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.

61. Question

~Well. . . here we go. *rubs hands together*

I know I have at least one review that I still need to reply to, which I'm hoping to get to sometime next week. Love you guys! :)

Dr. Drakken watches as the warp pad glows across the night sky and then seals shut again, taking the light that used to be Lapis, still is Lapis, with it. It is truly amazing – though a little hard on the ol' protective instinct – to watch his girlfriend turn herself to a thousand little sparkles and throw herself into the stars she knows so well.

Amazing is too mundane a word, though, Drakken decides. Astounding is better. She is astounding. In his life, Drakken has met a great many astounding people – he likes to think he is a rather astounding person himself – but she is by far the most so.

Drakken runs for his front porch at a speed that would have been truly incredible had he been gifted with legs just a smidgen longer, the ring's point biting into his knee and his mind. Like he could forget it was there. Soft evening air dances around him and tries to warm him, which works well enough on his cheeks – like, there's a heartbeat behind them and everything. The rest of him, however, feels like one of those microwavable meat pouches, half-mushy, half-stony, and all-over lukewarm, with spots that that microwave has burned and other spots that have gone untouched.

With shaking hands he pulls the ring from his pocket. He consults with his lungs, which advise him to breathe, so he does, in and out and in and out and in and out.

He's excited – he's scared – he's excited.

This is nothing like the thing with DNAmy, Drakken reminds himself, clamping his mind shut against the inevitable conga line of memories. He's known Lapis for years, not hours. There's no other man in her life. Somehow he's earned the trust of a being who has centuries of reasons to never trust anyone again.

And the timing's perfect. Jasper is gone, back to Homeworld, and good riddance on her! The planet is (currently) safe. And Steven is healing. Not healed, not past tense – it is a long, possibly infinite process, as Drakken understands all too well.

He loves Lapis. And she loves him. She won't look at him with that I'm-so-sorry tint to her eyes and shake her head at him and leave his heart kicking itself.

She won't.

Drakken tries in that moment to imagine how she will look. The glee that shows up on her will be smaller than what shows up on him, he knows that well enough by now, but he allows himself to picture her sparkly-eyed and open-mouthed, happy-mouthed, those cute, tiny teeth peeking out to say hello.

The ring keeps trembling in his fingertips, and Drakken tucks it back into his pocket, turning it at the angle he has calculated will keep it furthest from contact with his body. It could crack otherwise, and there can't be any cracks on this plan, this day, this news.

This news! It touches down inside him and swells bigger and bigger, until it seems to have replaced all his bones and internal organs, too much and too strong and too good to be contained. He recognizes the thing that paces his feet back and forth; it's the same thing that always made him explain his supergenius evil plans to anyone with working ears, friend or enemy.

Only there is no enemy this time. No one to cut his excitement down to size. No one to keep it from popping open like the overfilled balloon he's turning into.

A person can't be expected to keep something like this to himself. Least of all Dr. Drakken.

In the movies, the hero is supposed to tell someone who was always there for him. This person hasn't been, and yet Drakken can't imagine telling anyone else first.

He turns and sprints back down the driveway.

The hovercraft mini-wall rises higher than Drakken remembers it, hitting him in the knee region and toppling him headfirst across the firm seats. Blood rushes to his temples in a less-than-pleasant manner, but the ring is still in one piece, and that is most of what matters.

Somehow he uses his vines to right himself, plucks away a few petals that pop out to tickle his cheeks, starts the ignition, steers his hovercraft through the sky. His destination is only a few blocks away, but the flight seems to take too long.

Drakken springs from his seat, activating the hovercraft's forcefield, and jogs to his second porch of the night. He rings the doorbell and slams his knuckles against the door at the same time and then stands there, bouncing on his toes until Shego comes to the door. There's nothing sleepy about her, and the star-studded sky doesn't look black at all anymore after seeing her hair.

"Yikes, Dr. D," she says. "Everything okay?" She sounds exasperated, but she also sounds something else, something newish for her. Maybe concerned?

Drakken bobs his head up and down until her eyebrows twist at him and then he has to grab his cheeks and manually end the head-bobbing process. "Everything's fine, Shego! Everything's great! I have spectacular news!"

"What, is the UN giving you another ceremony?" Shego leans one shoulder, clad in a blouse the color of mint ice cream, against the doorframe. It seems strange to see her in something other than her jumpsuit, in a different context, unrelated to him. He doesn't do well with contexts unrelated to him, but he's working on it.

"No. This."

Drakken pulls the ring from his pocket.

Her green eyes blank themselves as she stares at it. "Um, okay. So you found a ring in your Crackerjack box. Good for you."

Drakken feels his jaw grind. Her tone is teasing, which he's learning to live with, but it also doesn't understand, and that's harder to take. "No. I won it at an arcade. Crackerjacks always get stuck in my teeth anyway."

Shego laughs – a familiar sound, an irritant and a balm at the same time. "So…what am I missing?"

Drakken holds himself back from saying, Gee, Shego, what good news are people usually announcing when they pull out a ring? Trying to sting her with his sarcasm would be like trying to impress Eddy with his biceps. It isn't going to happen.

"It's an engagement ring. For Lapis," he says lamely, as if there's anyone else in his life he would give an engagement ring to.

Shego's eyebrows untwist and reach for her hairline. "Are you serious?"

"As a heart attack," Drakken says, and immediately regrets the words when his chest twinges.

Shego pulls away from the door and lets her arms rest at her sides in a way that somehow doesn't look floppy or dangly-awkward on her. For an instant, Drakken's afraid she disapproves, but then those black lips stretch into a smile, a real smile. It's rare to see Shego smile without an I've-got-an-ulterior-motive gleam within it. Rare and almost as beautiful as one of Lapis's smiles.

"Yikes, Dr. D," she repeats, only this time she doesn't sound exasperated or concerned at all. "That's huge." She smirks at him. "I take it you haven't been planning this too terribly long."

"About five hours now," Drakken confesses. "Ever since I saw the ring."

She leans over his hand, and the smirk twitches. "Well, I see money was no object."

Drakken feels his eyes bulge at her. "I can't give a gemstone ring to my gemstone girlfriend! That'd be like if I gave you a ring made out of human –"

Shego's hand makes a stop sign in front of his face. "Okay, that's as far as that analogy needs to go."

Drakken drops it, because he's grinning almost too big to continue. Grinning until the corners of his mouth seem to touch his earlobes.

"Dude, your mom's going to flip out," Shego says.

"No doubt." Drakken grimaces, his palette dry. "I'm not sure if I'm looking forward to that or not."

"Are you kidding? It'll be great!" Shego pretends to lay her hand across her heart. "Her own little Drewbie, all grown up and ready to propose."

Propose.

The second the word hits Drakken, it's as if his throat fills with oatmeal. He takes off a glove, drags a sweaty palm down the side of his lab coat, then does the same with the other hand. He tries not to see DNAmy and that look in her eyes – that sad-but-not-sad-enough look…

"So, what's the plan?" Shego says.

Drakken listens for the scorn that usually accompanies that question, but he doesn't hear it. Her eyes are open, almost perky, like she really cares to know.

"I ask her to marry me," he says.

The smirk slips into a scowl. "Really, Dr. D? That's the best you got? When? Where? How?"

Drakken clamps his hands over his ears and shakes his head. "One conjunction at a time, Shego!" he snaps, oatmeal in his throat, oatmeal in his brain.

"They're pronouns, but fine." Shego snaps her arms into a fold across her chest. "Let's start with 'when.'"

Drakken breathes in hard, and a tunnel forms through the brain-porridge, clear enough for him to find an answer. "Soon. But not too soon."

"Because…?"

"I feel like I should get permission from someone to ask her."

Shego all but snorts. "Like who? Her space dad?"

Now she's mocking him, but it doesn't matter, because his mind has taken off at a trajectory that can't be rerouted. "Well, there's Blue Diamond. The giant alien matriarch woman who brought her to life. But she doesn't even understand what marriage is, let alone why I would want it. That might be a longer and stranger conversation than anyone wants –"

"What about the kid?"

Drakken blinks at Shego. "Steven?"

"No, Dora the Explorer." Shego shakes her head. "Of course Steven. Him and those other alien dorks he hangs out with."

"Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl," Drakken reports, because that is information he knows.

"And don't forget Nerdlet." Shego holds her hand about four feet from the ground to indicate Peridot. Drakken tries to imagine telling her, tries to imagine her not broadcasting it to every other Gem in Little Homeworld. "They're as close to family as Lapis's got. Not that you need their blessing to ask her, far as I'm concerned. But if it means that much to you, you might as well go get it."

