaring their allegiance to Blue Diamond, who did not send them here. Full, gauzy skirts nearly skim their bare tones. They pass a wave back and forth between them like the Quartzes in Little Homeworld will toss balls to one another, and while you cannot make out their faces, you know what you would see if you could: upward-pointing noses, small thin mouths designed for smirks, cunning chins the barest of notches.

You force yourself to take the next step forward. You do not want to join them. It is the last thing you would want. Whatever is unfurling in you is much deeper and crueler than a wanting; it is a reminder that this is what you were made to do.

One of the Lapises gestures impatiently to the other side of the wash of waves, probably telling her partner to try and stir the waters from another angle. The other Lapis nods and swoops in your direction, stopping right before she would land on you. For the first time, you get a good look at them.

You know them.

The one nearby has darker skin than you, the shade of the sea in the evening rather than at midday, and her hair, too, is darker, only partially gathered into a messy tie at the back of her neck. A ponytail, you remember Drakken calling it. Pyrite deposits fleck her nose like Ron's sun-speckles. Her gem rests on her stomach, like Steven's, an easy place to defend it.

Farther away, her partner balances in the air with her arms folded across her chest, the gem on one shoulder poking outward, unafraid. Her hair is immaculate by Lapis standards, the fringe on her forehead flat, straying nowhere near her eyes, and the sides hanging in even columns around her face, the ends twisted and looped in a style that has always reminded you of the scrollwork on the columns of Kindergarten Base Twenty. You remember how you admired that base when you were young and callow, the way its architecture was simple yet ornate.

They look exactly the same.

Of course they look the same. Something dark in the center of your gemstone begins to laugh. When would they have ever needed to regenerate?

Steven claps his hands to his cheeks, looking like the Steven you first met. "Aww!" he says. "They're so cute!"

You shiver and wrap your arms around yourself even as the warm water laps at your ankles. "Cute and evil. That's what Lapis Lazulis are."

"You're only half of that," Drakken says smoothly. You blink and his grin disappears, his lips casting about for words. "The – the – the – I mean – the cute half! You got that, right?"

"Yeah, I got that." You give his hand a squeeze, hoping to reassure him in the same odd way his clumsy speech reassures you.

"Hey, guys! Over here!" Steven shouts, waving his hands above his head. "We need to talk!"

They exchange a puzzled look. The one with the pyrite speckles tilts her head, and the one with the curled hair nods. They land inches from Steven and their faces brighten, but they ignore him. They are gazing only at you.

"12CH!" the one with the pyrite speckles says, greeting you with the class and facet number you had long since forgotten. "So good to see you!"

"Yeah." The one with the curled hair shrugs. "I mean, this world's coming along pretty great, but we could always use the help. Come give us a hand, would you?"

You wonder, then, why you ever bothered to fear the unknown creatures of Earth and the evil you thought would dwell in them. The true evil was close at hand all along. You know this evil, and it thinks it knows you; it thinks you still want to help it.

Your hands clamp into fists, but slowly you release them. You stare at your fingerprints until the dark feeling on your back begins to dissipate, remembering how Drakken respected them with his. Unique. Just like you, he said.

"Actually, you've got it all wrong," you say, and you don't bother trying to sound friendly. You lift your head and meet both pairs of blue eyes, identical to each other and to yours. "I'm a Crystal Gem."

It is as though Sapphire has breathed on their expressions and chilled them in place; cold overcomes them. Dr. Drakken grabs your shoulders, his bony fingers so tense you think they might break.

"Oh," the pyrite-speckled one says. "You're that Lapis."

"Yeah, we've heard all about you," adds the one with the curls.

Steven takes a breath to speak, but Drakken beats him to it. "No, she does not answer to 'THAT Lapis,' and she isn't any '12CH,' either! If you must speak to her, you will address her as Lapis Lazuli!"

"Or Bob," you say, ignoring the bewildered glances they give each other.

"Yeah? Then what are we supposed to call each other?" The one with the scrolling hair presses her hands to her skinny hips.

Drakken's frown turns thoughtful for a moment. "Well….how about we call you Lisa" – he wafts a hand toward the one with the pyrite speckles – "and you Leslie?" He points to the one with the scrolled hair.

"What is he talking about?" Leslie says. She is turned toward Lisa and she speaks as though Drakken stands farther away than he does.

Lisa shrugs. "No idea, but I kinda like it." She grins at you, a grin you remember, playful and proud, just as it was when the two of you were first paired up for a mission, targeting a small, temperate planet with perfect malleable soil. It took only a few Homeworld-hours for it to fall. "So, what have you been up for, oh, let's see – the last five thousand years?"

You find yourself shaking your head. You do not want to relive it, any of it save for the last three years, and certainly not with them. "What do you mean? I thought you'd heard all about me," you say, and you are neither able nor willing to cleanse the disdain from the words before you release them.

"That's true. We have." Leslie takes a step toward you, and though she is the same size as you she seems larger, her body dominating the space between the two of you. "Fuse with any good Quartzes lately?"

Steven gasps out loud.

Tendrils of cold wind up your back, and you crystallize them before they can rise to your face. The ground beneath your shoes turns to the barren abyssal plane, textured only with what remains of the ocean's unwanted, and you are almost certain you can feel a harsh hand squeezing you. You have no response. You can only stare at Leslie, at the darkness gathering quickly behind her eyes, and wonder if that was how you looked to Jasper.

"No?" Leslie says. "I guess that was a one-time thing, then."

"And your best friend is a Peridot?" The name that has come to mean so much to you turns into a scoff on Lisa's lips. "What would they think on Homeworld?"

You focus on the ocean lapping around you and keep your feet set. As long as they are talking, you tell yourself, they are not wringing the life from this planet. "I'm through letting Homeworld choose my friends for me," you say.

Without warning, Leslie's leg swings out and kicks you in the side. "We were supposed to be your friends," she says.

The blow does not hurt; the intent behind it does. You stumble, and Steven shouts something indignant. As you catch yourself on both hands and one knee before you can hit the ground, you glimpse Dr. Drakken: his fists clenched and jerking, his eyes grinding shut.

Lisa peeks over Leslie's shoulder. "Did you even miss us?" she says. The injury in her voice is real, but it will take more than that to win her your pity.

You pull yourself upright. "Did you even miss me?" you say. "Did you even realize that I was gone?"

Lisa's eyes shift away from yours. It is all the answer you need.

Drakken leaps across the shallow water, lopsided yellow petals framing his face and a vine collapsed halfway out of his neck; he closes his fingers around Leslie's wrist, and for a moment you try to imagine how his angry touch would feel. No words come from him, only grunting sounds, and they are as jagged as the uneven edges of rock that poke upward from the valley your fellow Lapises have begun to carve. "NGGH DOKK MMMNR!"

Leslie tugs away from him, her expression uneasy, and you do not make the mistake of believing that it is because she's intimidated by Drakken. "What does 'NGGH DOKK MMMNR' mean?"

A branchlike vessel in Drakken's throat swells, fierce with his heartbeat. "It means – that – that it would be better for all of us if you never laid a hand on her again!"

Leslie smirks. "That was a foot."

"GRRAK! That's only cute when she does it!" Drakken snaps.

His organic warmth beside you has transformed into livid heat, and while you know none of you are safe right now, the memory of being safe fills your hollow places as you stand next to him.

"You know," Leslie says, turning to you, "Jasper told us about that, too. She said you had a funny little something-or-other that could grow plants following you around all the time."

You do not look at Drakken; although a strange calm has come over you, you doubt it will survive if it sees his anger. You lean toward them, pushing him behind you. "He's a human," you say, your mouth stiff. "He's adorable. And he doesn't follow me around." You pause and glare at the Gems who rode with you on Blue Diamond's palanquin so long ago. "We're in love."

They stare at you as if you have said something incomprehensible. They glance over at Drakken the way they look at any type of life they do not understand, like he is just more organic clutter to be purged in their flood. They exchange concerned looks that seem to make sense to each other. You realize in that moment that at some point they would have made sense to you, too.

"With a human?" Leslie says at last.

You shrug. "A human was good enough for Pink Diamond."

A line appears between Lisa's eyebrows and she tips her head to one side, contemplative.

"But believe it or not, I didn't come here to catch up," you continue, taking advantage of their stricken silence. With one arm around Drakken's elbow, you slide him aside. "Steven Universe has some things to say to you."

"Steven Universe? Oh-my-stars, the Steven Universe? Wants to talk to us?" Leslie feigns a squeal, a grotesque parody of human excitement. She turns to Lisa, eyes exaggeratedly wide. "Do you think we should listen to him?"

Lisa's speckled nose crinkles. "Well, he is half Diamond. Maybe we should half listen."

They snicker, the sound sweet and sinister.

Steven turns to you, and the realization comes to his eyes before it comes to your mind: you would have said the same thing to him, but in the spirit of play. Her tone is scathing and incisive.

Somehow, you still hear yourself.

"Seriously, you guys?" you say quietly. "How about a little respect here for once?"

Lisa looks away again, even when Leslie grabs her elbow. Leslie never blinks. Her eyes are a pair of swords arcing at you, and only by meeting them with the blades of your own gaze do you keep them from striking.

