~Oh my gosh, IT'S HERE! :D

I'm really sorry it took so long, guys. I really wanted to get this chapter to you as soon as possible, and then my writing schedule got all thrown off because my grandpa had to have open-heart surgery. (He's doing well now, BTW, but it was scary for a while.) Anyway, thanks to everyone who reviewed. I'll be trying to catch up on replying in the next few weeks. Love you guys!~

You do not know what is happening right now.

You and Dr. Drakken have gone on your date for ice cream at sunset as planned, the air gentle against your bare arms and the sky ablaze. He has already finished his cone, and you slip the last bite of yours between your teeth. As far as you are concerned, the atmosphere is just as soothing as it was that first night – perhaps more so, now that you have familiarized yourself with this planet, grown to love it and the man both.

Dr. Drakken's behavior, however, has been strange: more urgent and agitated than is typical even for him, with trembling limbs and a wild look in his eye that you recognize from early human sailors about to make for uncharted waters. It is a look that clumsily fuses two mineral veins of anticipation, one crafted from joy and the other from fear.

Now he kneels in front of you as though unable to regain his footing, trickles of rich brown ice cream coursing down his face and drying, crusted, on his upper lip. His hands run over his hips until they find and plunge into his pockets. Caught between the two longest fingers of his left hand when it resurfaces is a ring, the flimsy, Citrine-colored one he purchased at the arcade.

Was this his plan all along, for the ring to be yours? If so, you can't understand why he has waited several days to give it to you, or why the giving appears to frighten him so.

Drakken's lips work; they shape sounds, but not words. You decide to give him some of yours.

"That's a nice ring," you say, for it is, if not the fanciest you have ever seen. "Is it for me?"

Drakken nods and swallows. There is a question in his eyes, and you wonder what question he could have to ask that would make them look as though he half expects to sail off the edge of the world.

"How come?" you say, not questioning the ring so much as his tight quivering hold on it.

Drakken doesn't swallow this time. His mouth bursts open. "You're supposed to give someone a ring – when you ask them to marry you."

You blink.

"It's traditionally a diamond ring," he continues, "but I was worried it might be someone you knew…"

You stare at him, at the ring in his hand, the brown smear of ice cream on his sleeve, the way his hair forms soft spines that stand out in all directions as though in bewilderment. "When you ask them to marry you?" you repeat.

Drakken frowns, stretching his already lengthy face. "Oh, dear. I'm getting this all out of order, aren't I?"

"How would I know?" you say. His words have landed on you like raindrops, spilled across, yet will not stay in place long enough to be absorbed into your skin or your gemstone.

"Nnnnghgnnn – blast it all. Can I start over?"

He glances at you as though asking your permission, and you nod at him.

Drakken takes a long breath and closes his eyes. When he opens them, you can almost see him gathering his often-disordered thoughts into as neat a line as he can make.

"Lapis Lazuli," he says, "I never knew that having no idea what you're doing could be this much fun. So, if you'll let me, I'd like to spend the rest of my life with no idea what I'm doing. I mean…that doesn't sound right, but what I mean is, I'd like to spend it…with you." You piece his words together slowly, and you think you have nearly figured out what they mean when he stretches out his arm and removes all ambiguity. "Will you marry me?"

His eyes are avid and tender on your face. You don't try to hide the puzzlement in your expression, nor the clearing of it as you fathom what he is saying and the center of your gem goes still.

You think of Ruby and Sapphire; you think of Kim and Ron. You think of a joining that does not require you to disappear, of lives cycling one another like the moon and the tides. That is what he wants from you, and now you understand why he was so nervous to ask. This can change everything for both of you.

The skin around Dr. Drakken's mouth vibrates. There is, in fact, no part of him that is not trembling, and in those uncontrolled movements you see how much your answer matters to him.

How much you matter to him.

Warm, clean water surges through your gem, replenishing your wings and bathing your powers until you they seem almost unsullied by their first Purpose. You lift your gaze to the sky, where shades of Amethyst and Jasper wage war, and lower it to watch the first faint winks of fireflies also seeking a loving companion. You are unsure how it progresses from here. You are unsure of your role.

"Do I have to say yes?" you ask.

Pain creeps into the corners of Drakken's eyes, and you hear his next few rasping breaths, louder than the breeze. "Well, you don't have to," he says. "I would really, really like it." His voice seems to crease, the bump in his throat rising and falling. "But I can't force you. Well, I won't. Mind control is so 2002, am I right?"

He releases a laugh that makes you think of gemstones you have seen that were created by scientists, assembled in a lab. He is trying so hard not to beg, the effort must be like a dagger in his throat, but he is still willing to swallow it to let you know you have a choice.

For an instant, you stand on the beach again, looking up at his face. You hear his voice: Excuse me, Miss? Miss? Uh…Miss Blue Lady? Are you okay? Do you need me to call someone?

You remember Steven's words, when you awakened on the barn floor from dreams of a green creature that held you on her back and Jasper on her nose: Someone wanted you to call him when you got back. He seemed real worried. . . his name was Dr. Drakken?

You hear Drakken's voice again, smaller inside the connection of two communication devices: Lapis, I just realized something. And I need to tell you now before anything else happens, okay? I love you.