Her voice descends to an odd place on those last two sentences, so that for a moment she sounds like someone older than Shego, someone more serious. Drakken realizes in that moment that she has complete faith he'll get said blessing if he asks for it. His belly rocks with warmth.

Drakken nods again and again and one more time again. "It's just…I don't want to upset Steven," he says, and even though his voice is the same marvelous thunder-baritone it's been his entire adult life, it strikes him that he also sounds like someone other than Dr. Drakken.

Someone who can be quiet and patient to help someone else. For a little bit. If it's absolutely necessary.

Shego laughs again. "Yeah, I'm sure it would realllly upset Steven to know that two of his favorite people might get married. Come on, Doc."

Well, when she puts it that way, it sounds rather idiotic. Not that Drakken will admit it to her. He lifts his chin, almost blocking his own vision. "So…"

"So," Shego echoes. "I can't imagine that you'll wanna wait too long. You are not a patient person."

"No." That he'll admit. The oatmeal in his brain continues to slide back, the images gaining focus. "I go to Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl tomorrow." Drakken can't quite get his head around Peridot – she is a hard one to get your head around – so he leaves her out of the equation for now. "I ask them when would be a good time to ask Steven. And then – I ask Steven. And then –" he swallows – "then I find a time to take her on another date."

Drakken's calf muscles, such as they are, tremble. He can't imagine resting them, though. He can't imagine resting any part of himself until this is sorted and straight in his mind; it's so much more important than any world-domination plan has ever been.

"So let's move on to 'where', now," Drakken says. His fingers bounce off each other, again and again, mimicking the synapses colliding in his brain. "Hmm…I wonder if there's a warp pad that can take us to the Taj Mahal? Or maybe the Eiffel Tower? Or should I try to find somewhere outside of our little planet?"

"Doc," Shego interrupts him, "are you seriously trying to impress the girl who can make tsunamis when she blinks?"

She's still smirking at him, but she hasn't resumed her propped-against-the-doorframe pose. She isn't sarcasming (if anyone can make it a verb, it would be Shego) him this time.

Drakken feels his eyes narrow at her. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying she's been to places you can't imagine and places where you couldn't even breathe." Shego shakes her head. "That's not why she's into you."

The face she points toward him has a shimmer he saw a precious few times in their stint as partners-in-crime – one that says she's about to tell him how to make the plan better instead of simply pointing out why it's a pile of refuse. He remembers, all too vividly, how his stomach would sour as he wondered why she didn't just help him, if she was so practical, and then sour further as he chastised himself for needing her help in the first place.

Drakken gulps back the memory, which falls sharply down his oatmeal-filled esophagus, and lets his eyelids slide shut. Him and Lapis, that's what he needs to think about, and his brain once more does not disappoint. The Lapis-moments he has been so lucky to live are quick to crop up and warm around the edges, and he slips into them as easily as he tugs his safety goggles down over his eyes.

He sees her standing there on the beach on his first day here, small and lost-looking and bluer than he was, feels the worried must-check-on-her pang in his chest. He hears her whisper of a voice answering his questions – he had so many to ask the only alien being he'd ever met who wasn't trying to mangle him. Feels her little, unheated hand slap against his in a high-five. Tastes the vanilla, not as rich and delicious as chocolate, but they were out of chocolate that day –

That's it. That's it. That is IT!

"Um, so you've started popping petals again." Drakken can hear Shego's smirky smile even before he opens his eyes and sees it. "I'm gonna take that as a good sign?"

Drakken does nothing to acknowledge her, save for tearing off the offending petal. She can't say anything that would bring him down at this point. Well, she probably can – but it's going to take more than a wisecrack about his flowered neckwear to knock the wind from his sails.

"The ice cream!" he bursts out. "The shop, I mean! The little ice cream shop on the boardwalk! After we met on the beach and I tried to dry her off, she followed me there, and I bought a vanilla cone and I let her try a few licks because she'd never tasted it before. Think of it, Shego! She'd never had ice cream!"

He locks his legs and braces himself for the snark, but it never comes. Shego regards him with an expression as close to soft as he has ever seen on her. "Yeah," she says slowly. "I think that'd mean a lot to her."

Drakken nods, feeling himself break into a full-face beam. He hopes it will. He hopes he's doing it right. Lapis has brightened his life so much, and he wants to do the same for her. For someone who spent most of his adult life dreaming of making others miserable, the thought feels strange in his mind, sort of loose and baggy, like he needs to grow into it, only it doesn't sag the way Eddy's old hand-me-down clothes always did.

"It's genius!" Drakken can sense a gleam creeping into his eyes, crafty but not evil, and he likes it and lets it stay. "I can ask her on a date to get ice cream and she won't suspect a thing, because we always go get ice cream after something really big happens! And we can go when the sun starts going down, because that's how it was when we first went! I'm doing the math in my mind, and I don't think I can recreate the exact lighting, though – at least, not without moving a few buildings and trees, which I take it might be frowned upon."

Shego's hand smacks her forehead in mock shock – or a reasonable imitation of surprise, to sound less juvenile, Drakken thinks. "Listen to the sanity coming from this guy," she says.

Is that a compliment? It sounds like a compliment. It must be a compliment, because he's on too much of a roll to stop and analyze what else it could possibly be. His thoughts have cleared and they leap from one hemisphere of his brain to the other, outrunning any doubt.

"And then – then while we're there, I can – I can –" Drakken interrupts himself before Shego gets the chance to do it again. "I probably shouldn't put the ring in her ice cream, should I? I read about a guy who did that once, and his girlfriend wound up swallowing it. That'd just be…" Drakken shudders a tad, trying not to envision what a Gem has for a digestive system. "…wrong."

"Uh, yeah, I'd vote against that," Shego says.

"I guess I could try to tape it to the underside of the table umbrella," Drakken muses, slapping one wrist against his side to fling away some of the sweat. "But what if it falls off and conks her on the head? I'd really be afraid to let the ring out of my sight, to tell you the truth –"

"Okay, so no eating the ring and no hiding the ring," Shego says. "Maybe now that you've gotten the rest straightened out, just do what you said at the beginning and ask her to marry you. Look, I know how much you love to put on a show. But haven't you noticed that overcomplicating things never ends well for you?"

Her words touch Drakken's skin and they sting, and he drops his gaze to his hands, which seem to have shrunk. Not that he has much time to study them – the image in his mind has become a panorama of skywriting and violins and waiters in black tuxes that they probably don't even have at the ice cream shop in question. He tries to picture a happy Lapis somewhere amid the grandeur, but the thought won't come into focus. She just looks uneasy, like maybe she left the oven on at home.

He doesn't like that image.

"But I just want it to be special," he says. "I want to be so much better than –"

"All the other marriage proposals she's ever gotten?" Shego says. The question is wry, but her eyes remind him of two sparklers – ones that he has to shake out before they burn their way too close to his skin.

Drakken bristles as he glances at her. "She's been around six thousand years, Shego!" he says, and the magnitude of that number nearly overloads his mental hardware. "Surely I'm not the first one to have found her enchanting!"

Shego chuckles, a squeaky sound that would be categorized as a giggle if she were any less fearsome than she is. Something about it soothes the shaking and straining inside him. Shego has a way of taking heavy, daunting problems and chopping them up into bite-sized (if not especially delicious) chunks.

Drakken looks at her with a hopeful perk to his ponytail, and she shakes her head even though he hasn't asked her anything yet. "Dr. D," she says. "Do you have any idea how NOT romantic it would be for me to write your proposal?"

"But –" Drakken wills the words to stop, stay trapped inside, and of course they don't listen to him – "but you make everything perfect."

Shego tugs on a petal that must have sprouted above his collar when he wasn't paying attention. "If she wanted things perfect, she wouldn't still be with you." It doesn't sound like an insult, and Shego is extremely capable of making nearly anything sound like an insult if she wants it to. And even as she shrugs, she gives him a smile that is nowhere near casual. It matches the smile she wore the day they tied the medal around his neck, a smile he'd been longing for ever since she first cut one of his ideas to ribbons.

It looks pleased. It looks…dare he say it? Proud?

Drakken grumbles under his breath and hurries to turn away, because it isn't oatmeal in his throat anymore. It's tears.

---

By the time Drakken finally falls into bed, several hours past summer-sunset, he has a plan. Okay, so it's a rickety, barebones type of plan, but it's better than no plan at all. And surely it will start to flesh out naturally as he talks to Lapis's family.

The next morning, his eyes still sleep-sticky in their recently-donned contacts, Drakken sends Pearl a text message on the cell phone he remembers her talking about getting:

Dr. Drakken here. I need to talk to you, Garnet, and Amethyst ASAP. Can you send someone over the warp pad to get me, please? And not let Lapis know I'm coming?