The thought is powerful, and yet as you stand there watching them, it comes to you with sudden clarity that all three of you have far too much power. They were crafted from the same mineral as you and grown in the same soil, and they were given the same Purpose. How can your gem not hold all the same things that are within theirs?

Steven straightens his body so that his pink jacket pulls tighter, making a gruff sound in his throat to clear the way for what he is about to say. "So…I kinda get it. Things are Homeworld are way different now. But that doesn't have to be a bad thing." Leslie rolls her eyes, and he pretends not to notice. "The Diamonds aren't in total control anymore. You're free now. You can do whatever you want to do."

You keep your eyes open and fixed on them. From what Spinel told you, you have a suspicion what their reaction will be, and you do not want to watch the moment where Steven loses what faith in them he has.

Their blank expressions are not affected; it is as though the water has washed over their faces as well, emptying them out, leaving them as smooth as these stones will eventually become.

Lisa peers at her friend before saying, "Terraforming is what we want to do." The words do not proclaim or threaten; they ride a casual wave to the shore, grinning at their accomplishments.

"You can't be serious." Steven doesn't quite manage to contain his horror. "You like terraforming?"

"Uh, yeah," Leslie says, creeping closer to him. "Why shouldn't we?"

Disbelief swamps you, undiluted, transforming into fury. "Because it's wrong?" you blurt out.

They startle at the volume of your voice, a place to which it rarely travels, as do Steven and Dr. Drakken. You have held yourself silent for too long, among your fellow Elite more than anyone.

"Wrong?" Lisa says. "How can the thing we've done for thousands of years suddenly be wrong?" She should sound cruel as she says it, yet she is wide-eyed, her neck stretched forward as if to see you better.

"It isn't 'suddenly' wrong!" Drakken says. "It's ALWAYS been wrong, and you just couldn't see it, you little – flying – nasty – patoots!"

You will have to ask him later what that means.

Leslie folds her arms and regards him with amusement. "At least let us finish this world. We're almost done."

That is a lie. They have crushed a channel of earth below them, a trail of damage marking where they've been, and large runs of soils spill away from the rocks, leaving their edges exposed and sharp, but the presence of the small, bulbous-headed creature who still sits in Steven's hand means they are nowhere near complete. The procedure you ache to forget comes back as though you never left it, and you recognize that they are only partially through the first stage: deluging the terrain and dividing it, so that only those of stone and sea survive. Next they will level and correct the stone left behind before tearing chunks from it, priming it for the insertion of Kindergartens.

The vine growing from Drakken shakes but remains curled at his collar. "Boy, you two just think you're all –"

Leslie does not give him a chance to finish. You grab his hand and pull him away just in time as she sends another streak of water into the space between you and Steven. It slashes through the boulder behind you as if it is made of talcum; you hear it rather than see it, but you know that sound too well.

Steven glances backward and lets out a quivering breath. "Team huddle?" he says.

"Team huddle," you say.

"Quite," Dr. Drakken agrees.

Lisa and Leslie don't even move to watch you leave. It is no less than you expected of them.

The three of you scramble for a spot higher on the rise where the ground has yet to pool with water. You drop to your knees on the healthy grass and Drakken and Steven crouch with you, forming a circle with the creature prancing in the center. Your gem is frost and your thoughts are fire, and you wonder if this is how Garnet feels when Ruby and Sapphire have an argument.

"So how are we doing, team?" Drakken says, his usually buoyant words fighting to bob.

"Not too good," Steven says.

Drakken flinches, his stomach caving more than usual. "I was afraid you were going to say that."

Behind you, you hear the laughter on the breeze and the slap of water against land. The rhythm rings with familiarity in a way your fight with Aquamarine did not; every movement is clearly being carried out by a Gem of your height and build, with the confidence of a Purpose they have known from the beginning.

"Look, we tried talking to them, and that didn't work," you say. "They didn't even understand that terraforming was wrong. Doesn't that mean it's time to fight them?"

Steven gives you a quizzical look, and you bite the corner of your lip. You didn't mean to seem eager for a fight. You look toward the prospect not with excitement, but with relief. They will cease to talk and to laugh, and the things they launch at you will be things you are able to deflect.

"No, they didn't understand," Steven says. "That doesn't mean they can't. I mean, you figured it out, Lapis."

A thought flickers inside your deadened gem: if you have what is inside them, they would also have what it is inside you.

You shake your head anyway. "Steven, I don't think you know what you're saying. They're not going to listen to you. They're not as nice as I am. And I'm not even all that nice half the time."

To your surprise, Dr. Drakken does not rush to reassure you. He stares at his feet and exhales, a fast, stiff sound. "Um, I'm going to vote for trying to talk to them some more, too. Because if there is a fight, I'm not going to be a whole lot of help."

"Drakken, this really isn't the time to start doubting yourself –" Steven begins.

"It isn't about doubt – it's about certainty! I tried to sic my plants on them after that awful little Leslie kicked Lapis, and it didn't work! My vines respond to my impulses and emotions, and even though I think they've got a remarkable amount of intelligence and intuition for plants, there are still some things they don't understand. They wouldn't touch her. Either of them."

"What are you saying?" you ask.

Drakken shakes his head. "They're too much like you, Lapis. My plants were looking at them and seeing you, and they couldn't bring themselves to hurt them! Of course…that's assuming that sight is the sense that plant life relies on to gather information…"

He continues to babble and blunder, but you are quiet. Your boyfriend's powers are useless and even though you did not intend to, you were the one who has made them so.

"So…we're going to try and change their minds," you say at last, without inflection.

Steven nods. "What helped you, Lapis? What changed your mind about Earth?"

He delivers the question gently, and yet it still goes into you like a Ruby's knife. Your first encounters with Earth fill every crevice of you: Bismuth's fist a blur as it plunged toward you; glass pinning you on all sides while you watched Crystal Gems twist and contort into monsters; the green glow of the spaceship thrumming behind you as you stared into the face of the boy you hoped had been selfish enough to flee; Jasper knocking herself against you in the fusionscape until she could grab on to the ocean. You are just about to snap your mind shut on them when two small faces appear, one round and pink, the other narrow and green, surrounded by sunlight in the barn, coaxing you:

Look, Lapis. Earth is always changing.

Look, Lapis. These musical instruments! I bet we can learn to play them.

Look, Lapis. You've got to watch this show! It's called "Camp Pining Hearts," and I know you'll just love it!

"A cycle of horrible torture," you say. You glance away from the sympathy that you know will fill their eyes and shrug. "But also singing and dancing and stuff."

"Okay," Steven says with another nod. "Let's try that, then."

You blink at him. "So…just a little torture?" He did not bring any mirrors or angry Quartzes with him, so it will not be the full experience.

"No. The other thing."

"Oh. Right. That." This makes much more sense.

"Thank goodness." Dr. Drakken sighs. "I was going to volunteer to torture them myself, and I'm pretty sure that would be a massive step backward on the whole path of not being a supervillain anymore!"

You would giggle if you did not understand him too well. You don't want to torture them, but you want justice; you want revenge; you want them to know the guilt that lives between your shoulder blades.

Steven marches down the slope toward the valley they have created, and you and Drakken follow him. Lisa and Leslie twist toward him, their faces pinched and annoyed. Briefly, you stand with the ocean between you and the water pooling at your ankles.

"Hey, guys!" Steven says. "Blue Diamond wouldn't be very happy with you doing this!" You do not think you will ever get used to hearing the tinge of anger in his voice.

Leslie tosses her head, the ruffled ends of her hair jouncing up and down. "What's she gonna do, take away our status? Oooh, no, wait – she already did that!"

For a moment, the dark water in her eyes parts, and you can almost trace the outline of whatever lies beneath it before she hardens again.

"Okay – so your feelings are hurt. Is that it?" Even in his irritation Steven is kinder than you; he speaks without mockery. "You're used to being appreciated for your powers and now you're not anymore?"

There is a beautiful silence where neither of them speak. Lisa's chin inches downward a few centimeters, a motion stopped before it can become a full nod.

You hear a grunt behind you, a mangled grunt that transforms into a steady growl, but Steven talks over Dr. Drakken's grumblings. "Well, what if I told you," Steven says, "that there were other ways to use your powers? Ways that would let you create stuff instead of destroying it?"

He turns to you, and you can almost feel his hand clasping yours, urging you forward.

You climb the ridged side of the valley and your senses narrow, washing away everything but the ocean. You call for it, and though it does not know you, it scampers toward you eagerly, swirling away from your feet and twining with the soil, rearranging it. Its movements are quicker and not as cautious as those of Earth's ocean, and you have to lift it in slower, more deliberate strokes, balancing its weight on your wrists rather than your fingers. In this brief span of time, you are a feather: something that feels small and fragile to the touch yet does not move when water pelts it or hands tear at it.