You look at this man, the crack down his cheek where he hurt himself, the humorously large ears that have heard all of your darkest secrets, and the black eyes that have never lost faith in you. You glance down at the fingerprints you did not know you had when you arrived to terraform Earth. This is your choice. He will not take it away from you.

How fortunate, then, that the answer he wishes to hear is the same one you wish to give him.

"Yes," you say.

Drakken chuckles ruefully once more. "That's what I figured – mind control's on its way out. It was fun while it lasted, but the consequences…"

"No." You shake your head with a small grin. "I mean yes."

Drakken's eyebrow startles and then seems to freeze. "Yes-yes?"

"Yes-yes," you say.

Dusk recolors your surroundings, throwing long puddles of darkness across the table where you sit, but Dr. Drakken's smile cuts through the shadows, and he lets out a whoop that frightens off a nearby shorebird. Since he does not appear to remember how to move, you take his hand in yours and pull him to his feet. His arms curve around you and his magnificent chin settles atop your head. You feel his body shake, and you realize he is crying.

"Thank you," he sputters into your hair.

You do not have a response to that. You hear the ocean in his heartbeat, and you feel peace in every facet of your soul.


Dr. Drakken, as you anticipated, does not stand in one place with this news for long. He sprints up and down the boardwalk, letting out a whooping noise; he tries to climb a light-post near the road and slides off its metallic frame into a heap on the ground – a heap that, again, does not remain still: he contents himself with running circles around the light-post and cheering until he finally runs back to your table and collapses, gasping, into his chair, his eyes exhausted but as bright as they have ever been.

Now as he sits beside you, one small booted foot raps against the side of his chair. The noise has no pattern, no rhythm, and no real Purpose beyond overflowing joy. Drakken scribbles on an unused napkin with a black drawing-stick, leftover from meepmorp class, that you drew from your gem. He writes the word plans once, and then again, and then again, until the napkin is littered with letters, and several sets of them read palns instead.

"Plans," he mutters to himself. "Plans, plans, plans."

You lean a little closer over his shoulder. "What are we planning?" you ask to help him along. You remember seeing Kim and Ron when they married: her white dress, the procession of loved ones, and the leaping declaratory music that inundated the room. The word you are seeking washes up at your feet. "Our…wedding?"

Drakken nods and clenches the drawing-stick harder, looking at you with something close to shyness, an expression you have rarely seen from him.

"Is it going to be all big and fancy?" you say.

Drakken taps the base of the drawing-stick against his front teeth. "I'm going to go ahead and say yes, probably so. For my mother's sake if nothing else. She's been after me to get married practically ever since I left home, which was…almost thirty years ago. So I don't think she'd be very happy if I just went and eloped."

You frown. "What's eloping?" Marrying seems a large enough activity to occupy all the space around the two of you; you do not need another one to complicate things further.

"It's when people go get married without having a wedding," Drakken says. "They just find lawyers or someone who can make it legal, they sign a piece of paper, and POOF! All of the marriage, none of the hullabaloo."

You shake your head. You have never been one for hullabaloo, but you see a reflection of yourself sleeping with your head in Mama Lipsky's lap, more comfortable than you ever were on Blue Diamond's palanquin, and it does not sound like much of a sacrifice. "No. I wouldn't want to do that."

"Me neither," Drakken says with a wrinkle of his nose. "After all this time…it'd be so anticlimactic. And there are few things that frustrate me the way an anticlimactic ending does!"

There are many things, actually, that frustrate him this way, but you do not point this out. You don't want to extinguish the glow on his face as he watches you, the evening sky behind him dulling in the span between sunset and stars.

"You have a…pastor, right?" you say instead. "At your church? Is he someone who can make us married?"

Drakken stares back at you, the outline of what you last said – married – on his mouth, as though he cannot comprehend the word he taught you years ago. After a moment, he shakes out his arms and bobs his head, and you notice the uneven ends of his hair kick upward, matching the swaying in his voice. "Yes. Yes, he can. I'd love for him to be the one to do it." He squints at you. "So – we can have it done at my church."

He speaks as though certain, but his eyes hold questions. He is reaching out for your input.

"Actually…" You shake your head again. You have grown to like Drakken's church and many of its attendants, but it seems wrong to be walled in with no view of sky or sea on a day meant to celebrate him and you and your bond. "Do you think we could hold it here? I'd really love for it to be on the beach."

Drakken rests his teeth atop the base of the drawing-stick. "The beach? Even after Monster-Steven and everything?"

You turn your hand over and gaze at your fingerprints. "All the important stuff that's happened to me," you say, and you are no longer surprised at the conviction you hear in your own voice, "good or bad, happened on that beach.

"Besides, everybody you love is supposed to be there, and that includes…"

"The ocean." Drakken says the words with you, and you nod at him. You can no more deny the ocean attendance than he could deny his own mother.

Thoughts take flight behind his eyes, yet his gaze is almost steady, nearly sure. For all that Dr. Drakken's mind can be easily lured from its paths, it can also enclose him in a biome where nothing exists outside of him, you, and whatever has captured his attention. "I guess you couldn't really pick it up and drag it into the church with you."