He paces back and forth in front of the warp pad now, gnawing his nails even through his gloves, and wondering if he should have spelled out what "ASAP" means in case Pearl doesn't know. But a hum tickles the air, the warp pad glimmers, and Amethyst stands in front of him. Drakken is actually quite glad she's the one they sent – he gets to spend a few minutes feeling enormously tall.

"Dude." Amethyst pokes him with a squishy-strong elbow and grins at him. "What's this big thing you gotta keep secret from Lapis?"

Drakken tries to grin back at her, but his lips are trembling all over the place, and he thinks they might fall off. "Oh, you'll see," he says, and thankfully his voice retains its boom.

By the time they touch down in Beach City, Drakken's tummy rumbles and bubbles like a vial of volatile chemicals, and it's only partially due to the dizzying ride on the warp pad. Whatever the other ingredient is, he doesn't know. It might be fear, only it doesn't feel like fear – there's too many giddiness pinging inside his head. And what reason does he have to be afraid of Amethyst, or of Garnet and Pearl, who he can see standing down the beach?

Drakken skitters toward them, arriving in a breathless stumble, and as speech typically requires breath, he doesn't get to start the conversation.

It is Garnet, in fact, who speaks first. She acknowledges his existence with the usual chin-dip and then says, quietly and calmly, "Yes."

"Gnnnghh…wha…yes?" It is not Drakken's proudest moment; the best he could do was straighten his non-words into a word. Good thing Shego wasn't here to witness it.

Garnet doesn't move. "You're going to ask Lapis to marry you, and you want our permission."

Drakken freezes, except for his cheeks, which he watches turn cotton-candy-pink as he keeps his gaze fixed on Garnet's shades, where he doesn't have to read anyone's eyes. He also sees a rogue petal unfolding delicately from the top of his head, but he can't seem to bring himself to yank it off. Dazed, his head ringing, he wonders if this is a future-vision thing or if the tone of his text was just that obvious.

"Uh-huh," Drakken says. His boom has been reduced to a rasp, not even a particularly deep one, and he could not possibly have chosen a less scientific-sounding affirmative phrase, but what's a mad genius in love supposed to do when facing his future somethings-in-law?

Pearl puts one hand over her mouth and starts to cry. For a second, Drakken's afraid he upset her, but when she lowers her hands he sees the wiggly smile on her face. His insides still feel like they're on tumble-dry, but maybe they'll fluff out into something more comfortable soon.

"So…is that a yes?" he rasp-booms.

Amethyst is bouncing up and down, the way a little kid would, the way Drakken undoubtedly would if all of his nervous energy hadn't been bunched up within him like someone punched a pause button on his adrenaline. "Oh, man, that's great! You totally should!" She curls her fingers around the cuffs of his lab coat. "You make Lapis happy. When I first met her, I didn't even think that was possible."

Drakken follows the lengths of her stubby fingers to the rest of her as she lets go. She's smiling at him, big and goofy, and Drakken feels himself breaking into a mirror image of it. It hurts his cheeks a little, but he doesn't want to stop. He never wants to stop.

Garnet gives him a thumbs-up. She smiles, too, one of those only-at-the-corners things that has never looked more welcome than it does now.

Drakken's mind spins like a carousel, minus the happy-horse music – although, nope, he thinks he can hear some of that in his brain, too. This is what it does to him, being so loved. He's almost starting to get used to it, after so many villain-years of letting his hatred for everyone else and everyone else's hatred for him scrape against him, but sometimes it still feels so smooth, so snug, that he has to stop and marvel at it.

"You're very nervous," Garnet says suddenly.

She probably doesn't need future vision to tell that, either. He's trembling to the marrow, and several more pedals have sprouted against his neck, all of them worry-slick.

Drakken gazes at Garnet's face. It looks wise, somehow, even with the sunglasses blocking half of it, and it occurs him to that she is basically a walking marriage to herself…somehow. Now he wants to ask her questions – questions that have nothing to do with alien biology or the infuriating hot-dog-to-bun ratio that spoils every backyard cookout. He swallows until he can feel moisture between his teeth again and asks the biggest question of all. "Does she say yes in every future?"

Garnet shakes her head, and Drakken's chest cavity takes a hard hit. Before he can press his hands over it, try to resuscitate himself, she says, "But most of them."

Okay. Okay. Drakken nods and nods until his pulse stops throbbing behind his eyelids. That is good enough. It has to be good enough. He will have to trust probability on this. The thought of science is a comfort, actually.

And suddenly he realizes that bit of uncertainty isn't the only thing that's pulling sweat from weird places on his body and redistributing it to even weirder places. There's pain, pain that will stick to him and not come off unless he blurts it to everyone around him, and his next words come out as easily as his bad-guy grandstanding ever did. "Happily ever after…didn't happen for my parents," he says.

Drakken ping-pongs his eyes across the three (four? Three-and-a-half?) Gems in front of him so that his optical nerve will be too preoccupied to recall the sight of Richard Lipsky's back as he closed the door behind him – didn't slam it this time, the way he so often did, but pulled it shut with such finality it would have been stupid to hope. Not that it kept him from doing so for a few years.

When Garnet speaks, it's so quiet and understated Drakken would almost miss it if he didn't know her words were arrowing straight to him specifically. "Happily ever after doesn't happen for anyone," she says. "If you want to be with the person anyway, that's how you know it's love."

Drakken draws a shuddering breath and thinks of happy Lapis, sad Lapis, angry traumatized Lapis. "I do," he says. And even though it's not that "I do," the words seem significant somehow.

Garnet simply, gently nods. "I know."

Talk about comfort. That nearly gets him to join Pearl in her tears. Drakken jams the back of his hand to his nose and sniffles, "I'd like to tell Steven about it, too."

"Well, du-uh," Amethyst says.

She gives a snicker that doesn't drip like disdain the way Shego's would, but Drakken does his best to ignore her. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and, well – his mouth is certainly in motion, and he's not about to let her be the impediment that compels it to stop!

"When would be a good time to talk to him?" Drakken says. "Today? Now? Or later? Does it have to be later? Because if it needs to be later, I can do that! I can wait! Well…" He pauses for a moment, feels the tiny time bombs that seem to be ticking away under his skin, and amends, "I can try."

"Steven's been doing very well today," Pearl says. She glides a hand from Drakken's forearm to his elbow, and it doesn't freak him out at all, because it's less like coming too close to a human's personal body space and more like brushing your arm against a marble sculpture. (Gee, he hopes that's not demeaning.) "Maybe well enough for a visitor?" She directs this to the others.

"A visitor with good news?" Drakken adds, trying not to sound like he's wheedling them into this. He will wait for Steven if he has to, but it puts a knot in the back of his throat.

Garnet nods again, and Drakken gives in and joins Amethyst in her hopping. How could he not? For this one specific moment, there's nothing cruel or stupid or unfair in the world. It's just a great world.

A world that couldn't have turned out better if he ruled it himself.

---

Climbing the last step into Steven's bedroom is like walking through a portal into the past (not that Drakken ever has, outside of some rather odd and frightening dreams). It's rumpled and mussed, as every little boy's bedroom ought to be, with the bed hastily made and a stack of clothes shoved into the corner, falling on top of itself. Drakken suspects that is Pearl's handiwork. But all the kid-touches feel like museum pieces, relics from some bygone era.

And then there's the profound weariness in the eyes of the boy in the bed. Drakken recognizes the look from hundreds of sleepless nights trying to tear the world apart and rebuild it in his image, and something indignant squeezes his lungs. Steven shouldn't have to go through that. He's too young. He's too good, and not in the insufferably self-righteous way Drakken used to believe that Kim Possible was.

Steven sees him and manages a smile – hard work, Drakken can tell, but not forced, not completely. "Hey, Drakken. Good to see you."

"Nice to see you too," Drakken says, also truthfully, although he wishes he didn't have to see the sad circles beneath Steven's eyes or the reddened, rubbed-raw state of his face. "How are you doing?"

Steven shrugs. "I dunno. I think I'm getting better, maybe. I'm trying to get better, but it's not easy." He stares miserably at the comforter beneath him. "Everybody's just been so nice to me lately that I wish I had more progress to show them."

"Balderdash, Steven!" Drakken thunders – and then immediately softens his voice, because what the heck is he doing, yelling at the kid? "I mean…we all want you to get better, but that can take a long time. Nobody's standing around with – with stopwatches or anything, docking you for time!"

And thank goodness for that. Drakken would have been penalized several times over the past few years. Some days he still can't get away from the thought that he would look marvelous as a statue.