You tug free a clump of the saturated purple soil, and your mind raises it above your head to a spot where the other Gems cannot miss it. From half of it, you carve a figure the same shape as all three of you, one arm stretching forward to command and the other crooking at her side to protect herself. The remainder of the soil spins and caves until it becomes a ripped, pitted sphere, a sight they know just as well as you do. The clay Lapis's wings flicker in all directions, both surging toward her destiny and trying to escape it, and though you do not touch her with your hands you can feel how cool she is, how strong and how afraid.

"This is called meepmorp," Steven says. "It's when you take the things around you and you change them to express what you're feeling or what you've been through. You can meepmorp happy or sad or mad or a whole bunch of other things that I can't even figure out how to describe! And then you can share it with as many people as you want to, or you can keep it completely to yourself – totally your own choice. It helps you understand yourself so much better."

"It's helped me a lot," you say, your voice a trickle. You focus on the fabricated clay wings and open yourself to them, allowing them to siphon from the whole of your experience with Earth, from everything you can scarcely bring yourself to feel. They pitch and throb like a ship without anchor or recourse in a storm, they rage and howl with your memories, and then, finally, they reach a place where they begin to mellow, their flapping slow and comforted.

You glance up, and Lisa's expression, too, appears to have mellowed. It reminds you of a Gem beginning far beneath a planet's crust, the heat of her surroundings still determining how her body will bend – pressed one way, it will become a question; pressed another, it will become an insult.

Before either one can Emerge, however, Leslie gives an incredulous laugh. "So, let me get this straight. You can do whatever you want with your powers…and you use them to play in the mud?"

Her eyes attempt to shame you, and for an instant it almost works. Yet Dr. Drakken continues to growl, and your vision returns to the creature sitting in Steven's hand. Her eyes are black seeds like Pumpkin's, like Plastic Lazuli Hope's, and their vulnerability makes you brave.

"Um, yeah!" you say. "It's called not hurting anyone."

They roll their eyes in perfect synchroneity. Your eyes, you remember now, always felt as though they rolled a measure or two behind the other Lapises', and at the time you were grateful that the difference never seemed to show. "Not this again," Lisa says, as though you are Peridot, gabbling about Camp Pining Hearts episodes long after everyone else has lost the desire to listen.

"Yeah, this again!" Steven says. "Because this is exactly what the whole thing is all about. When you terraform, you destroy organic life!"

They stare at him. You wait, hoping to see the truth plunge to the centers of their gems and remake them, but you suspect it is not to be.

You are correct.

"Oh, right." Leslie flips her body around and drives a jet of water, clean and bright, through a tree. It snaps off at the trunk, leaving a desiccated stump behind as the branches roll into the ocean below. "You call this life? No way."

She waves her arms at the vibrant colors they want to dull, at the creature who watches them fearfully from Steven's arms, at Dr. Drakken. What you see in her eyes is worse than hostility; it is amusement. She has been Taught too well, and she does not care enough to see them as they are.

"It can't even regenerate," Lisa says, and the words strike deep inside you, waves against an eroding coastline. "It's way too flimsy to be life."

You firm your jaw and walk closer. Behind them, sunken into their shadows, you can almost see yourself as you once were – keeping your gaze down, hidden behind the hair on your forehead; and amending your giggle, trying to make it sound as sincere and malicious as theirs. "Yeah, it's super flimsy. It can't regenerate," you tell them. "That's why it's so important for us to protect it.

"Because you know what? It can think. It feels pain. It gets scared. And it knows how to love. In a lot of ways, it's probably more alive than we are."

This gets their attention. They straighten and stiffen, the wind pressing their skirts against long legs that seem, somehow, to be more graceful than yours. For an instant, only the water speaks, murmuring as it rubs against rocks and roots.

Lisa breaks the quiet with a gasp. "Did you seriously just say that?" Her face glows with hurt, as if you have slapped it.

"I didn't mean –" you say.

"The Diamonds weren't letting you really live for a long time." Steven rushes in to replace your thorned words with his flowering ones. "And that's a real bummer. But the good news is you're not alone. Tons of other Gems are trying to figure out who they are now that the empire's been dissolved." He reaches into the pocket of his denim pants and pulls out two folded pieces of paper that you recognize as the Era Three pamphlets he has created. "That's why we started this place called Little Homeschool. To help you."

Leslie laughs again, cinching her arms across her chest. "Help us? Look, the only 'help' we need is help finishing up this world." She looks at Lisa as though Lisa is the ocean, someone who is obligated to go wherever she directs and to take any shape she commands, and Lisa nods.

"If you're not gonna give us that, can you at least not get in our way?" Lisa adds.

She sounds friendly and casual. You stand on an island of numbness within an encroaching sea of pain. A crude, unpolished facet of yourself tells you to turn and flee, but you catch Steven's eye and remember watching him leap in front of you on the deck of a boat so long ago, feeling the warm fold of his arm come back to push you and seeing his shield swing forward to protect you, and you know cannot abandon him.

Dr. Drakken's shoulder, padded broad inside his coat-of-labs, brushes against yours as he stalks toward Lisa and Leslie. You cannot see his expression, but the back of his neck, tense beneath bristled hair that has lost its usual joyous curve, tells you nearly as much. You loosen the artificial muscles in your legs and stroll over to his side, trying to appear merely curious.

"Excuse me, ladies. May – I – have – a – word?" Drakken speaks as if the words have a foul taste.

Leslie shrugs. "As long as it's just one."

Lisa pokes her in the side, a nudge so familiar you almost feel it sting your own flesh. "Aw, come on. Let him talk. At least he's funny."

Cold shoots down your spine. What she has said is accurate, but she says it in a pointing, distanced tone that he does not deserve. You glance down and see yourself in the water that washes around your ankles. You could use it to show them the truth; you could fill its surface with reflections of Drakken's hands introducing you to your fingerprints or holding out an ice cream cone for you to sample, demonstrating a high-five or packing down wet sand to make a building – but you won't give them to people who do not respect him.

"Well, I have discovered over the years," Drakken begins, "that oftentimes a desire to maim and destroy stems from a deep-seeded trauma at an earlier point in your life." He frowns. "Gghn. Is it 'deep-seeded' or 'deep-seated'? I never did know for sure. But that's not particularly relevant, so you know what? We're just going to go with deep-seeded because of the whole thing I have with the plants, all right? Capache?

Lisa and Leslie look at each other, and your gemstone groans. It is the same look they exchanged when they first heard of the rebellion, of a Pearl with swords in her hands.

"Now. Well. Oh, yes, so aggressive destruction often has its roots – heh - roots. Another plant term, and I didn't even do that one on purpose!" Drakken grins. "But the roots are rooted in some kind of traumatic past experience!"

You can't look at them anymore, and you look at him instead. He holds his head with surety, even as his words tangle around one another, his arms sweeping the air and his eyes alive, persuasive. He has forgotten who he is talking to.

The water lies still at the bottom of the valley like a child in bed. The destruction has ceased for now, but Steven and Drakken do not have an eternity to delay them.

"Sometimes the trauma is incredibly traumatically obvious, such as, oh let's see – a war! Being unjustly imprisoned and used as an object!" Drakken continues. "Orrr…it could be something that seems smaller to everyone except you, like being abandoned by a parent – oh, wait, you don't have parents, so that won't mean anything to you – or having people who you thought were your friends betray you. That's what happened to me and it messed me up pretty darn good, even though it's not nearly as horrific as anything that happened to Lapis…"

"It's not a contest, Drakken," you say automatically. Your statement is true; so is his.

"Whatever. The point being that it hurts. Majorly, absolutely, mind-bogglingly hurts! And you hate the entire rest of the world for not hurting with you!" You hear Drakken's breath catch and watch his throat give a bare shudder. He lays himself out too easily. "You're furious that you can't drag them down to your level after you've spent your entire life trying to climb up to theirs!

"So I decided to become a supervillain and conquer Earth – that's my native planet, you see – and then I thought that would drag them down and climb me up all at once! Sort of the whole 'two birds, one stone' sort of thing. Is that something they say on Homeworld? Anyway, I nearly succeeded, too, but then this meddlesome little redheaded teenager got it into her head –"

You are about to tell Drakken that he has drifted from the topic when your eyes find Leslie.

She stands with her back in Drakken's direction, though she is turned at an angle where he can still see her if he tries, her body a quivering rod, her feet thrown wide. As Drakken continues talking, she tosses her arms about in the air and shapes her mouth into exaggerated contortions along with him. Lisa rolls her eyes to the sky in agreement.

In that instant, you are back on Homeworld, walking next to them while they pretend to hunch their backs, grit their teeth, and gasp in effort after catching a glimpse of some Bismuth, stooped and sweating over her work – perhaps the Bismuth who lives in Little Homeworld with you now. The water at your feet begins to churn.

"Stop it!" you say. The words are louder than you thought they would be; they are the weight of all the instances when you should have said them, fused and towering.

Leslie gives her hair another pat. "Sorry," she says without a trace of apology in her voice. "It's just – those are waaaay more than a few words."

"They're so – many – words." Lisa smiles at you and immerses you in another memory of Homeworld: how she would stand in a line of other Lapises and tilt her body slightly away from them, creating a space just the size for you to slide in beside her.

You will not be taking that space anymore.