"I could," you say. "But it'd cause a lot of problems."

Drakken bursts into laughter, and with scarcely any walls on the boardwalk to catch it and send it resonating back to him, it drifts into the stars and tapers out in the night. It is a sound you have known for so little of your existence and yet so much of your life. "Okay, so, yes to pastor, no to flooding the church. Beach weddings are very romantic anyway, I'm told! And weddings do take quite some time to plan, so hopefully that'll give the memories time to…you know, fade a little. The bad memories, I mean."

You glance at the napkin. "Okay, so what next?"

"I don't know." There is a sharpening on the edges of Drakken's voice, the beginnings of a whine, not a challenge. "I know there's a lot more for us to plan, and I can't even figure out where to start, and I really just want to tell some more people before we get all caught up in the details! It isn't like a world-domination plot where they're going to make fun of me for not knowing everything right away, after all!"

Drakken presses the napkin so hard with the drawing-stick that its tip breaks off and spins across the tabletop. He gives you an unhappy look. "Oh. Sorry, Lapis."

"That's okay. I can fix it later." You pick up the drawing-stick and ease it back into your gem. "Well, why don't we go tell more people, then? Like…oh stars, does Steven know about this yet?"

Drakken churns in his seat, his eyes still chuckling. He is joy and pride and satisfaction, layered atop one another like the strata that make up the Earth's crust and mantle. "He knew I was planning to ask you. And he was pretty sure you were going to say yes."

You smile. Steven, as much as he has changed, still knows you well.

"He was right, then. And he's gonna be so happy to know it. Let's go tell him. I'd bet he'd plan the wedding for us if we'd let him," you say.

"He would?"

"Yeah. When he was little," you say, and for a moment your back aches as you recall a time that is far away but not long ago, "he used to plan weddings for his favorite characters from TV shows. He's supposed to be getting back parts of himself, right? This would be the perfect way for him to remember the part of him that loves love."

You watch Drakken's face. It is busy, crowded with thoughts that scramble atop one another, but in the end a grin wins out. "He might have to fight my mother for it," he says.

You giggle despite the knowledge that Steven could effortlessly win against Mama Lipsky in a fight. "Maybe they'd make a good team. They're kinda alike in some ways."

"Yes, I suppose so," Drakken says. "Steven and Mother. Who'd have thought? Urrr…I guess I have to tell her, too." He gives you a sidelong glance. "I wouldn't blame you if you don't want to be there for that. There'll probably be lots of hugging and cheek-pinching."

He puts a hand to his own cheek, the scarred one, and flinches, although he has told you the mark no longer pains him. It does sound overwhelming, her reaction, and you would rather see the jubilance return to Steven's eyes first.

"How 'bout this." You inch your chair closer to his. "Why don't we swing by Little Homeworld first and then warp back to Middleton to tell your mom?"

"Brilliant idea!" Drakken says.

His stare grows vacant once more, but he is right there next to you, warm and soft and kind. You put a hand on his arm, and he startles like a shorebird. His lips shake, yet you sense it isn't fear that moves them.

You stand up and summon your wings, and then pluck him from the ground. "Yahoo!" he hollers into the wind in place of his usual giddy nervous shrieks.

The sky is dark and the water smooth on the horizon as you pass over the beach. The tide rides in and out like human breaths, and you feel the ocean's delight singing in your wings.

Even from the air, Little Homeworld is as chaotic as ever, loud and bright with the lives of hundreds of Gems, calling out to one another, asking and answering questions. You swoop higher to keep Dr. Drakken clear of the rotating cylindrical tower that juts from the roof of the central building like a cliff from the sea. A pinched voice, nasal and warm, reaches you before you spy her, a streak of green and yellow, standing amid a clump of Gems who all hold baseball equipment.

You swing closer, lowering Drakken until his feet touch the floor, then land beside him. You exchange grins with him and move your hand behind your back, the ring sliding up and down on your fourth finger – the one where Drakken told you humans traditionally wear their rings. It is not heavy, but you still feel its weight, its significance, subtly terraforming the motions of your hands. "Hi, guys," you say.

As you hoped, you hear a screech in reply.

The crowd splits, opening to let Peridot tear through to you, a baseball player's hat toppling from her head and falling in the grass. She skids to a stop and stands before you, her tiny body tensed and vibrating, her eyes almost the size of the ball she clutches, and in that moment you understand: she also knew what Dr. Drakken was planning. Keeping his secret must have been like trying to walk through a countercurrent for her.

"Yeah, Peridot, he asked me," you say with a light laugh. You hold your hand out for her inspection. "And I said yes."

There is an instant of stillness, no longer than a blink, and you know it is the only one you will experience for quite some time.

In the next blink, Peridot is screaming, and her arms are around you, then around Drakken, hoisting him from the ground, and then around you again, her face pressed into the inlet of skin that shows below your top. It takes a few additional moments for her shriek to resolve into words.

"I just – this is amazing! This is fantastic! This is superlative! It's objectively the best! This is just what I wanted for my favorite ship! This is just the most imperfectly perfect bit of imperfect perfection –"

She is not making any sense, and yet somehow you understand her.