Steven's face relaxes, ever so slightly. "You sound like our shrink," he says.

For an instant, Drakken knows he would be penalized now as the old-Drakken jealousy sneaks up on him and tries to take him down. That one itty-bitty word – ours – it denotes sharing, and sharing denotes division, and even a mathematics novice can tell you that division, by its very definition, means the pieces left get smaller. Drakken slams his molars together and bites the feeling in half like a carrot stick.

It's not like Shego bringing home another friend she met on vacation. Licensed psychiatrists don't have favorite clients. That would be against the law or something.

Not to mention that the longer he looks at Steven's face, still clearly in a wrestling match against misery, the more such a thought seems petty and unimportant. (People act like those words mean the same thing, but they don't. Something can be objectively petty and still be important.) The longer he looks at Steven's face, the more entrenched he becomes in wanting the kid to be okay, until that's heavier than anything else he could even try carrying.

"So you've talked to him," Drakken says. "Did you like him?"

"Yeah. I like him a lot. He and I are working through a lot of things." A hint of hope peeks out between Steven's syllables, and Drakken sags with relief he didn't know he needed to feel. "Mostly about my negative emotions. He says I've been trying to pretend they don't exist – or they shouldn't – because I didn't really have them as a kid."

"Mmm-hmmm," Drakken says, hoping he appears understanding. That part he can't relate to. He's had negative emotions from the first context-less moment clear enough for him to relive – something about Eddy snatching his toy car from him and making him cry for his mother.

"But he says negative emotions are just a part of life. That they're normal. He told me pretty much what you said," Steven goes on. "That if you just keep them all stuffed inside and try to act like they aren't there, they're going to just build and build until you –"

"Volcano-fy," Drakken supplies, because he has grown rather fond of that word even if it isn't in the dictionary. (He should think about submitting it – it and meepmorp both. The latter with full credit to Lapis, of course.)

"Yup. You were right."

Now, those are words Drakken never tires of hearing.

Drakken leans toward Steven, joggling his weight from one foot to the next, and something plasticky pokes him in the hip. The ring. Oh, sweet Tesla coils – the ring! He'd almost forgotten about it somehow.

But he isn't scolding himself for it. Far from it, in fact. Look at him, getting so waylaid by concern for his fellow man! Snowman Hank would be proud.

"Steven," Drakken says, "I have a surprise for you."

Steven eyeballs him like Drakken just waltzed in carrying a search warrant. "I think I've had about all the surprises I can take."

His voice still droops, and Drakken doesn't like it, not when there are so many things to be non-droopy about. Still, he can hardly blame Steven for being leery. The poor guy keeps getting blindsided by revelations about a mother who is actually a literal part of him. That'd be enough to put anyone off.

"But this is a good surprise," Drakken tells him.

He's still shaky standing there in front of the bed, but it's a sweet sort of shaky, the wonderful tremors he had in his shins as the last Lorwardian machine hit the ground in an explosion of alien technology and Earth pollen and he realized that he'd done it, he'd made it, he'd won. His fingers, though far from steady as he fishes the ring from his pocket, move with a confidence and a certainty he can't help but be proud of. Little pinpoints of sunlight get caught in the frail plastic and dance around, and Drakken realizes that he doesn't have an explanation.

He doesn't need to give one.

For the first time in a good long while, Steven's eyes turn into stars. "You're gonna ask her!" he whispers.

There's no question mark involved, but Drakken nods anyway. Several times. He's got enough friction in his body to spark a fire, and he has to move something.

Steven throws back his covers, the ends of his puffy deep-teal comforter toppling to meet the stuffed-animal arm sticking out from beneath the bedframe. Before Drakken can even begin to process that, Steven's arms tie around his waist. "You're right," Steven says. "That's a wonderful surprise."

The top of the kid's head is level with Drakken's nose. If he keeps this up, he'll be taller than Drakken soon. Drakken's chest quirks again, and he can't blame jealousy this time. Nostalgia is more like it. It's sharp enough that his nervous system doesn't even register Steven's hug as a security breach.

Steven pulls away and looks straight into Drakken's eyes. "So…do you have a plan?"

He doesn't groan the words the way Shego has done so many times – or Kim Possible or even her buffoonish little husband. His face is flushed with genuine curiosity, and Drakken's ego slurps it up with a straw.

"Yes, I do have a plan," Drakken says, and he takes a moment to secure the ring back in his pocket before he continues. Seventy-five arcade tickets were never so well-spent…provided she says yes. "I'm going to take her out for ice cream as soon as we can go. At sunset, you know, like the first night we met. And then we'll eat ice cream and I'll…I'll ask her." He ends several decibels above where he began, but who even cares?

Steven lowers himself onto his mattress once more. The comforter shifts, and Drakken finds himself staring at the fake sesame seeds on Steven's cheeseburger-shaped backpack. It seems strange, incorrect to see it hidden away like that, but nothing could possibly bring Drakken down now, not after Steven smiles, effortlessly this time, and says, "She's gonna love it."

He sounds like Steven again, albeit in a deeper register. Perhaps even more vitally, he believes.

Drakken is sure he's glowing at a hundred watts, and he lets out a laugh that is every bit as bold and wide as his old evil cackle, except it doesn't taste of malice anymore. He takes another moment to rein his breath back in. His veins are pumping as if he chugged more than his usual latte at breakfast this morning.

Steven gets up on his knees on the bed. "Can I tell Peridot?" he says. "You know she'll be so excited."

Peridot.

Her name hits Drakken with a thud and an oh-of-course trumpet slide. He doesn't know how the tyke managed to slip his mind, but then, his mind has been one big greased cake pan ever since he first saw the ring behind the glass counter. Peridot, his buddy and Lapis's best friend. He can't keep this from her any more than he could will himself right-handed, much to the chagrin of that blasted teacher back in elementary school.

But then Drakken sees, all too clearly he sees, Peridot's bunchy lips coming unbunched and expanding to largemouth-bass proportions, spewing the best secret he's ever had to keep.

"Of course I don't want to exclude her," Drakken says with a frown. "I just…she can be a little…a little… not… good… at secrets."

Steven makes a sympathetic noise from some husky-low part of himself. "I can tell her it's like the surprise party we threw for Connie's birthday last year. That she only has to keep it a secret for a few days."

Drakken ponders that, tucking his own lips. A nagging little thought – that he'd be chancing it to let Peridot know – keeps buzzing around like a fly, and he wants to grab a flyswatter and flatten it. He knows what it's like to have your intellect doubted because you can be something of a…a "loudmouth," as Shego so crudely refers to it. Peridot should never have to feel that.

And it does make sense for Steven to be the one to talk to her. Drakken tries to imagine himself remaining cool and collected when he tells Peridot, even when she begins to screech, but it requires true imagination, as fanciful as a fire-breathing unicorn. He would join right in with her, maybe not screeching exactly – his sounds would be much more manly but would likely draw just as much, if not more, attention. Masculine voices are still something of a rarity in Little Homeworld. Though Drakken has heard quite a few of the big Gems, mostly Quartzes like She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, talk as though they have gravel grinding in their vocal cords –

FOCUS, Drakken, he can almost hear Shego chiding him.

Drakken shakes his head, then realizes that makes it look like he's saying no, and so he nods instead in rapid succession. "Yes. That would be great. Make sure she knows how important it is that she doesn't say anything to Lapis. About this," he adds, because Gems as a whole tend to be a literal-minded species, and Peridot is among the literal-est.

"Gotcha." Steven actually bounces a little, his knees squeaking the mattress springs. "You just better ask Lapis soon, or Peridot might explode."

"She might?" Drakken says. "I'm going to explode if I have to wait too long!" The thunder-boom he takes so much pride in crackles out and his words end up drizzling. It's slightly less than dignified, and part of Drakken wants to wince in preparation for the verbal slap that so often follows.

But Steven has never been one to judge, especially after melting down into the Incredible Pink Hulk not two weeks ago. He just gives a grin, so free of mockery that Drakken wants to hug it to himself, as tightly as he's ever clutched a Doom ray. "So, yeah, it'll be soon, then," Steven says.

"Precisely." Drakken pulls himself to maximum height and stands there like a pillar. Well, maybe not a pillar…maybe more like one of those toys from the commercials they used to play on TV all the time, the ones that wobble but don't fall down. He swallows, the porridge in his throat going a touch dry. "Wish me luck."

"I will." Steven wiggles his miniature-shrub eyebrows, and a mischief-gleam sneaks in beneath them. "But I don't think you'll need it."