By now, Dr. Drakken has caught on. A pink harsher than Steven's hurries into his cheeks and lines his eyes, but it doesn't slow his speech. "What – are you worried that if you stop terraforming, there won't be anything left for you to be good at?"

This alone out of his myriad of words seems to affect them. Lisa closes her mirthful eyes. Leslie's arms lock closer to her chest as though to ward off the same chill you feel beneath your skin. You blink and she has recovered her composure.

"Um, let me guess. That's what you were afraid of. Probably for good reason." Leslie's lips twist, and you remember what Drakken said earlier, about looking at them and seeing you. You hope that your smile has never looked like hers – smug, malicious, disdaining every world in every galaxy that is not her own – and yet you are fairly certain it has.

Drakken slams a foot into the ground and pushes his shoulders back before they can fall, and you watch him stand taller, pride flaring around the injury and overtaking his body, lighting him up. It is the same stance you have seen him take with Professor Dementor; it is the posture he wears when someone smaller than him reminds him he is not as big as he would like to be. You want to give him a hug but you know that one touch, even from you, might cut him down like that tree.

"That worked so well with Spinel," is the only intelligible thing he says.

That's because Spinel's spirit was cracked and not Corrupted, you think.

"But we can teach you how to do other stuff!" Steven picks up the conversation like a ball one of the Quartzes has tossed his way. "Stuff that you could be good at, and stuff that it doesn't matter if you're good at!"

"What kinds of stuff?" Lisa says.

"Music," you say.

A bewildered silence falls. None of them expected you to say that; you did not expect yourself to say it, especially not in a voice that knows what it is to yearn for Era One's simplicity and ignorance.

You slip between Dr. Drakken and the Gems who know no path other than the one Homeworld dictated for them, and even as the gesture seems natural it feels strange. He is the type of person who wants to be seen, while your first instinct has long been to hide. But if it will draw their bitter sweetness away from Dr. Drakken, you will come closer and try to divert their attention.

"Yeah. There's a lot of stuff on Earth to learn, and not even all of it is brand-new," you say, your voice sounding thin and dark after Drakken's broad, glowing one. "You remember dancing? Not fusion dancing," you add, before either of them can reach the words first and use them as weapons. "But just…moving. Remember when Pink Diamond used to throw those balls?"

"And then her Pearl would catch them?" Lisa says. The light from this galaxy's sun runs across the speckles on her cheeks, gold one moment and black the next.

You feel no exasperation as you shake your head. "No. I mean the parties. Back before the war. Remember when we weren't being presented to the Diamonds – when we were just off by ourselves – and we'd move a little differently, be a little silly? Have fun?"

Leslie's body remains still. Her face does not change. Only her eyes move, shifting to her bare feet and holding there, and you watch as she relives the patterns they once made across the palace floor. It hurts you in a way her rudeness has not.

"Well, on Earth, there's all of that and so much more," you say. "Dancing is a way of expressing yourself, too, and no one can tell you that you should or shouldn't move a certain way." You do not look them in the eye anymore; you speak to Leslie's feet, the only part of her that she leaves unguarded. "There are things that are right and wrong on Earth, but that isn't one of them. There's just your way of doing it."

"How?" Lisa says. She sounds cautious.

You find yourself taking a deep breath, as though oxygen is all you will need to prepare for this. "I'll show you."

Without waiting for a cue, Steven hands the bulbous-headed creature to Drakken and pulls his phone from the pocket of his denim pants. Human phones, you have learned in your time on Earth, do not exist solely to connect with friends who are far away; they can also store pictures and music. He looks up at you, and you nod.

Steven's fingers slide across the screen, and within seconds a song comes pouring forth that is pure music, its words left unspoken, its strong confident beat uninterrupted. The song leaps into the sky and soars across it, and at the end of each flight lands a note deep and firm. Far below you, water lists at the sides of the valley they created, but its siege against the rocks has paused. You take a moment to gather your courage, finding more than you anticipated, and you let the music into you.

It seems to enter you from the ground up: your feet turning, your legs swaying, your hips passing your weight back and forth. You arrange your two longest fingers on both hands into the shape of scissor blades poised to cut and pull them across your eyes, peering from the crevices, casting your elbows out to either side as if trying to fight your way through an undisciplined crowd. It is not your fusion dance –you do not give that away to just anyone anymore – and it is far bolder than the courtly moves Homeworld would have required from you.

From the corner of your eye, you see Steven's head bobbing and his fingers clicking, and you hear fumbling noises as Dr. Drakken begins what you assume to be his moonwalking dance, the one he showed you on your beach. You have heard songs on Earth advise you to dance like no one is watching, and you do not do that, for you know it is a lie. Instead, you dance to the truth: that you are free; that are you are in the company of the two people you have loved longest; that you have a home waiting for you, built from the pieces of the homes that came before.

The music picks up speed, flying faster, the heavy notes squeezing closer together. It reminds you of the life you hear every time you rest your head against Drakken's chest, and you remember how it felt to realize that the Diamonds were wrong about these messy, fragile creatures.

The water in the valley gives a surprised murmur. When you lift your head, you see Lisa observing you with a questioning smile on her face. Her hands curl into fists, but you see no anger in them. They are light and subtle, like the faintest stirrings of wind through leaves, as she tilts them, first in your direction and then away from you. You blink, and her shoulders swivel in place too, climbing higher with every sounding of the loudest notes.

A slim hope spouts in the center of your gem.

You, however, are not the only one who has noticed. In an instant, Leslie's hands clamp on her hips as she stares at Lisa, her eyes tight, her mouth puckered and small. It is a look meant to drown, to drag beneath.

Lisa stops, as motionless and stiff as a pane of ice. Then she flicks her shoulders, jostling the hair that reminds you so much of Drakken's, and slouches, settling back into indifference. Yet somehow, the hope in your gem has not run dry.

"Um, okay, so, were we supposed to get something out of that?" Leslie touches her forehead with the back of her hand as though suddenly fatigued. "Because that was really boring."

"Why, you little –" The remainder of Drakken's words fall to pieces, torn apart between clenched teeth.

You step forward again, keeping him from their sight. "Yeesh, I guess you don't remember dancing. But what about singing? You remember singing, right?"

They exchange distrustful looks.

"Yeah. Singing. Dancing with your voice," you say. "Making your own music. Like the Emergence Song, remember? And it works. Sometimes if something is way too hard to explain, you can just sing it, instead."

You hear the harshness of your tone and feel the chill in your eyes. You know without seeing that you are glaring at them just as hard as Leslie glared at Lisa, that your expression is grim and your jaw a warning. You must appear invulnerable to them right now.

You will have to fix that.

The cold drains from your skin as you turn to the side, away from them and their valley and toward whatever lies beyond it. You take one small step, then another, down the ridge of the embankment to the other side. Patches of water soak the sandy ground that awaits you, vines swinging from the surrounding trees, a curtain separating all of you from the rest of this world. You hear the flutter of wings and the press and release of bare feet and know they are following you.

You wrap your hands around your bare arms and begin to sing, a gentle trickle of words from your mouth that are new to you yet not entirely unfamiliar. They have been buried and growing inside you, like Gems or seeds or babies, since you first heard the giggles on the breeze and remembered everything you wish to forget.

Ooo-ooo

Why so blue?

So many shades of sorrow

Got mixed into my hue

They watch you as though you are something they have never seen before, some species they are encountering for the first time, and you wish they were right. It would be less painful if they were foreign to you, the way they are to Steven and to Drakken, rather than the people who were with you for your first millennium of life. They are Lapis Lazulis like you, and there is something deeper within them that they have not allowed to surface, just as there was with you.

Humans sometimes use the word blue to mean sad; it is one of the many ways they fit the word into their speaking like stones into a wall. On Homeworld, blue was your cornerstone. Everyone you were permitted to befriend was blue, and while it still paints many of your closest companions – the sky, the ocean, Dr. Drakken – you have come to see something wondrous about all of the colors, spilled and swirled together, providing both contrast and support to one another.

And each new moment just astounds me, you sing.

There's so much I wanna do

I finally feel my colors shining through

You glance over your shoulder at them, and the smile that finds your lips is genuine. When the thought storms in that they will not understand without thousands of years of torture, you rinse it from your mind and keep going.

Their footsteps follow yours as you walk up to a puddle and stare down at its surface, clear as glass. You could reflect any number of images across it, communicate with them through pictures as you first did with Steven, but you leave it still so the only thing it reflects is your face, fixed and determined and joined quickly by Lisa's and Leslie's faces on either side. Lisa frowns, a look that seems more pensive than upset. Leslie is expressionless.

I'm tired of the fighting

I'm tired of the blame

That mirror was a prison

And fusion was the same

You watch your reflection's neck shiver as she sings the words with you.

What's with these new sensations

That suddenly appear?

Deep as the rolling ocean

Free as the atmosphere

You step in the puddle, crushing all three reflections beneath your shoe, and sprint to where the vines hang. With the same motion Mama Lipsky uses to open the window drapes at her house, you sweep the vines to the side. Beyond them, the world is untouched by any Lapis: moss hugging rocks still innocent of wounds; squat bushes with soft shoots green as an Emerald, the color of Shego's eyes; a steep white cliff coastline that tries to protect the ocean.