You rub the top of her head with your knuckles. "So, I take it this means you're happy about it," you say, your tone not as wry as you were expecting it to be.

"Are you kidding? Of course I'm happy about it!" Peridot pulls back and stares up at you, the big green eyes welling with joy. "You and Drakken are going to be stationed together forever! And now we can begin preparations for another marriage operation!"

Operation. You roll your eyes and laugh again, and she laughs with you, a cackle that seems wrung straight from her nose.

"Marriage operation?" a full, strong voice asks behind you. "Who's getting married?"

You turn to see Bismuth, her forehead in creases. She does not wait for an answer; when her eyes land on you and Dr. Drakken, she does not seem to need one. "You, Wings?" she says to you. "You and him?"

"Yup," you say.

"Well, con-grat-u-lat-ions!" Bismuth draws the word out slowly, the way she would draw irons from a fire, and grins at you. "I think that calls for a high-five, don't you?"

She raises her hand to you, and you realize you are not waiting for it to strike you. She is unrecognizable as the pitiless Gem from your first meeting on the battlefield, the memory of fists and pain attenuated by the brighter memory of her muscled arm across your back, protecting your gem from the Diamonds' pink leg-ship, and the image of her now, standing aside from you, leaving it to you to close the gap.

You do, and when your palm touches hers, you reach out and hug her. Your arms do not meet around her back, but it doesn't matter. Bismuth gasps, a noise almost too small for her; she chuckles into your hair, gives your shoulder a gentle squeeze, and then lets you go.

"Did you hear that, everybody?" she calls, her voice sailing across the tops of Little Homeworld's buildings. "Lapis and Drakken are getting married!"

A cheer goes up from the mass of Gems, sounding confused but sincere. A group of Quartzes farther back begins to applaud.

Dr. Drakken has been carried to the edge of the crowd, and now he bends down to Peridot's level, no doubt answering her many questions, with a dazzling smile on his face. You remember seeing that smile for the first time on the beach, how you thought it could have been powered by magic itself were it not for the utter lack of artifice in it – it had nothing it felt the need to reshape.

You hear the rustling of liquid wings beside you, and you know who it is even before you hear Lisa say, "Lapis? You're getting…married?"

You turn and look into eyes that mirror your own. Hanks of Lisa's tussled hair fall from their tie and dangle around her pyrite-speckled cheeks.

"Yeah," you say. "To Dr. Drakken."

"Oh." Lisa locks her fingers around her opposite wrist. "Um…I'm guessing that must be a good thing? 'Cause you seem happy."

"I am happy," you say with a grin. "We're in love, remember? And now we're going to live together and spend the rest of our lives with each other."

"Oh!" Lisa nods. "Like a permafusion?"

You take a step back, distancing yourself from the word. "No!" you say, and your voice is not nearly as harsh as the one you hear in your head.

"Yikes. Sorry." Lisa squints at you, her face confused. "I thought the Gems down here liked fusing."

She thinks you are like Amethyst or Pearl or Steven. It should be a compliment, but your eyes slip over the crowd of clapping Quartzes and find the one named Zebra, a Jasper who knows all too well what it is to be dragged toward fusion by something other than your own will. You and she have spoken about it, but only a few times and only briefly; it is a wound for both of you.

"Not all of us," you say. You turn back to Lisa, who watches you with nothing fiercer than curiosity, and you sigh. "I'll tell you about it…someday, okay?"

She nods again, and yet you still feel a strain in the hollowest part of you, the emptiness that always accompanies trying to talk about fusion. The original Crystal Gems saw it as such a beautiful thing, and while you have begun to be able to see its beauty in others, Garnet and Smokey Quartz, for you it will always loom in your mind, green-tinted and snarling.

"It's better than fusion, anyway," you say. "For me, at least. We get to choose it."

"Okay, so it's better, but –" Lisa toys with the hem of her skirt. "You trust him, though, right? And you're always going to be protecting each other, like you did the first time I met him?"

The sincerity in her voice is another raindrop in your already flooding gemstone. You nod at her. "Yeah. I guess in that way, it is like a fusion. But we're not going to merge. We won't disappear inside each other, or make each other bigger. We're just going to…be…together, forever."

"Well, it sounds like fun. Whatever it is." Confusion still flits through Lisa's blue eyes, but she links her arm through yours the way she used to do back on Homeworld before the war, before the mirror. It should feel wrong here on Earth, yet it does not. You cling back and with your other hand you find Dr. Drakken and fit your fingers to his, which are shaking but do not pull away from you.

The warp pad rings against the night air, and you turn in its direction. Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl stand in the fading glow, and in front of them you catch a silhouette of someone no longer the same size as Amethyst.

Steven.

"Lapis!" he calls. He bolts across the grass to meet you, the ends of his jacket swinging as he runs, and he comes to a stop half a meter from you to regain his breath. "Garnet said Drakken had proposed by now, and she was pretty sure you had said –" Steven's eyes move from Drakken's face, which gleams with the revealing, to the ring on your finger and grow wider. "You did! Oh my gosh, you guys, you really did!"