---

Steven throws on his T-shirt and jeans and jacket with more verve than Drakken's seen from him in the past few weeks and takes off for Little Homeworld. An hour later, he returns with the news that Peridot has been told. "She squealed a lot," he reports to Drakken, "and then she told me to 'reassure Drakken that his confidential information is safe with me.'"

And Drakken feels a radiant beam in his chest, almost as warm as if Lapis had already said yes.

Almost.

Now it's time for Drakken to ask her something. Not the big something. The little something. The little something that leads to the big something. The tip of the ice cream – iceberg, he hurries to correct himself.

Although, given the circumstances, "ice cream" would be an appropriate word choice, if not nearly dramatic enough. Shego can roll her eyes all she likes, but there are some occasions that are worth getting dramatic over, and this is most assuredly one of them.

Steven brings the warp pad to a smooth stop in Little Homeworld, but things continue to tumble inside Drakken. He scans the usual plethora of milling Gems until he locates a Raggedy-Ann bob situated on the outer banks of the crowd, keeping a thin distance from the hustle and bustle. Drakken sucks in a breath and holds it until his nostrils pinch.

When he asks her, he has to play it cool. Collected. Unruffled. Seamless.

Then again…maybe he doesn't. That is, as Kim Possible would say, "so not him," and if tries to act like a whole different person, Lapis will certainly figure out that something is up. She's smart, that one, and quick. Sometimes Drakken thinks she's gotten adjusted to Earth life better than he has.

This is it. Go time. You got this! The same things he used to say to himself before he launched every one of his evil schemes, only back then they were propped up strong with arrogance, and he can't find any arrogance lying around right now. He might take it if he could.

He starts to walk toward her, but somehow it's hard now. Somehow lifting his feet, one and then the other, and letting them descend again seems to require the utmost concentration, as though he's suffering from muscle memory loss. The grass keeps tearing loose under his boots, and Drakken can't shake the itchy-necked feeling of having written his calculations down with the numbers in the wrong order. His arms feel like they've stretched to the ground, the way Spinel's do sometimes, only he can't claim as much control over them. He should fold them or something, but they're suddenly too long for him to make sense of.

But somehow Drakken makes it, and then he's next to her, and he can feel everything awkward about him ceasing to matter. He has to clear some leftover porridge from his throat before he can speak. His "ahem" must hit Lapis at about the same time as Peridot's poke in the side, because she turns toward him and smiles that little butterfly-smile.

That smile. Drakken could explain, scientifically, what that smile does to him – endorphins in his brain, compounded when he remembers how hard it was to earn one from her back when they first met – but at this point he would rather just stand here and enjoy it, let it warm him.

"Oh. Hi, Drakken," Lapis says.

Over Lapis's head, he sees Peridot plaster her hands against her mouth. Drakken makes sure to avoid the little one's eyes.

"Hi, Lapis," Drakken says, and then his heartbeat thuds in his ears and he's left dizzied for a moment. He understands now why people calling proposing "popping the question" – it does feel like the words are fizzling and sparking on his tongue, the taste sweet but the feeling uncomfortable. And this isn't even the capital-Q Question; this is just preliminary! "I was wondering if you might want to go on another date tonight. For ice cream. At sunset."

He can hear the nerves jittering at the edges of his voice, and he winds up with a mouthful of Pop Rocks again when Lapis shakes her head. It's a myth that you'll explode if you wash them down with soda, but this could definitely be a spontaneous-combustion situation. She doesn't want to go get ice cream with him?

"Of course I'd love to," Lapis says, as if she's read his mind. "But I have a meepmorp class to teach tonight." She scrapes her bangs back so she can take a closer look at him. "Does it have to be at sunset?"

"Yes," Drakken says stubbornly. "It's special."

He sounds like a stress toy being squeezed, he knows, and he has to search Lapis's face for any sign that she suspects something. Her blue eyes are almost as dark as his and much deeper, with more places where she can hide things. She doesn't do it that much anymore, though. At least not with him. Right now she looks bemused and nothing else.

"Okay," she says, not batting an eye. "We can do it tomorrow, then."

Drakken feels his shoulders wilt, or maybe those are the inevitable petals that sway above them. Tomorrow. Twenty-four more hours of having Will you marry me, Lapis? sizzle on his tongue and in his gut and across every thought he manages to think between now and then. But what choice does he have if he wants to recreate that night on the boardwalk? If waiting is what he has to do to make things just right for her, he can stand to wait.

Maybe.

Drakken pulls air through his teeth and holds back an annoyance-grunt. "Tomorrow sounds great," he says, and he hopes he sounds like he means it. He hopes he does mean it. "I mean, not as great as tonight sounded," he adds, because he can't bring himself to lie to her, "but it'll be worth the wait!"

"Well, yeah." The butterfly-smile shifts a little, and Drakken can tell she's teasing him, in that way of hers that isn't intended to cut him down to size. "Because sunsets are special."

"They sure are," Drakken agrees. There's a scientific explanation for that, too, but right now his knowledge of air particles and the visible light spectrum is skidding across his mind like Commodore Puddles on a newly waxed floor.

Behind Lapis, Drakken hears a staccato nasal sound. If Peridot is attempting to curb her giggles, she's not doing a great job of it.

Lapis takes his hand, and it gets to feel big for a moment, wrapped around her small cool one. "Want to stay and watch the meepmorp class?"

He says yes, because he would watch Lapis do just about anything. And after they walk off, finger-twined with Peridot still snickering behind them, it doesn't take long for "teaching a meepmorp class" to rise very close to the top of Things He Likes To Watch Lapis Do.

She talks to the Gems casually and pauses often for questions. Her voice rises out of its usual hush to travel to each member of the loud and unruly crowd, but it stays as soft as ever. Her hands move only when they have something to demonstrate, and her chin holds straight, neither thrusting at the sky as his would be in her spot nor pointing toward her toes as it would have when he first met her. Confidence is adorable on her.

No, it's more than that, Drakken decides as he observes her. It's how it feels when his ego rolls over inside him and splits apart, the offshoot mutating into something that gasps with pride – pride in someone other than himself.

He'd love to get that feeling under a microscope, too, but for now it's enough to know it exists.

When Drakken gets home that night, sunset has come and gone, and the ring prods him from his pocket as if to say, Hey, what gives? Wasn't I supposed to get used tonight?

"Soon," Drakken says – out loud, because he knows the only ones around to hear him are his poodle and his plant-monsters, who have formed a tentative peace treaty. If Commodore Puddles doesn't try to hike his leg over them anymore, they don't shoot spines at him. Drakken thinks that means he's doing well – they don't exactly offer classes on how to be a plant parent. Well, not this kind of plant parent, at least.

On weakened ankles, he crosses the kitchen floor and lays his forehead against the window, the pane refreshingly steady and strong under his anxious skin. Drakken thinks he can feel every vein in his body, and even though they're thrashing about in turmoil, the memory they pump up is tender: Lapis that first evening on the beach, sopping wet and sad-eyed, water dripping from the folds of her skirt to form little puddles around her bare, vulnerable feet.

He was drawn to her because she looked small and wet and afraid – and, okay, because she was the only other blue humanoid he'd ever spotted on this earth. He was drawn to her, but not in the sense that he wanted to marry her, or even ask her out. At the time, he simply needed to know if she had a place to dry off and stay safe for the coming night. And she was appreciative (nice to meet someone appreciative for a change) – so much so that she followed him, and he felt no urge to escape her.

Drakken remembers the wonder on her face when she swiped her tongue across ice cream for the first time in her life, the same look she had when he told her every person's fingerprints had unique patterns. He remembers her asking him, after she'd returned from her fusion with Jasper and after he'd realized she was powerful enough to hold someone like that down for so long, if her fingerprints were still the same.

"Well, I hadn't exactly…memorized them. But there's no reason they wouldn't be."

He wants to memorize them now, though, and not just for the sake of science. Because they belong to Lapis. Strong, quiet, soft, fierce Lapis.

Gaah. Drakken yanks up his sleeve, and his watch cheerfully informs him he's been home less than five minutes. His left heel begins to shimmy against the floor, and he can't do much to stop it. The waiting presses against him like a sleeping henchman, heavy and real – how is he supposed to make it through another twenty-three hours of this, even with Garnet and Amethyst and Steven and Pearl and Peridot and Shego helping him hold it up?

There's a lonely gap where his mother's support should be, but Drakken knows better than to tell her yet. He's waiting until Lapis says yes – if she says yes, he reminds himself. When Mother finds out, her reaction will make Peridot's look calm, and he doesn't need any more before-the-fact stress about that. And if Lapis says no, it'll crush her hopes.

Heck, if Lapis says no, Mother will probably try to hunt her down and avenge her son's broken heart, swinging her overstuffed purse like a weapon, and Drakken could never let that happen to Lapis, not after everything else that's happened to her. Not even if it turns out she doesn't want to marry him.