A yip comes from behind you, and you glance back to see the bulbous-headed creature leap from Drakken's hands and take off toward you. More of her kind poke their heads from the bushes and the bases of trees, venturing out to meet you.

Ooooh

Why so blue?

So many different reasons

But are they really true?

The first creature is centimeters away. You lower yourself to the ground as you do with Commodore Puddles, and she climbs into your lap. She makes a bubbling sound when you rub her side and tips her head forward.

I wanna keep on going

Wanna be right here with you

I'd love to see your colors shining through

The crimped sections atop the creature's head part, blooming to reveal a second skin with strata of colors that remind you of a desert at sunrise.

A thickness rises in your throat, but you sing past it, extending your words to them like a hand for them to clasp.

I'd love to see your colors shining through

Sunshine rests on your back. Drakken's eyes shine with tears as the most thorough silence yet falls. You almost believe it is reverent until the two women who look like you burst into laughter, Leslie first and louder with Lisa not far behind.

Dimly, you are aware of two vessels of organic heat beside you. The shorter one throws his arm before your chest as though to shield you and exclaims something. The taller one gingerly rubs his fingers across your bare shoulder, making noises that are not words, meaningless.

"You really expect us to dance and sing like Pearls?" Lisa says. "I mean, honestly? Come on!"

Leslie turns to Steven, and her voice walks toward him, lazy yet precise. "Gee, Steven, I don't know what you need us for. You already have a Lapis doing your bidding. And look how dull it's made her." Her eyes return to yours, as blue and swift and sharp as the water she wields. "Or were you always this pitiful, and we just never noticed?"

You have no words to defend yourself. You can only stare at the cuts in the rocks behind them, the places where they have left their mark.

"All right, let's get out of here." Leslie pulls her arms into their fold across her chest, the puffing curled ends of her hair bouncing with each movement. "See ya later," she says. She sounds casual, as though the two of you have been sent on separate missions and will meet up again on Homeworld before the orbit is through.

Lisa gives a quick wave over her shoulder, and the two of them fly away like small giggling birds into the area of this world they have yet to damage, leaving you behind.

This is not the most frightening thing that has ever happened to you. This is so far from being the most frightening thing that has ever happened to you. It is not more frightening than Jasper standing with her thumb over your gemstone, ruminating on all the things she could do to it. It is not more frightening than Steven being abducted to Homeworld to stand trial, or Spinel pressing the Rejuvenator against your back.

This was the first thing you were ever afraid of.

This cold does not numb you. It is bracing, harsh, a slap.

Steven puts a gentle hand on your arm, and you realize Dr. Drakken is repeating your name in a shredded voice that indicates he has probably been saying it for quite some time. When you turn to look at him, everything in your vision has gone bleak, even his lively, sweet face.

"Of all – the – nerve!" Drakken splutters. "Who do they think they – how dare they – NNNGH? That's a lot of – I can't even – oh, CODSWALLOP!"

A cod is a fish, you know. But you have no idea what a swallop is; you don't know what the words make when they fuse.

You do not, at this point, care. You stand up, and the creature falls to the ground.

Steven stoops to pick her up and then pushes his other hand through his curls. "I can't believe they did that! I had no idea! Lapis, I'm so –"

You put up your hand, stopping him before he can apologize for being who he is.

"I knew it," you say. The voice you hear is brittle, as dark and churning as the ocean within. "I knew it wouldn't work. I knew they wouldn't listen. But I still tried it. I actually let myself believe it – that I could reach them. I was so stupid. I was so stupid!"

For a moment you think Jasper has found you and made good on her threats as something inside you breaks, and then breaks again.

"It didn't work," you say, and the words are neither accusation nor admonishment, just patches of frost. The only warmth left is in your cheeks, flushing, disgusted with every Lapis on this planet. "It didn't work, and now we're going to do this my way."

A gust of wind hits you and freezes the moisture in your eyes. There is no time for it anyway. Even now, you can see chippings of rocks and fragments of trees in the area beyond you as the water swings back and forth, continuing their mission.

Dr. Drakken assumes a warrior's pose, his feet spread as far as his narrow hips will take them, the scar beneath his eye twitching. "Why, those little – Why, I oughta – Why, I could just wring their – Why, I could just stomp –" He seems incapable of finishing sentences, only beginning them.

Somehow, Steven understands him. He reaches under his T-shirt to grab his shield, but you shake your head at him. "No," you say. "I'm doing it my way."

This is your mess; this is your fight. You will not let these Gems harm your friends.

"Wait, Lapis!" Steven says, and through the strained sounds pouring from Drakken's mouth, you imagine him to be saying the same.

Your wings flare and carry you away from them and the vines and the creatures who listened to you sing. Resolve turns your surroundings indistinct until only Lisa and Leslie rise from the background. It is just you and them and the ocean, the way it could be on any number of projects Blue Diamond assigned to you.

They laugh as they cut the world apart. Their giggles stick to you like wet sand to skin; you don't know if you will ever stop hearing them. You cannot fix this with a water-punch that propels them into the cosmos. They would only come back. You need to convince them that it is in their best interests to leave this planet and all others in the future alone.

You are not as disappointed as you should be.

You reach down on your flight toward them, skimming your fingertips through the water beneath you. It feels pure and clean, and when you raise your arms it follows them. Its weight and texture are unfamiliar against you, its salt content higher than the ocean on Earth whose properties you have memorized, and it takes your powers a minute or two to balance it, to adjust it to the point where it feels comfortable in their grip.

Neither Lisa nor Leslie looks surprised when you stop beside them.

"Hi, there," Lisa says. She smiles at you. When you look around her, you see the blight she wants to visit on this world; when you look at her, you remember her hand squeezing yours for a fragile moment in the line on the way to be presented to Blue Diamond for the first time, maybe to comfort you, maybe to seek comfort for herself.

You know which of those things you will defend now. This planet can still survive. Whatever you had on Homeworld died a long time ago.

"Changed your mind?" Leslie watches you over her crossed arms, her eyes secure and unexpecting. "Decided to come give us a hand?"

You answer her smirk with your own. "Well…you might say that."

You yank the water from below harder than you need to. With a silent apology to it, you split it as gently as you can and shape the halves into two enormous hands, each as tall as you are and many times wider. They mimic the movements of your hands: folding in, fingers touching palms, just shy of forming a fist, and then lashing out.

The pointing finger on each hand grazes a Lapis and sends her flying, reminding you of how Pearl brushes flecks of dirt from her clothing. They stumble as they attempt to right themselves and they cry out, but an instant later they clamp their jaws around their pain, hide it. They are Lapises to their cores.

The thought is like silt in your gem. With quick motions and very little effort, you pull your hands and the ones above you into fists and punch, striking Lisa and Leslie across faces too similar to yours. Their heads bounce on their necks as you aim and thrust, again and again, careful each time not to hit anywhere near their gemstones.

Perhaps you are doing that to spare them. Perhaps you are doing it to prolong their pain.

You do not, at this point, care.

You do not know how long you punch before you sense a shift in the ocean. The first giggle falls on you like the first raindrop of a storm: solitary and simple, almost unnoticeable to those who are not attuned to it. A second laugh follows, and then another, and another, until there is a steady patter of them pelting you.

It cannot mean anything good.

The water hands rush forward again on your command, but the one on the left swerves around Lisa, not touching her. She giggles again and cocks her wrist, and the hand rotates so that its large liquid fingers are pointed at you rather than her. You have just enough time to cringe before it hurtles forward and slams into you.

Water clots your senses and mashes your chest, stealing oxygen that you do not need and strength that you do. Through the salted streams that swim before you, you can make out Lisa. She wears a half-smile and an expression that reminds you of Dr. Drakken's – her eyebrows perked, her face alight with new discoveries.

In that blurred moment, you understand. The uses you have found for water go far beyond what Homeworld Taught the three of you six thousand years ago. You discovered them, sometimes in droplets and sometimes in floods, in your time on a planet where the ocean was the only one you trusted. Lisa and Leslie do not know what it is to be surrounded by rebel Gems, how it feels to fall out of prison onto sand and not be able to find your wings. Your fear has made you creative; it has driven you to explore every crevice and turn of your powers for protection.

You brace yourself for the second blow, but it does not come. You scrape the water away from your face with one hand to see Leslie angled toward the green shore with a fist of water slanting high behind her, poised to come down atop Dr. Drakken.

The water tightens as it switches from Lisa's hold to yours. You thrust it forward, smacking Leslie in the back of the neck. "This is between us!" you say. "Leave him alone!"

Part of you wants to add, He literally can't even hurt you, but you do not know if this will matter to her, if it will make her less likely to attack him.

Leslie turns to face you, her eyes wide; she is still surprised to see you standing in opposition to her. Her fist pulls back again, and you do the one thing you were hoping you wouldn't have to do: you lift a tendril of the ocean and attach it to her wrist in the shape of a prisoner's shackle, forming liquid links between her and the water below.