Amethyst lets out a raucous yelp and bumps her hip against Peridot's. The two of them grab on to each other and scream together, their giddiness unintelligible.

Lisa steps aside so Steven can hug you, his arms fitting naturally around your shoulders now rather than your waist. You bend your cheek to his and let the stray hairs he has forgotten to shave scrape against your skin.

You let him be the one to pull away first. Unlike Bismuth, he is recognizable as the person you first knew – the boy who reached out to steady you when you began to fall, the boy who was already willing to protect you even before he heard you speak in your own voice. You peer into his eyes, nearly as deep and dark as Drakken's. "How are you, Steven?" you say softly.

"Right now, at this exact moment, I am great!" Steven grins at you, and you know that he does not lie. Most of the smiles he has given you since he transformed from monster to young man have been tepid: not insincere, not deceptions, but clearly brought forward as much by duty as by love; this smile is nothing like that. It is as warm as the brush of an organic hand, as warm as the comforting burn of a star. "Lapis – I am so happy for you."

Your throat tightens.

"And me, too?" Drakken rocks forward on his toes again. You don't think anything could slow the grin on his face; if anything tried, you would beat it back.

"Sure, I'm happy for you, too." Steven extends an arm to Drakken. "You get to marry Lapis. What could be better than that, right?"

He laughs, but the sound seems to echo against a hidden door he doesn't know how to open. You wonder if he is still thinking of Connie.

Over the top of Steven's curls, you see Pearl with her hands clasped at her chest; in her own cordial way, she looks almost as enthused as Amethyst. Garnet stands at her side, and you know she is watching you from behind her shining opaque glasses. Her plump lips, usually gathered and stoic in the center of her face, spread, the strong lines on either side of them fanning.

You tug your attention back to Steven. "Steven, Drakken and I have been talking a little. We were wondering if you'd like to help us plan our wedding."

From the light and the water that fill his eyes, you know you were right to ask him. This is not a distraction for him – it is a reminder of something he needs to not abandon, something from which his life has been built since the beginning, a shimmering geode beneath a surface that has weathered. "Seriously? You guys want my help?" he says.

"Of course we're serious," you tell him. "That'd be a really sucky joke to play on you right now. Plus, you'd be great at it. You were already great at it when you were a kid. I think my favorite was the one you gave for the rich duck and his girlfriend who came riding in on a bear?" Steven starts to say something, but you hold up your hand. "Yeah, I know that was just pretend, but…love comes really easy to you."

Steven stares at you, tears balancing on the ends of his eyelashes.

Drakken nods and hops in place. "We'd be honored to have your help, Steven! You'd probably wind up working with my mother, though, and she can be a bit…" He frowns. "Pushy."

Steven shakes his head and drags the back of his wrist across his eyes. "Your mom's great, Drakken," he says. "I bet working with her would be a blast."

You nudge Drakken's arm. "Speaking of Mama Lipsky," you say, "we probably should go tell her soon."

Drakken swallows, and a petal unfolds from either side of his neck. "Yes. We probably should."

A tremor weakens his usually bold voice. When you glance at him, however, he does not look afraid, simply nervous. You have never seen anything fearsome about Mama Lipsky, but you understand being intimidated by the woman who gave you life. You give his hand a squeeze, and he squeezes back.

"Yeah! Go tell her!" Steven leans in and embraces each of you once more, his eyes pushing nearly shut with happiness. After he lets go, Garnet touches his arm.

"Don't worry," she tells him. "I'll help you plan your wedding, too, someday." Her lips spread again. "In fact, I already have – in more than 363 ways."

Steven lets out a startled laugh and steps aside to whisper something to Pearl. As you pass them on your way to the warp pad, Peridot trails after Garnet, shrieking questions:

"Is it Connie? Does he marry Connie? Do they get married in the Temple? Do they name their first child after me?"

You feel Dr. Drakken's chuckle in the tips of his fingers before it expands to rumble through his chest, his side jostling yours. "Peridot Universe," he muses once you are out of her earshot.

"Peridot Maheswaran-Universe," you remind him with a smile.

Drakken grimaces. "Have fun at school, kid," he says in a voice that is probably meant to hold Shego's incisive wit. It does not; it is too open, incapable even at its harshest of sounding like hers.

You step onto the war pad together, your hands still linked.


Dr. Drakken stands beside you on Mama Lipsky's wilted porch, humming impatiently under his breath. He has plucked the petals from his neck and straightened his body so that his gaze is high and direct, but the thin-boned hand that clutches yours feels damp like an oyster, and even in the encroaching darkness you can see his legs shaking. A moment earlier, you quickly pressed the door-chime before Drakken had the opportunity to strike at it with his clenched fist, and with every second that passes the waiting appears to steam away more of his reasoning.

The front door swings open, the gap between its catch and the frame widening, and Mama Lipsky bustles out, her gaze bouncing from Drakken to you. "Drewbie! Oh, it's so good to see you, my darling boy! Ohhh, and you brought Lapis! How are you, dear? Well, come in, come in!" she says, her words piling against one another, leaving no room for you to answer.