Drakken has to stand there in the kitchen for several more minutes, his head sweaty against the window glass, because he just wowed himself so hard right there.

Twenty-four more hours. He can do this. Right? Can't he?

Double gaah. Gaah to the tenth power.

Drakken plunges both shaking hands into his pockets, only to shoot them back out when one of his fidgety fingers bumps into the ring. Far be it from him to crack the thing in two and then have to go earn seventy-five more tickets for another.

This will be a restless sort of night, Drakken figures, the way Christmas Eve always was for him when he was a kid.

Oh, who is he kidding? The way Christmas Eve still is for him.

He spends most of the aforementioned night sprawling and curling and trying not to shiver under the covers even though it's nowhere close to cold. His adrenal glands are going full throttle, and the whole thing feels a touch too similar to how he used to get the night before he launched a world-domination scheme – not the cruelty and the vengeance mixed in with the urgency of the I'll-show-you, but the part that was anticipation and panic, desperate to let the whole population of Earth know that they'd underestimated him.

This isn't the same, he attempts to reassure himself. He's not doing anything bad this time, for one thing, and for another, this isn't for the world – it's for Lapis, and he already trusts her, but it still eats on him like something viral in his body. It's an infection he's been fighting off since the morning after the Lorwardian invasion, but viruses aren't always nice enough to disappear. Some of them hang around in your body forever afterward, either granting you immunity or making you susceptible to something worse in the future.

Which reminds him that they have a vaccine for shingles now. Drakken just hopes he'll remember it in a few years when he needs to get it. It may make medical history, but he doesn't particularly want to give the human race its first study of blue shingles.

On that note, he falls asleep and drops into a dream where he's in a skewed, warm-lighted factory that appears to sell only windows. A butterfly that he instinctively senses is also blue flaps behind the draperies in silhouette. Drakken jogs to keep up with her – it's a her, he knows that too – but every time he locates her and throws the drapes open, she's already three more window-squares ahead. He doesn't have to be a supergenius to guess the symbolism behind that, Drakken thinks when he wakes up to a gray misty morning.

Fortunately and unfortunately, he has work today. Fortunately, because it'll give him something to do besides wear a path in the floor and count the hours – minutes – seconds! – until sunset. Unfortunately, because his hands and his knees, his very being, still have a bad case of the shakes, and that doesn't serve him well in Lab 591 today. He can still do calculations and measure out quantities with the best of 'em, but he keeps knocking into ring stands and dropping pens on the floor, and of course they roll under the lab table, where he has to risk head-bonking to retrieve them.

Drakken keeps forgetting and then remembering and then re-forgetting what exactly they're trying to mix. Truth serum, he realizes in one of his less-foggy moments, the same principle behind the Truth Ray that he planned to use on that one scientist who had stood up to the gluteal discomfort of an ice-cube chair better than he anticipated. It's more streamlined, easier to keep track of in serum form, and he probably should have thought of that, too – but it would have meant sticking a needle in her. And that makes him feel kind of unwell.

Lapis would laugh if she found that out about him. Not that mean, cutting type of laughter – there would be mirth in her eyes, to be sure, but they would also look at him, appreciating him and respecting him and liking him as if it's no trouble at all to do it.

Drakken reaches for a centrifuge and in his haste he misses the test tube that stands between them. Correction – his eyes miss it. His elbow doesn't. The tube tips and a bubbling, frothing concoction gushes over the table, washing it in shades of red while scientists who have a quicker reaction time than Drakken run back and forth to blot it up before it reaches the floor.

That is the point where Agent Kane – a Global Justice veteran and absolutely the kindest government agent Drakken's ever met – taps him on the shoulder and steers him out into the darkened hallway to talk. "Looks like you're having a bit of a hard time today, Dr. Drakken," the man says.

Drakken hopes his cringe isn't obvious. Actually, he hopes he doesn't cringe at all. Agent Kane has never once berated him, but Drakken is so accustomed to everyone treating him like a hypothesis to be scrapped and replaced with something better once he proves himself untrue.

"Err, yes." Drakken straightens his body and tries to look sturdy even though he feels about the consistency of gelatin – with porridge mixed in. Which would undoubtedly not taste good together. "I know I've been a bit of a Mr. Margarine Hands today –"

Nnnggh. Not the right phrase. Better ones, longer ones, fluffier ones land in his cerebrum and then go winging away like his dream butterfly/metaphoric girlfriend. How does Lapis always talk so simply, so clearly? Most of the time, Drakken's words either fail him or stack themselves up into towers of verbosity – good word there – that he has to flaunt because he's so proud to have built them.

"I promise I'm not going back to being a supervillain," Drakken blurts. That seems the most pressing issue to take care of, before any doubt can creep into Kane's eyes and tear Drakken apart.

Sweat collects on Drakken's neck. What would Lapis say right here, right now, in this situation?

Scientifically, the comparison isn't viable – Lapis would never be standing in the halls of Global Justice, nervous about proposing marriage to herself. But he thinks about her anyway, how her words just seem to be the right size for their jobs, not one bit of superfluous anything in her sweet whispery voice. He imagines her talking. He imagines and imagines and prays and imagines, until the sound of her swirls in place in his brain and carves away an open, unclouded space.

"It's just that…I'm nervous," Drakken says. "I'm – I'm proposing to my girlfriend tonight."

Perfect. The words must be perfect, because happy lines pop up across Kane's cocoa-moo-brown face. "Well!" he says. "That's enough to get any man a little flustered, isn't it?" He claps Drakken on the back, and Drakken knows he's not Jell-O because he doesn't squash under the man's hand. "Best of luck to you, and congratulations."

Drakken thinks the congratulations might be a tad premature – he learned some things about counting unhatched eggs in his supervillain career – but he smiles and heads back into the lab with a little skip, like there are Slinkies on the bottoms of his feet. He tries to do his best and to picture everyone else in the lab as a friend and a colleague rather than part of a pack of vultures ready to pounce on him the second he trips up. He's perhaps only halfway successful at either goal, but maybe that has to be good enough for today. There's a beehive in his chest already, and he doesn't need to add any more bees to it.

And then the bell is ringing and the work day is over. And then he's in the hovercraft, soaring across a sky that hasn't turned orange yet, but it's close. And then he's at home, staring blankly at the kitchen table.

Dinner. I need dinner, Drakken manages to think.

He fixes himself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and a little salad. Nice and light, to leave room for ice cream. And lessen his chances of puking. That would be decidedly unromantic.

The food is there and gone so fast that you wouldn't think it would have a chance to make an impression on him, but every flavor is a thousand times more intense than usual in Drakken's mouth. The salt is saltier, the sugar sweeter, the tanginess tangier – even the lettuce, which Drakken would typically describe as bland, seems to burst richly in between his teeth and drizzle greenness down his throat.

Drakken finishes his last bite and wipes a napkin across his lips. And keeps wiping until his skin screams at him to stop. So he stops and let his fingertips play with each other and listens to the nervous thudding inside him.

The sun is about six percent closer to the horizon than it was when he got home. It's time.

Drakken shouts goodbye to Commodore Puddles and flings himself out the front door. He's locking it behind him when he happens to pat at his pockets and they both come up flat. No ring. He almost forget the ring.

Grumbling under his breath keeps him from hyperventilating, so Drakken does that as he lets himself back in and jams the ring into his pocket and then realizes he's being awfully rough with it. He worked hard – well, played hard – to earn that ring, and he is about to offer it to Lapis with all his love. The least he can do is not manhandle the thing.

Drakken slows himself down for a moment – a feat that feels akin to stopping time itself – and gives the ring the tenderest of pats. It almost feels like it pulses back at him, though he knows it's just his own heartbeat shivering in his fingertips.

He walks – well, scampers – the couple blocks to the warp pad and stands there in front of it, hopping from foot to foot. If he sits down, he thinks he might not be able to get back up.

Minutes drag by like cold syrup. Drakken's checking his watch to see if time has stopped when the warp pad comes alive with light and a pretty jingle that nonetheless makes him jump at least two feet. Luckily, he's able to keep himself upright and stick the landing.

He watches the light until it settles itself into his favorite shape – Lapis's. She looks calm and unafraid, the antithesis of him. Drakken expects the thought to rub him raw, but instead it feels cool and smooth against his fear, the way the window felt against his forehead last night.

"Hi, Drakken," she says.

"Hello, Lapis!" Drakken calls back, maybe a tad too loud. He tests the shape of his pocket again to make sure the ring's still there. Of course, there's no reason why it shouldn't be, but wouldn't it be just like an interdimensional wormhole to sneak up on him like that? "Are you ready for our date?"