You have no time for the memories of being her to arise, and no energy to stop them. You remember Jasper thrashing on the other end of the chain, bellowing at you to give up in a voice that filled your shared being, gazing at your powers the way Drakken gazes at a food he hopes to devour. Creatures that have never seen light swish around her ankles. The water is cold, but you are colder.

Leslie shakes herself free and pulls the water back to herself. You start toward her, hearing nothing but the grumbling of the ocean as it jerks back and forth like a toy two children want to use. You fight to reach it again, but Lisa flits over and adds her influence to Leslie's and the water tears away from you with a hiss.

Something wet and far too familiar wraps around your ankle. Your surroundings dim, the bottom of the ocean taking their place.

"Water chains?" Leslie says. She is smiling, too, a broad stretched grin that you do not recall from before. "You've got to quit teaching us things!"

She gives her arm a shake and the chain flips so that you hang upside-down. Your hair fans away from your scalp and your wings flail at the air, and through it all you can hear them laughing.

They handle the water without Aquamarine's arrogance, you notice, merely the confidence of Gems who have known from the beginning that this is their Purpose. Anything you can do, they can do as well. And you realize with the taste of salt on your mouth that Leslie is right: every new action you show them becomes a lesson, and they are not stupid. They will store them away like little treasures and cherish them, never forget them.

Terror is a comet, a ball of ice streaking through you.

You grab for the water and demand it to release you. You wish you had an extra moment to be kinder to it, but it heeds you regardless, and the pressure falls away from your ankle. You twist in the air, right yourself, and dodge the next fist of water that Lisa sends in your direction.

"Look at her. Not singing anymore, is she?" Leslie says. "I guess she doesn't have a song for this."

She turns an expectant look on Lisa, who nods. "I guess not," she says.

You yank a sheaf of water up to meet you and, still staring at them, you mold it into the shape of the baseball bat Steven taught you to use on your first day at the barn. It winds up and tilts, and you swing it toward Leslie, hitting her in the shoulder where her gem is not. She spins away from you, her legs entangled in her skirt.

Lisa lets out a gasp. You swing the bat again and catch the backs of her knees. She stares at you as she flies past, her face a mixture of confusion and anger.

It is a triumphant sight, but you feel no triumph. You glare toward the horizon and you wait.

Please don't come back, your mind begs them. Please just leave.

They are back within a matter of Earth-seconds, with eyes like the abyss. "You know, you're really starting to get on my nerves!" Leslie says.

You say nothing.

Her arm shoots forward, and a thin tendril of water slithers across the sky and tries to slip around your ankle once more. You snatch your foot away, focusing on your shoe, a piece of you that was not there when you chained yourself to Jasper.

Leslie shakes her head. "She just doesn't learn, does she?" You recognize the scorn in her voice. You are now a Peridot to her.

"She really doesn't," Lisa says.

A look passes between the two of them that you are not close enough to read. Leslie's hand dances in the air, and the water behind her rolls until it is a baseball bat as well. She would never have been taught how to use one, but it does not take her long to figure it out; the bat sways a few times and then circles around in your direction. You raise both hands to stop it.

It dissolves, and you are about to reach for it once more when water surrounds you on all sides. Your reflection fills your vision as the water eddies around you, thickening and lengthening, a cyclone that never strays or moves beyond you. Sunlight tries to come through, and you catch hurried glimpses of Lisa's and Leslie's faces, though they are always spinning and never in the same place twice. You grapple with the water, your powers quivering inside you, yet you know it hears one Lapis pleading with it to stop and two Lapises urging it to keep going.

Giggles bob in the air, each one like being kicked again. You force your limbs apart and anchor them, forcing the edges of the water trap outward. It falls apart too easily, limp as fishing wire without a fish on the end. You push the water aside, tension in every facet of your gem. Meters away from you, you see twin white-topped waves rising into the air, higher than Pink Diamond's head, higher than you can withstand.

You have only enough time to shrink them, lure a few droplets' worth from their side to yours, before they slam into you.

For an instant, the world is filled with blue and betrayal, from the sky and the water and the Gems who wanted you to join them in their destruction. Someone sobs nearby, but you can't tell where the sound is coming from. You have no sense of where you are going or how far until your shoulder blades collide with something smooth and flat.

The air around you hums, the song of the universe turned discordant. A groan rises inside you, but you manage to pull it back.

The water drops from you, returning to its bed in the valley. Your wings shake but manage to push you back into the sky despite the weakness in your arms and legs. You draw a trembling hand across your forehead and slowly turn to see what broke your fall. They come to you in layers, like the gradients of color in the creature's head.

Steven's shield, still vibrating with the impact of your weight.

Dr. Drakken's hand beneath it, bent at an unusable angle.

The cliff wall beneath them both, pitted with crooked crevices of jagged rock. If not for Steven and Drakken, this is what your back, your gem, would have found when your fellow Lapises were done with you.

You don't see them, and though you know they are dangerous, you don't want to look for them. They almost shattered you. They might have been trying to shatter you.

"Lapis? Are you okay?" Steven's words shake harder than your hollow insides.

"I'm fine," you say. It has never been more of a lie.

Drakken cries out and cups his uninjured hand around the other, which does not even appear capable of movement. "Owwwwwwwww-aaaaah! Ooooh, that was absolutely worth it, but it still hurts so bad!"

You thought you were beyond hurting, but the sight of the tears spilling onto Dr. Drakken's gentle round cheeks catches at you and stings. For the moment, you are grateful for it. It seems nobler, braver somehow, to focus on Drakken's pain above your own, and you must be brave if you are to see this to the end.

Steven runs to Drakken's side and presses his lips to the back of Drakken's damaged hand. An aura, thick and pink, glows from beneath the fabric of Drakken's black glove, and you watch his wrist straighten, the fragile fingers slide back into place.

Your feet leave the ground, your wings clawing at the air as you fly. The sky around you is a maze, and your head rings with the sound your back made when it hit Steven's shield, and with the sound it would have made if Steven had not gotten there in time. You can only follow the giggling until you stand above the planet with Lisa and Leslie again.

They turn almost lazily to face you. Leslie dips her head toward Lisa.

Lisa's hands dart back and forth at a speed you did not know she could reach, a speed she must have learned today, from you, and with alacrity and immediacy, the current she has been handling splits into four and rushes for you, and the ocean binds your wrists and ankles at her command. The lines of the chains merge into one at their base, but the end does not disappear into the water. Lisa clings to it, and you are suspended in midair, stretched like one of the animal hides you once watched early humans dry and scrape.

You thrash, whipping your neck in every possible direction, but at the other end of the water you feel two combined sets of powers, self-assured and deliberate and as heavy as mirror glass. You remember the night the Crystal Gems came after you to reclaim the ocean and how you answered them: your gem cracked and your wings unreachable, but every other part of you fighting as hard as it could. Your body feels now as it felt then, but every movement begins in your mind and ends in your back, siphoned away from you to them before it can spread.

Leslie floats into your view. Part of you wants to shut your eyes, but you leave them open as you watch yet another wave build behind her. A weakness moves through your limbs and your throat clenches, and yet you refuse to let your eyes close.

Lisa's hold on the chains remains firm, but she begins to shake her head hard. "I didn't want it to turn out this way," she says, and you realize with astonishment that she is speaking to you. "I thought we'd just, you know, agree to disagree, and we'd go our separate ways, and then –"

Leslie talks over her. "You should have stayed on Earth, 12CH."

She giggles, a sound that would seem innocent if you didn't know what she plans to do with it. You hear it as clearly as if you haven't spent these five thousand years apart. You hear the jokes she makes about other types of Gems, all the disparaging comments you let her get away with; you hear the things she said about you today, the things you always knew she would say if you let her see who you truly were. You can hear the snapping of the water and the denting of the rocks as she kills worlds to redesign them, and you can hear your laughter trailing behind hers, its accomplice.

You are no longer cold. You burn with a profound heat beyond their control, hot enough to be melted down and made into something new.

The chains holding you boil away.

You catch yourself in midair and draw your arms to your sides. Lisa and Leslie glance at one another, and you see them fight to keep the derision in their expressions.

You search for the water, and it gives itself to you without hesitation. It sprays from over the valley walls, leaps from the pools scattered on the green, and wrenches from Lisa's and Leslie's hands – water coming, rushing to see you because you have spoken. It gathers behind you, around you, before you, wrapping you, draping you like Blue Diamond's cloak, as though the scene before you and the pain lancing down your spine cannot possibly be real.

The giggling has stopped, but somehow you can still hear it. Somewhere behind you, you know, Steven calls out your name and Drakken curses the other Lapises in his unique, indecipherable way, yet that laughter is all you hear.

Water gushes from beneath your feet, pushing Lisa and Leslie outward and you upward. You rise and look out over this section of planet, the size that Blue Diamond would assign one of you to begin with, and there is no water left on it that has not aligned itself with you. Safety and anger and water swirl together; you become the ocean, and the ocean becomes you.

It stacks toward the sky until it arrives at a height taller than any of the waves used against you today, and as it does it begins to assume the basic thin, straight shape of a body all Lapises share. Long arms and legs take shape; eyes blink open where the face should be, silver and unbound; and the water tucks and rearranges itself to mirror the shape of your hair and your clothes.