Drakken walks through the doorway as though taking his first step onto an unfamiliar ship's deck, but he smiles, seeming to anticipate a marvelous voyage. You lean your side against him for support. "Before I say anything else, Mother," he says, "I – I need you to promise you won't hug Lapis hard enough to break her gem."

"Or my bones," you add. "I can fix those, but it's pretty gross to watch."

Mama Lipsky blinks at both of you as her sweet expressive features, so similar to Drakken's but for their neater construction, pucker in confusion. She has not yet guessed.

With tight, trembling fingers, Dr. Drakken reaches for your hand. A vine buds at the side of his neck; its flower trembles too. "Mother," he blurts out, "Lapis has agreed to marry me!"

The sound that issues from Mama Lipsky is nearly identical to the sounds you hear whenever you free a dolphin from a fishing net. She crosses the room on soft feet, her arms extended, aimed at her son.

"Don't crack his bones either," you call to her. You do not want to witness human bones breaking again.

You do not know if Mama Lipsky hears you or not. Her arms surround Drakken and she lifts him toward her, squeezing and pressing him against her so that you cannot tell whether he frowns or enjoys the attention. "Ohhh, Drewbie! My angel! My beautiful boy! Finally, finally, you're ready to settle down! You've made your mother so very happy! And so proud! I'm so proud of you!"

You watch as Drakken disentangles himself from his mother's arms, his fingers scrabbling at her shoulders as he hoists his slender body up and out of her embrace. You do hear a snapping sound as the soles of his shoes find the floor again, yet if it were bone you would see more pain than the small amount that skids across his face and disappears just as quickly.

Mama Lipsky turns to you and gives you a hug as well, her hands cinched against the skin below your shirt, her grip clinging but not crushing. She is like her son; restraint does not come easily to her, and you appreciate what she is able to show of it. You would prefer her not to hold you quite so close, but you like the feel of her, as round and tender as Steven once was.

"And, ohhh, Lapis! Ohhh, sweetheart! I couldn't ask for a better daughter-in-law!" she says.

You think that perhaps she could, but you do not say this, for Mama Lipsky's seed-black eyes gaze back at you, bright and moist, too honest to challenge. If she is willing to choose her for her lawful daughter, you won't try to dissuade her. Beyond the top of her head, you see the couch where you once fell asleep with your head in her lap and her fingers in your hair, the couch where you spent so many nights between the loss of the barn and the construction of Little Homeworld, the couch where Peridot stored her odd-job money until she was ready to spend it on furnishings for your new home. Your gem is a hot spring, warmth like curls of steam traveling down your back.

"Thanks," you say. "It'll be great to have you, too."

"So!" Mama Lipsky sets you down and clasps her hands at her chest. "When is the wedding?"

"Sometime in the future," Drakken says, and he speaks of this uncertainty with such confidence that you almost snort again. "On the beach."

"The beach?" Mama Lipsky repeats.

"Of course, the beach, Mother." Drakken's words take on a sharper angle, seeming to prepare for an argument. "The whole ocean-bond thing, remember?"

"A beach wedding." Mama Lipsky blinks as though staring into a sun. "How romantic! I'll have to wear my best pearls."

You hope she does not see you flinch.

She turns to you once more. "Ohhh, Lapis, what will you wear?"

You glance down at the abrupt coastline of your shirt and the sharp gold ribbon that knots your pants and matches the softer strands climbing around your ankles. "Something besides this, I guess?"

Mama Lipsky actually gasps, and Drakken rushes to answer you before she can compose herself. "I mean, you're more than welcome to wear that if you're most comfortable in it," he says. "But…you know, traditionally, the bride wears a really special, really fancy dress on her wedding day. It's kind of a big deal, you know?"

"Oh." You take another look at the light you wear in the shape of clothing. You have spent the entirety of your existence in one of two arrangements, and aside from the times you were regenerating, you have thought very little about their appearance. Clothing on Homeworld was crafted for protection and identification purposes rather than decorative ones. The first outfit you wore declared your loyalty to Blue Diamond, the second your loyalty to Earth.

You suppose it is only right that there would be another to signify the alliance you are entering with Dr. Drakken.

"Okay," you say with a shrug. "That could be fun."

Mama Lipsky still gapes. You are uncomfortable until you feel a flower brush the top of your head and hear Drakken say, "We can work out the specifics later, okay?" in the softest voice he can manage.

"And where will you live?" Mama Lipsky says.

"After the wedding," Drakken clarifies. His lips fall, and the rest of his face appears to elongate in disappointment. "Oh, man, are we going to have to buy a whole new house? I've already got a house, and I like it! Besides, my – err – custom paint job has probably driven the resale value down quite a bit among the tedious majority of homebuyers…"

"Well, I like my house, too." Your spine feels parched as it still sometimes does when you have to disagree with someone you trust, and yet when you look up at Dr. Drakken you see no conflict in his eyes, only muddied waters. "I mean…we've got a warp pad, right?"

Drakken shouts out a laugh, spraying the air in front of him with particles of saliva. "Lapis, you are brilliant!" he exclaims. "We can spend half our time in Middleton and our other half of time in Beach City!" He turns to his mother with an expression that is two parts declaratory and one part pleading. "We've got family there, too, after all."