"I'm here, aren't I?" Her voice sparks, but it's not Shego-sarcastic. She uses her flames to keep people warm, not to burn trees to the ground.

This time, Drakken has no trouble closing the distance between them, and this time he knows just what to do with his arms – he loops them around her, at the exact topographic point he's memorized, where he is neither grazing her gem nor brushing her bare midriff. There's no scent pattern to her that a dog could track, and no shampoo or perfume rises up to meet his nose, but there's that scent of saltwater that always seems stuck to her hair. No, not stuck to. Even woven through doesn't do it justice. It's nothing less than a part of her.

When he lets go of her, she grins and raises her arms to activate the warp pad. Her body morphs into light again, light strong enough to tunnel into the sky and twirl them both through it and bring them back down to a twinkling, musical halt. Drakken doesn't know exactly what enables them to dismantle physics like that or what they do to humans to warp them from one pad to another; he asked Lapis once, but the specifics were beyond her as well. It would probably be a good question for Peridot, Drakken decides, and even though the things he doesn't know still itch like mosquito bites on the brain, he's getting better at not scratching them until they bleed anymore.

Little Homeworld seems to rush at Drakken in all its crazed glory, and several of the motley assortment of Gems raise their hands to acknowledge his and Lapis's arrival. He finds Peridot near the front of the crowd in a full-body twitch, giggling like an idiot.

No, Drakken amends himself, not like an idiot. Like a little girl who's overjoyed because her big sister will be engaged soon.

(He hopes.)

Lapis's hand hasn't left his the whole time. She has a light, cool touch, not overbearingly present the way another human's would be.

They skirt the borders of Little Homeworld and walk through the used-to-be-meadow until the grass gives way to sand, and then they're on their boardwalk, the one where Lapis got her first taste of ice cream and he got his first glimpse of that smile. Drakken glances at the sky. The sun has begun to make an appropriately dramatic descent, smearing red and orange down to the horizon and painting the cloud-bellies purple. It's close. It's so close.

That same sun slants down on him and Lapis, pulling their skinny shadows across the boardwalk, and Drakken lets himself grin at how tall he looks. One foot drags along the warm wood, wanting to slow down and savor the memories, but his other foot won't slow, won't wait – it has to go, now, or something inside it will rupture. That foot wins, and Drakken takes off down the boardwalk as far as his somewhat-abbreviated legs will carry him.

A ten-second sprint later, he startles at the sight of his empty hand. Great. He left Lapis in the dust.

He doesn't even want to imagine what Shego would have to say about that.

Drakken peers guiltily over his shoulder to find Lapis only a few paces behind and not seeming offended, her eyebrows up in both a question and a shrug. He turns – the ring feels like a lit match in his pocket, but he turns and scampers back to her and puts his fingers between hers again. "Sorry," he says. "I'm a bit excited."

"I noticed," Lapis says. He hears laughter at the corners of her words, that fountain-at-the-mall laugh that fits so smoothly in his ears. She moves the two of them forward at a perfect compromise of a speed.

Come to think of it, everything is perfect now. The temperature is summer-night-luscious, the fireflies are starting to wink, the birds are singing – okay, so they're seagulls, and their screeches aren't exactly soothing, but he doesn't mind. It sounds fine to Drakken. It sounds right for him and Lapis.

On the other hand, sweat dampens his collar and sticks his ponytail to the back of his neck, and he thinks he dropped peanut butter somewhere on his lab coat. Drakken wants to kick himself…well, not really; that would hurt – but he's mad at himself for not thinking to shower or change his clothes before he proposed, let alone splash on some cologne.

But isn't that part of what makes Lapis so wonderful? She's never needed to see him cleaned up or smell him cologned to want his company. Drakken remembers how her gaze met his for the first time, how the first impressions that flash across most people's faces – blue, ugly, weird, ew – never appeared on hers. Her eyes were so nervous and guarded, and she stood with her shoulders hunched together like someone had just hit her and she was expecting them to hit her again.

So much has changed. So much hasn't.

By the time they reach their ice cream shop, Drakken can no longer feel his toes. He lurches in a probably somewhat drunken fashion up to the counter with Lapis at his side.

"Two ice cream cones," Drakken says, flashing two fingers and a smile at the person behind the glass. He's not sure why he felt the need to illustrate the number with his fingers, only that it makes him feel more solid, and that's the state of matter he would like to be in when he proposes. "I'll take chocolate, and she'll take…"

Drakken stops and nods to Lapis. He's fairly certain he knows what she'll say, but it should be her decision.

"Vanilla, please," she says, just as he suspected she would.

The person behind the glass disappears into the void beyond customers' vision, and Drakken runs his hands up and down his thighs, grateful for the water-absorbent gloves that keep him from leaking perspiration all over the place. "Beautiful tonight," he says vaguely, and then he can almost hear the skin on the back of his neck turning sunburn colors. "The weather, I meant. Although the argument could definitely be made that you're beautiful tonight, too –"

Lapis giggles, her eyes steady on the sky above him. "It took me so long to realize how many beautiful things there are on Earth. I mean, I get why I wasn't able to like them at first." She rolls her eyes as though her five-thousand-year imprisonment was a mere pain in the butt. "But now I love it here." Her voice falls to somewhere even quieter than usual. "I'm so glad I never got the chance to terraform it."

Drakken bobs his head because, dang, she doesn't need to yell to make her words slam into you and knock the breath from you. Terraform must be her Diablos, and still the shudder that moves through her is brief, contained. "Me too," is the most eloquent thing he can add.

The person reappears at the counter and reaches two ice cream cones through the glass just then. Drakken wraps his hands around his. The proximity to cold on this warm night tickles his nose, and he can feel himself salivating and not just from how delicious it looks. This cone is all that stands between him and the question that's been burning a hole through him for the last twenty-four hours. He's almost there. He's almost ready.

He's almost not afraid.

The two of them walk to a table, their table, where they watched twilight fall that first evening, and somehow Drakken retains enough gentlemanly instinct to pull Lapis's chair out for her. She rewards him with that tiny flutter of a smile and keeps smiling as he plops his tingling, restless self into the chair across from her.

Drakken gives his cone a quick lick and then watches Lapis tackle hers. No, tackle is too blunt a word for how she approaches it; Lapis Lazuli never tackles anything, except people who decide to mess with her or her friends. She does some things neatly, like this, and she does some things clumsily – albeit not clumsily enough to give his worst moments a run for their money – and she does all things delightfully. He likes observing her face, all the simple little parts of it, as they work together to catch a splotch of ice cream before it falls from the cone, to swallow and sort of shimmer with happiness.

The world stops feeling like a place that needs domination or destruction with her sitting in the midst of it. Ever since the night of the Lorwardian invasion, Drakken has been on a quest to be as morally upright as he is intellectually brilliant – a quest he would still be on even if he hadn't met her, but having her here is like being handed a cheat code, so it's almost not even hard anymore.

And then DNAmy patters across his mind.

Logically, scientifically, Drakken understands why he would think of her right now. He's about to propose, and he's been burned by a woman before. And burned is exactly the right way to put it – it scalds down into you and leaves you feeling charred and crumbly and brittle afterward. Drakken has received many burns in his life, of the chemical and the exploding-doom-ray variety, and the DNAmy-burn hurt in a way no amount of aloe vera lotion could fix.

He and his shrink have traipsed up and down and all around that territory, so he knows what to tell himself, too. DNAmy doesn't know how to interact with a man and not flirt, for reasons that would keep her own shrink pretty busy she if she had one, reasons that weren't his fault. Drakken, however, had basically gone his entire adult life without experiencing fuzzy-tummy feelings for a woman, and he pounced on them the second they showed up. She thought they were having fun and being silly, and he thought they were destined to spend the rest of their lives together, and the whole thing went up in a KA-POW as spectacular as any failed scheme.

He has hated her. He's missed her. He's wished bad things upon her and then rescinded them after she inevitably suffered for loving Monkey Fist.

Drakken brings his ice cream closer to his face and guides his tongue around the scoop's perimeters. The chocolate snuggles down in his dry mouth, rich and alive and immediate, connected to now. He's not back then, hemmed in fake French fries and holding DNAmy's hand and taking a risk without having weighed the odds. He's now, and this is Lapis.

Lapis loves him. She's said so herself. And there's that ancient wise adage about love and marriage going together like horses and carriages, right?

(Okay, so maybe it's just an old song lyric, but that doesn't mean it's not true!)