You stand inside an enormous liquid replica of yourself, and you are protected at the center, in the chest, like the beating heart of an organic being.

Your arms lift, and so do its. Once again you are something small and central within something huge and powerful, yet this is not at all like being part of her. No one else's words taunt you and threaten you from the darkest corners; this creature hears the pulsating of your gemstone and nothing else.

You guide its hands to the pool of water below and pinch off a piece of it. The water does not still at your touch but continues to loop within the limited dimensions you afford it. It tapers and elongates, and as you clench down harder, it turns gray and solidifies into something much like a spear – artless compared to Pearl's, but it will suffice.

The vast liquid arm raises again as yours does, the spear folded in its fist. "Who's dull now?" you say. You are not screaming, but the water grabs and expands your voice until it is large enough to get their attention. "Who's pitiful now?"

They thought the three of you were the same, and they were wrong. You are angrier and more broken than they will ever be. You can level them as easily as they level this planet.

She and you hoist the spear higher. Beneath you, Lisa wraps her arms around Leslie's neck and Leslie lets her cling to her. It is the first time you have seen two Lapises touch each other since before the war. Their mouths are open and unmoving, no sound coming from them, and yet their giggles still fill you, and you direct the spear to an angle where it will drive through them and you will poof them, just poof them, to make the laughter stop.

You realize you are smiling.

You think you may also be crying.

You twist your head sharply to the side, and even with your eyes enshrouded by water, you can see Steven and Drakken standing where you left them at the peak of the cliff, the bulbous-headed creature nuzzling uneasily in Steven's arms. They look back at you from what seems a great distance.

Steven doesn't shake his head like you expect him to do. His eyes do not say Stop or No or even I'm sorry – merely I love you.

Dr. Drakken leans heavily against Steven's shoulder, his hands thrown over his face. One bright black eye peeks out from between his fanned fingers. He will not stop you, either, you realize, but he does not want to watch you do this, just as you would not have wanted to watch him attack Bismuth when she was your enemy.

In the next instant, you feel a voice stroking your powers. Crying amid the rapids, its timbre is higher, its tone thinner and more hesitant than the ocean on Earth that you have come to know so well, but it resonates through the same area of your gemstone, fills the spaces left by your lacking insides.

The conversation you have with it is pure thought and instinct and emotion, unburdened by words, though you can interpret at once what it is trying to say: Don't. Please don't. I don't want to be used this way.

Of course it wouldn't. It never has.

You stare down at the tips of your fingers, at the prints that belong to you alone, and you let everything go.

The water falls out of your image and escapes, drenching you, Lisa, and Leslie as it runs away, back to where it belongs: its bed beyond the cliff and its pools in the sand and mud. It will settle there, as tame as it can be, and live how it was meant to live – not as a weapon or as armor, but as water, nothing more and nothing less.

You are immersed, the sea rolling over you in its rush to return home. Wave after wave moves across you, and then the bombardment has passed and you can feel the sun against your back again, and you rise to your feet, cleansed and whole.

Lisa and Leslie remain on their hands and knees. Their expressions make you think of Gems who have taken grievous damage but whose bodies have not given out yet.

You can level them as easily as they level this planet. But you will not.

"Okay," you say quietly. "We're done here. No more fighting. Not more terraforming."

Their heads bob like tossed sailboats, and something in their faces gives you pause.

Before you can figure out what, however, Steven and Drakken come racing down the ridge toward you. "Lapis, Lapis!" Steven says. "That was amazing!" He unfolds his arm, and the creature leaps from his hand into yours, nuzzling her face into the isthmus of skin between your shirt and your pants, and accepting the touch of your hands as though they have never destroyed worlds like hers.

Dr. Drakken's lips work, but before he can speak one recognizable word, you fit your fingers between his. "Great to see you guys," you say. "But I think we're okay. Everything's under control here, isn't it?"

They nod again. "Oh, yes!" Lisa says.

"After that ridiculous show of strength, we'll do anything you say!" Leslie says.

You sigh, your hope drying. There is respect in their eyes now, but it is the shade that flows from fear, and you have an immediate image of them looking at Jasper the same way. They will follow whichever Gem they deem the strongest, you know.

But you have no need to prove yourself stronger than Jasper.

Sharp pain pierces your head, and you pinch the thin ridge at the top of your nose, the way Drakken does when he is tired and aching. "That wasn't strength; it was weakness," you say. "Restraint takes strength. Patience takes strength. And I don't have the strength to deal with you." Your voice breaks like one of the trees they demolished, pieces spraying every direction, and yet your gemstone feels secure on your back again.

Even as you turn away, you see Leslie's arms come to rest at her sides. "You hate us," she says, and for the first time she sounds sad.

You shake your head, not because hate is too strong a word for what you feel toward them, but because it is too simple. "No. You just remind me of someone I used to hate. Me," you add before they can ask.

Lisa's brows squeeze together, the rest of her face going limp. "I didn't know you hated yourself." Her voice is no longer rock; it is clay.

Leslie tosses her hands into the air. "Where is all of this coming from? She never said two words on Homeworld!"

You stare her down. "That's because Homeworld wasn't a safe place. Even back when we all thought it was. But Earth is. And there are other safe places out there, too."

They do not even nod this time. They are motionless, sculptures of shock.

Steven steps into the place that your body leaves as you back away. His grin has returned. "And if you're interested in finding a safe place, Little Homeschool will be happy to have you." He pulls the pamphlets from his pockets and lays them across the stiff blue palms, folding the fingers around them. "All the information you need is in these brochures. Hope to see you there!"

Dr. Drakken chuckles, a sound edged with smugness. "Well, well, well. Looks like you ladies got –"

You take hold of his elbow, your pinch soft but not the softest it can be. "No," you say. "We're not doing the gloat thing. Let's go home."

The creature gurgles and nuzzles your hand. The puckered tips of her head whisper apart, the desert strata of her hidden colors shining through. "Don't worry," you tell her with a laugh. "I'll come back and visit." You feel as if you know her better than you do these other two Lapises before you, whose faces still do not understand you.

Lisa and Leslie say nothing. You turn away from them, from the fear in their eyes and the memories that rise up in you like fog, and walk back to the warp pad, Steven racing ahead of you. Dr. Drakken follows, walking backward, his arms outstretched in case either of them is foolish enough to attack you, though you're certain they will not.

When the warp pad delivers you to Little Homeworld, more time has passed on Earth than you anticipated: the sun has disappeared behind the horizon, the sky a gloaming blue laced with scatterings of pink, the night air cool and familiar on your skin. Your neighbors raise their hands and wave. You cannot see your home from here, but your back locates the ocean immediately. The steady eternal rhythm laps over you and douses your anger until you can almost feel it steaming away.

Drakken folds at the midsection, his arms and vines dangling, and a great breath surges from his body. "Well!" he says. "I think we did some awesome work today, team! And by 'we,' I mean mostly Lapis…but there was also that moment where I broke my hand, which was pretty amazing in its own right, wouldn't you agree?"

He continues to speak, but the edges of his words fade into each other. You can think only of the water rushing to shelter you, the cruel pitch of the spear, and the look on Lisa's and Leslie's faces as they watched you. They believed you would do it. They were afraid of you, just as you were afraid of them in your time on Homeworld. It feels more punishment than reward.

Your legs become vaporous again, and you sink down on the widest curve of the warp pad. "I really wish I hadn't done that," you say.

Steven does not ask what you are referencing. He stands in front of you and takes your hand in both of his, the pink cushions that do not yield as easily as they once did. "Don't beat yourself up, Lapis," he says. "'Cause, guess what? You didn't do it. You just almost did it. There's a big difference."

You nod. There is a difference, the difference between Gems flying away to find themselves in the universe and Gems wrapped in bubbles in the temple, their minds paused. It should make a difference to you, too, but the thought will not fix in place – it flits about, incomplete and uneasy.

"Still." You stare at your hands. "What does it say about me that I wanted to do that to them?"

"Um, that you're normal?" Drakken says. "Listen, Lapis, they could have – they nearly – they – they –" A wet sound gurgles in his throat. "It says a lot more that you stopped yourself, in my sort-of-humble opinion."

"I'm not sure I was the one who stopped myself."

Steven looks back at you, his forehead puckering. "What are you talking about, Lapis? Neither of us stopped you."

"We don't have power over you," Drakken adds.

You shake your head. "It wasn't either of you. It was the ocean. It told me it didn't want to be used this way."

You can still feel its urgency, its fright as three strangers fought for control of it. You scared the ocean, and that alone seems like a betrayal of the Gem you have become on Earth.

Steven releases your hand and eases down next to you. "But, Lapis, don't you see? All of you have the same powers. If you could hear it, so could they! You were just the only one who listened."

Earth's ocean murmurs its agreement, your name sighing through the tides.

You want that to be the end of it, but when you rise your legs are still unsteady and your spine heavy. "It's just – they really did remind me so much of myself."

Drakken gives you his broad smile, bright as starlight. "I find it hard to believe that you ever laughed while you were terraforming."