Family – it is a word you did not know before you came to Earth. It is a word that has almost begun to wash away the memories of all the nights you spent numbed and glassed, gazing at the changing star-pictures until you were too old to return to the world you left. To hold them at bay, you let your mind run over the other words that connect humans: mother, father, son, daughter, aunt, uncle, sister, brother.

Mama Lipsky nods as if this is sensible. "That's right, you do! Oh, I can't wait to meet the whole family at the wedding!"

"The…whole family?" A look of trepidation passes through Drakken's eyes.

You giggle, imagining the population of Little Homeworld gathered in rows on the sand, Quartzes and Nephrites sitting beside Drakken's human guests. "Good thing it's a big beach."

"It is. It is indeed. Oh…holy dang." Drakken begins to shake again, his knees striking one another like two pieces of flint scraping together, the breaths he pushes out whistling harshly. "This is actually happening, isn't it?"

You fold your hands around one of his; even through his gloves you can feel the frenzy of his heartbeat, a tsunami now rather than a steady tide but still recognizable as something precious to you. "It is," you tell him. "And it's gonna be great."

Drakken nods several times and presses his free hand to the center of his forehead. "Yes, yes. Yes, it is. Why…do I feel like I'm forgetting something?"

You shrug again. He probably is, but your knowledge of weddings is so limited you can't see yourself being much help to him.

"Shego! Yes, that's it! I meant to call Shego!"

Drakken gropes in his pocket for his phone, and it shoots out of his grasp, hitting the floor with a clatter. When he bends down to pick it up, it's like he is trying to take hold of water. You watch for an Earth-minute as he struggles to keep it from slipping through his fingers, and the next time it falls you catch it and pass him back to him, whispering, "It's okay. You've got this."

He darts a grateful look to you and lifts the phone to his ear, the buttons rattling when he presses them. A moment later, you hear a woman's voice, a voice that is formed from irreverence and regality fitting together more smoothly than they should, the way Pearl and Amethyst mix to create Opal:

"Well, Dr. D., what's the damage?"

Drakken makes a noise as if he has been pinched, and you realize he is trying to clean out his throat before he tells her. "She said yes," he says.

Shego does not pause; she takes no time to examine the news or let it seep into her before she cries, "YES!" It is the call of a crow rather than a shorebird, but it is the clearest exhibition of delight you have heard from Shego in the time you have known her.

The rest of the conversation you let them have in peace.

By the time Drakken hangs up and closes his phone, there are tears dewing in Mama Lipsky's eyes. "This is just such a dream come true," she says, dabbing at her eyes with a piece of pink cloth. "My little Drewbie, finally ready to bloom!"

As if they have been anticipating those words, a full ring of petals sprouts around Drakken's head.

You laugh into the palm of your hand. Drakken folds his arms and attempts to scowl.

He does not succeed. An instant later, he bursts into a grin that makes soft folds of his cheeks, his mouth so wide that its corners almost seem to breach the borders of his face. His eyes are more vibrant than you were Taught to believe anything native to a planet like Earth can be.

Mama Lipsky continues to bob in place, her hands clinging together and then dragging apart the way her son's do when his world overwhelms him. "This is the happiest I have been since I don't know when!" she says. "I hope you two know that – how happy you've made me…Ohhh, I think I need to go bake a cake!"

You frown. "Already? Won't it go bad before the wedding? I mean, we're probably not going to be ready for weeks –"

"Months," Drakken adds.

Mama Lipsky smiles at both of you, much the same smile you used to see Pink Diamond give to Pebbles. "No, not a wedding cake, sillies. I'll save that for the professionals," she says, although you do not see how anyone could be better equipped than she for the task. "No, this is a just-for-fun cake. Just for the three of us."

"All right," you say, smiling back at her. The taste of cake is sometimes still too indelicate for you, the sugar Drakken loves so much lying heavy on your manufactured taste buds, but if it is a token of Mama Lipsky's affection, you will find a way to eat it.

Her cake turns out to be more tolerable than you expected, sweet but not thick, easy to swallow. As you and Dr. Drakken chew, he starts to ponder aloud the details of the wedding – the "deets," he calls them; it is a term he learned from Kim, and you suspect it flows more smoothly from her than it does from him. Mama Lipsky flits around the room, pausing every few minutes to play with Drakken's cheeks, pulling them outward and wadding them beneath his eyes again, as though they are as soft as wet sand or rubber. Drakken grunts and growls and tries to shake her off, but his irritation seems thinner than usual.

He talks and you respond when needed until the sun's light has long since left the horizon, until even Drakken's active voice begins to fade and his head tips forward, smacking lightly against the tabletop. A sigh blows from him like wind tangling through leaves.

"Drakken?" you say quietly. You have learned what sleep looks like, but stillness is so unnatural a state to him that something always appears amiss when he enters it.

His mother takes a more direct approach: she bustles around on the other side of him and gives him a stern nudge with her elbow. "Honey, pay attention to your fiancée!" she says.

Drakken stirs, shifting his face away from her. "Sorry, not right now, Dr. Director," he murmurs. "I'm getting married tomorrow."