Drakken takes a full survey of Lapis's face over the top of his cone. She's freer with her emotions now – at least with him, she is – but they are still naturally subtler than his, and at times he worries he'll miss them entirely. He doesn't see any sign that she'll say no – then again, she has no idea he's planning to ask her anything important in the first place. Unless Peridot gave it away after all.

Ugh. Relationships are so befuddling. They're like those geometric equations where the X and Y graphs intersect in three or four places, the margin of error gaping wide and potentially catastrophic.

Lapis looks up then, and just like that, her eyes clink with his. What he can see of her mostly-shielded-by-bangs forehead tenses. "Is something wrong?" she says.

The sweat on the back of Drakken's neck ices over. "Wha – why would you say that?"

"Because you're usually better at eating ice cream than this."

Drakken follows her nod to his sleeve, where a trail of almost-melted brown drools its way from the wrist toward the elbow. His lips are parted, his tongue at the ready, but the cone he clenched in his fist is at least three inches too far to the left for him to reach. Drakken snatches up a wad of napkins and presses them to his sleeve with a scowl. He hopes that stain will come out – this is one of his favorite identical lab coats. Well, it looks like one of his favorite identical lab coats…

"Am I doing something to make you nervous?" Lapis says.

Drakken would facepalm if he didn't have a fistful of ice cream cone. Actually, he starts to do it anyway but, thank goodness, pulls himself back at the last second. Of course. All this time, all this progress, and she still thinks it's her.

"No!" Drakken's yelp is too loud and too much and too soon, he knows, but his ribcage is banging around like it's a literal cage holding back a wild bison or something. "You're fine! I just – I just have a surprise for after we're done with our ice cream!"

Drakken ducks his pinking cheeks and takes another swipe of ice cream while he's down there. Should he have said that? Did it give too much away? Confound it, why did he not search for YouTube tutorials on how to propose yesterday? Not everything is as simple as nuclear chemistry.

But when he sees Lapis shrug off the worry like a sweater she doesn't need in the balmy almost-night, he's fairly sure he did the right thing. He takes an honest-to-goodness bite off the top of his ice cream, a trick reserved for only the most desperate would-be fiancés.

"Okay." Lapis's eyes are still confused, but a smile peeps out as she says, "Well, you can go ahead and take your time. I'm not going anywhere."

Air wheezes through Drakken's nasal passages, and he pushes his eyelids together for a moment and shivers with the completely-out-of-context comfort of that last sentence. And maybe with a pinch of brain freeze, too.

While Lapis tilts her head to address her thawing ice cream, Drakken makes a complete three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sweep around his own cone, and it comes up smooth as silk in his drying-out mouth. It should be the signal for the rest of his body to loosen, too, and most of it does. Except for his right leg, which is jittering like crazy, pounding an SOS signal against the plastic chair's metal leg. Very hard and strong metal, at that, not giving anything back, and Drakken doesn't know why that bothers him, because it's not that he wants to destroy the chair. But evil habits die hard sometimes.

That's the moment when Drakken feels a narrow, sandaled foot reach out and hook around his, absorbing his quiver into its own understated strength.

He is not too proud to cling back.

"So!" Drakken exclaims, because he might as well try to keep up a conversation. Because the alternative is sitting here and focusing on his breathing, wondering why the more fiercely he concentrates the harder it becomes to accomplish. "Vanilla is still your favorite, huh?"

Lapis taps her ice-cream-free fingers on the tabletop. "Sort of. I've had other flavors that taste just as good, but this one is still the best. It tastes like the night we met, so it tastes safe."

She says it with another shrug, but the careless delivery does nothing to take the dazzle off what she just told him. She feels safe with him!

And, what do you know, he's emperor of the world after all.

"I love you," Drakken blurts out.

Lapis regards him with amusement – kind amusement, the variety he's needed more of in his life. "I love you too."

His foot must be shaking at close to warp speed by now, and hers still doesn't let go.

Drakken grins at her – sloppily, he knows, but how can he care at this point? "How's Steven?" he asks. It's the only other direction he can force his thoughts toward.

Lapis sighs and brings her cone closer to her face so she can rescue another drop of vanilla before it spills to the tabletop. It's weird how she's better at that than he is – even weirder that he doesn't really mind. "About the same," she says. "He's seeing his shrink twice a week now. He talks to me about it sometimes."

Drakken feels his hair swing farther upward. "And?" he prompts. He's been a good guy for long enough to know he shouldn't pry, but for pity's sake, this is Steven they're talking about. He wants the kid to be okay so badly that every inch of himself tingles with it, like he's rubbed up static all over his body.

Lapis squints at her cone, though Drakken suspects she's working to bring something else into focus. "Steven said the shrink told him that he can't go back to being the way he was, but he shouldn't forget his kid-self. Something about taking the pieces of how he remembers himself and using them to build the person he wants to be now."

"Wow," Drakken says, because, well, wow. It must be nice to have a past self who can serve as a good example. The view from Drakken's rearview mirror, while still fascinating, is significantly grimier.

(He also loves it that he's taught Lapis the term "shrink." Who says he isn't hip to how the teens talk?)

Lapis nods. "Steven said, 'The things he says makes a lot of sense, but I don't really know what to do with them yet.' And I said, 'Yeah, but at least you're listening to them now. That's a huge step forward.'"

Drakken could swear the Cosmic Wisdom on the Ages gathers on her face as she licks her ice cream again. She has, after all, had several millennia to acquire plenty of it – wisdom, not ice cream – and it makes his hard-won four-and-a-half decades look rather puny by comparison. It makes him nervous.

As does the fact that the cowlick on top of his ice cream has vanished – into him, he presumes. What's left lies flat. He's crunching cone now. The contents of his stomach fold together like box tops.

It's almost time.

Lapis's wispy voice is bright, and Drakken follows it back to the conversation they're having. "Anyway, I think that guy's helping Steven a lot."

She sits back, so humble, every bit as if she didn't glomp onto his scaly neck back when he was a Godzilla-worm monster and love him back to himself. Every bit as if she wasn't willing to stay chained to Jasper for heaven-only-knows-how-long to ensure he was safe.

Drakken drags the back of his already-besmirched sleeve across his mouth. "I think you're helping him a lot, too." He tries to say it softly, too, but his vocal cords don't really have that setting, and it comes out more foghorn than mist.

Lapis's chin lowers a fraction, and two squiggly lines of darker blue appear across the tops of her cheeks – her way of blushing – but there's an infinitesimal grin under it. And she doesn't argue with him, even though the woman he met on the beach the first day seemed to have a forcefield of sorts up to deflect compliments.

"I hope so," she says. "He did so much for me. I never imagined I'd have a friend like him."

Drakken watches her push away the words I don't deserve a friend like him. She's trying not to think like that anymore, he knows, in large part because she doesn't want Steven to internalize that.

"I never imagined I'd have a girlfriend like you," Drakken says, with total honesty and without even pausing to consider whether or not he deserves her. Love can't always be about deserving, anyway, or then it would just be due payment. "Total global domination, yes. You, no."

Lapis lets out her wonderful snort, still blushing. Drakken decides to take both of those as good signs. She lifts her cone again – hers is also nearly scalped by now, and with a spasm it reminds him to check on his own.

Two more bites left. Combine that with the ring chafing his hip every time he moves and the patter-pat of his knee against the underside of the table, and he's an all-but-certified wreck.

Somehow he crunches the bites one at a time and manages to swallow without choking himself. Somehow he refrains from shooting face-first across the table as he waits for Lapis even though his skin feels like it'll split open any minute now.

When her ice cream cone finally disappears, a seagull decides to serenade them with a long, grating set of screams.

Probably it's a seagull. Could be Drakken's insides.

His hand trembles its way to his pocket and hunts around for longer than it should have to given the surface area, but he finds it and tucks it between two fingers. The porridge in his throat grows thicker, clogging his ears like mountain altitude.

"Time for the surprise now?" Lapis asks. She folds one long leg up onto her chair and slings her arm across her knee, as casual as you please.

"Yup." Drakken almost doesn't recognize the watery remains of his own baritone. The bees in his chest buzz louder. He feels a smile stretching his cheeks, and he knows what it is because he's worn it before – the delirious grin of someone choosing to believe their crazy scheme will succeed.

One hand still in his pocket, Drakken squirms out of his chair. He tries to get down on one knee like all the gallant boyfriends in the movies, but his back says no dice, so he lets both knees hit the ground and looks up into Lapis's eyes. As soft as sand, as sharp as glass – which only makes sense, considering their similar chemical compositions. He tries not to see the freckly face that rejected him, pitied him. He really tries.

Please. He says it silently.

(Gosh, he hopes it was silent.)

And then he draws the ring into sight and opens his mouth.