His breath sifts the top of your hair, but his words seem to come from an impassable distance. Pain collects in your gemstone, cold and shallow, as it so often does when you remember how long your life has been and for what a brief portion of it he has known you.

You squeeze your hands into fists and press them to your brow as though you can wring yourself dry, filter out the most dangerous parts of you and be done with them. "I did, though," you whisper. "We would turn it into a game. Have little contests. It was the only time I felt like I really belonged with them."

You can still hear your laughter, and you try not to wonder if it was the last sound so many extinct species heard as their world crashed around them.

He is silent for longer than you have ever known Dr. Drakken to be silent, and then he guides his arms around you, and you glance up into eyes that don't have to guess anymore. "It's hard, isn't it?" he says. "To start all over when you can still remember doing so many horrible things? But if I can do it, you can do it. Because –" his voice lowers until it is almost quiet – "don't ever tell anyone I said this, but I think you might be tougher than I am."

You snort, your eyes and nose leaving moist circles on his sleeves, and rest your head against his chest, which is as strong as it needs to be and no stronger. Somewhere within him, among the many organic systems that keep his body working, are the remnants of his darkness, gathered and bubbled like Gem shards, and he too understands how lightly he must tread to keep them asleep.

Steven slips up behind you and pats your elbow. "You've grown a lot," he says, and though he is the one who has changed in size since the night of your first meeting, you somehow hear the truth in his words. "It's not your fault they're stuck in their ways."

You frown.

"Come on, Lapis. You do remember there are things in the universe that aren't your fault, right?" Steven's words nudge you, the way Pumpkin pushes her head against your hand when she wants to play.

Your frown disappears. "Well, maybe just one or two things –" you begin, and then the jangle of the warp pad interrupts you. All three of you turn toward it.

The warp stream narrows, and the light it carries settles into the shape of a woman with long legs, bare feet, and eyes that the sky will match when it gives up the last of its pink. She holds her hands behind her back, and even in the dark you can see that her hair is pulled back yet barely contained, the softly bristling ends falling from the tie.

It's Lisa.

Dr. Drakken takes a step forward, but you put your arm out to stop him. The moment is wispy, diaphanous, and he will break it without even trying.

"Hi," Lisa says. "Um, is this the school?" Her voice sounds thin and shy; it sounds like yours.

Drakken's mouth opens but he says nothing, his jaw simply hanging as though by fishing wire. Steven's eyes shoot to yours.

You turn away from them and you grin at her, the sort of loose, free grin you remember from when Steven placed his sticky hand on your back and the pieces of your gem flowed back together. "Yes." You spread your arms to encompass the buildings around you, the Gems going about their lives as they wander from place to place. "Welcome," you say, and you mean it.

Lisa smiles back. She looks more vulnerable now than she did when your group first met Blue Diamond, yet her eyes are hopeful.

And no more coldness remains inside you.

You step forward and nod to her, and she approaches you, her exposed feet timid on the tender sprigs of grass, the walk of one from Homeworld finding her footing on Earth. She follows because she knows nothing else, and you hope only to lead her to a place where she can see she has so much more than submission to give.

A few meters from the rest of the group, she stops and pulls one arm forward, rubbing the length of it with her opposite hand; it is strange to watch your own nervous gesture performed by another Gem. "Um… Leslie isn't coming," she says. "Also – she didn't want me to call her Leslie."

Disappointment, bitter and unsurprised, sinks deep into your gemstone, yet on its way it frees something quieter and more powerful to float to the surface. "So you came by yourself?" you say.

Lisa nods.

You reach out and place one hand on her shoulder, pretending not to notice how she tenses at your touch, and you look her in the eye. "That was so brave," you say.

Lisa stares at you as though she is waiting for the end of a joke, but you do not give her one. You try to imagine what their parting must have been like, and all you can envision are humans struggling to peel sodden clothing from their bodies after an unplanned swim.

"I never saw anyone do anything like what you did today," she finally says, and when you moan she shakes her head. "Not the part with the water. The other part, where you let us go. Something down here – it's made you so different."

"A lot of somethings," you say. "It's a huge long story that I'm way too tired to tell you right now. But I can show you around, if you'd like."

"Yeah." Lisa grins. The speckles on her cheeks look black in the dimming light, but her eyes are bright, and you think in that moment that you might know her after all.

You show her down the slope away from the warp pad and into the entrance of Little Homeworld, the spring from which every other offshoot flows. The buildings throw long shadows across the ground as you point to them each in turn. "That's our central lookout-tower-slash-meeting-place. That's the greenhouse where we learn how to grow plants. That's the studio where I hold meepmorp classes, which are really fun. That's the field where we play baseball, which is a game we totally need to teach you."

"All right," Lisa says, her voice cautious.

You wave your arm to indicate the houses around you, from the grand scrolling latticework of Butterfly's cabin that she wanted to be as much like her quarters on Homeworld as possible to the rounded building tinged a playful green and stippled with multiple windows on every wall, the one Topaz wanted to be as far from Homeworld as possible. "Some of us just hang out wherever, but a lot of us have our own houses. If you want one for yourself, just let Bismuth know, and she'll build it for you."

"Bismuth?"

The sound of Bismuth's name in her mouth stills you. You glance at Lisa, following her eyes with yours, and in that moment you realize she has been looking not at the buildings but at the motley collection of Gems scattered about: Quartzes who now hold volleyballs instead of weapons; Rubies sprawled on their stomachs in the grass, reading books they borrowed from the library; the trio of Pearls whose heads are bent in conversation rather than in deference to the Gems they would have served on Homeworld; Bismuth herself, who stands among a group of gabbling Nephrites, holding a box of meepmorp supplies out of their reach. It will only take a minute for her to look up and see the two of you, and then she will feel duty-bound to come and greet the new arrival. Lisa's eyes fill with fear, not disgust, but you still wish to step in front of her, to protect Bismuth from her.

You catch Lisa by the arm instead, careful to keep your grip light. "Look, I don't wanna throw a bunch of rules at you all at once," you say, "but there's one you need to know right away – and that's not looking down on the other Gems. We're all equal here."

She does not recoil at the idea like Aquamarine did. She just watches you, her face blank.

"Are you cool with that?" you ask.

"I guess I can be." Lisa rubs her arm, the space where your fingers were moments ago. "It'll be really different, though. This – this'll probably sound lame, but it was nice to be treated like I was special."

It does sound lame. It also sounds candid and open.

You meet her eyes again. Their luster reminds you of the home you both left, and the reminder does not ache the way it once did. "You're still special here," you say. "You don't have to be better than everyone else to be special."

"Wow," you hear her say, more a breath than a word.

Heavy footsteps beat the ground around you, and you don't have to look up to know it's Bismuth, just as you predicted. A wide smile clings to her face, but you don't miss the way her gaze tightens. You know what she sees when she looks at Lisa, for it is the same thing she saw when she first looked at you, the thing that pushed her fist into your stomach. You will never know how much of what she saw was truth and how much was fabrication.

Somehow, Bismuth still sounds pleasant when she says, "Hey, Wings, you brought a friend. Another Lapis, huh? I'll have to get busy thinking up a nickname for you."

"No, you won't," Lisa says. Her chin lifts perhaps just a bit too high and her eyes don't quite land on Bismuth's, but her tone is as pleasant as Bismuth's own, her grin small yet easy. "I've already got a nickname. I'm Lisa."

She says it with pride. You find your muscles loosening.

By then, Drakken and Steven have caught up with you, Drakken gasping a little with flower petals still atilt around his head. His lips twist to the side, distrustful, when he catches sight of Lisa, and yet you can sense the pull of his own inalterable past on him, nearly as strong as the moon's tug on the tides, urging him to offer her another chance. "Hello," he says stiffly.

"Hi," Lisa says with a wave. "Um – sorry – what was your name again?"

"Now I know how Kim Possible's husband must feel," Drakken mutters, but immediately afterward he straightens his shoulders. "I am Dr. Drakken! Proud and loving boyfriend of Lapis Lazuli, and slightly mad but now benevolent supergenius.

"And may I just add – I love your hair." He points at the disobedient strands of hair falling from the tie at the base of Lisa's neck and then brings his hand back to his own mussed ponytail.

Lisa giggles. You manage not to flinch outright, but a good deal of time will have to pass before you can hear her laugh without smelling salt and watching yourselves wipe species from existence. "Thanks," she says. "So are there a lot of blue humans on Earth?"

"Nope! It's pretty much just me and that guy who drank liquid silver for years – don't do that, by the way – well, I guess since you're a Gem, you probably can and it won't hurt you any…anyway, I didn't start out like this, either. It's kind of a funny story. Well, not funny ha-ha. It was a Tuesday…"

As Drakken continues to sputter a story you have heard many times by now, you lift your head and find your own image shadowed in the greenhouse's wall. You have been through too much today to fear the way the night shifts across the glass. The woman reflected there wears the star of the Crystal Gems on her shirt and pants that will not flounder beneath the weight of water, and she looks back at you with eyes exhausted and joyful.

You are not proud to be a Lapis Lazuli now. You are also not ashamed.