You laugh; you know he is not awake yet. With a raindrop's touch, you reach out and place the slimmest peak of your finger against his unmarked cheek to see if it really is as soft as Mama Lipsky's pinches would suggest. It is, but not like wet sand nor like rubber – your fingertip does not leave an imprint behind.

It is soft with something else altogether, something sensitive yet not quiet, something fragile yet not weak.

Drakken's eyes flick open, and the alarm in them calms when they settle on your face. "Oh. Lapis. Hi." He yawns into his sleeve, still stained with ice cream. "You know, I just had the most wonderful dream about you…"

You giggle and slide your hand over his on the tabletop. "Was it that you asked me to marry you?"

"Yes! And you said…" Drakken trails off as he glances down at your joined hands, at the ring on your finger. "Wait a minute…You mean I…?"

"Yup," you say.

"And you…?"

"Yup."

Starlight suffuses Drakken's face. "Booyah!"

"We were talking about plans for our wedding, but then you fell asleep in mid-sentence," you tell him.

"Oh. Yes. Yes, I suppose I did." Drakken blinks at you, and while his eyes are as vibrant as before, you can see the effort it requires to hold them open.

"So we can talk about the rest of the deets tomorrow. Or…whenever," you say.

Drakken nods, nipping his lower lip. "You sure you don't mind?"

"No," you say with a laugh. "Why would I? It's a lot easier to talk to you when you're awake. Although you do say fun stuff in your sleep."

"You go home and get a good night's sleep, Drewbie." Mama Lipsky pats her son's arm. "Lapis and I will be ready to help you figure everything out in the morning."

Drakken nods again and rubs one eye with a curled fist.

You part the hair that hangs over your forehead and tap your finger against the skin it reveals. "I'll take a kiss before you go, though," you say.

At first Drakken appears confused, but when you tap your forehead again, a grin pleats the movable cheeks. He bends down, smelling of anxious sweat and the chocolate ice cream he prefers and the petals that must have crept out again when he was not looking, and his mouth skims the space between your eyebrows. It does not feel any different now that you are engaged, and the realization is an encouragement, not a disappointment.

"I love you," you say.

Drakken slaps his hands together and stretches his arms to their full length, until his shoulders cant toward his ears, as though he is trying to shapeshift a body large enough to hold everything he feels now. It does not work; you can see the saturation pressing against his eyes, wet in the lights, ready to overflow. "I love you, too," he says. The lump in his throat strains, and his voice lapses into uncertainty. "See you tomorrow? To talk more about the…wedding?"

"See you tomorrow."

You reach out and give his hand another squeeze, your fingerprints against his, and then you walk with him back to his hovercraft. After he steers it into the sky, you veer away and fly for the warp pad. As the warp pad breaks the light of your body apart and reassembles you, you feel something similar happening inside you: a gathering, a rushing-forward of your essence, your powers aggregating at the top of your backbone. It is as it was when your wings first found air, as it was when you would orient yourself on an alien planet by identifying the nearest water source, and yet this sensation is stronger and far more expansive than the scope of your powers.

They are no longer the only thing that is true about you.

Before your return to Little Homeworld, you stop on the beach and shapeshift your shoes away so that your toes can plunge into the night's cooled sand. You turn and face the ocean, and through your timeless, indelible bond, you tell it and it understands.

The tide races inward to swirl at your feet, its liquid tendrils rising and roiling, forming hollow spouts around each of your ankles. You feel the water slide over your skin and realize you have given it no command. This is not an act of deference, but of celebration.

"I know," you whisper. "It's going to be great."

The ocean rears up to give you a playful splash, dampening the legs of your pants. You pretend to swat at it, and even as it scampers back to its banks, you can feel the lightness in its familiar refrain, the higher gentler notes that let you know that you have brightened its journey rising and falling across the sand. It laughs with you, you know.

For a moment you stand motionless, letting its song seep into the hollows of you that would host organs if you were a human. Deep within your gem, something seems to move, stirring as Dr. Drakken stirred in his sleep, so slight as to be nearly imperceptible.

You graze the remaining foam with the bottoms of your feet and start back up the shoreline, nodding farewell to the waves. They chant your name against the sand– Lap-is, Lap-is – and the sound follows you all the way to your house.


That night, you dream of Earth and of Homeworld, of the barn and of the house where you now live. A piece of you realizes that in your dreams the planets and buildings with which you are so familiar become Off-Colors: often shaped or shaded incorrectly with warped edges and smeared colors, yet anchored to their identities as if by a gemstone through which everything else is projected. You run alongside the ocean as it gurgles, both of you free to play now, no longer chained but forever linked.

When your eyes open, the night still rests heavily outside your window and wraps your room, and you are unsure why you have awakened. You straighten your limbs as the banana hammock wobbles and peer at your legs, your pant legs glossy in the silver lines of light reflected by the moon. Around you, all is motionless except for the trickling water in your miniature fountain, and it would warn you if there were cause for alarm. You run one finger down the silken side of the pouch that cradles your body and feel around for Plastic Lazuli Hope, intending to roll over and fall back asleep.

That is when you hear the sound.

It is a forlorn noise that tries to be less than what it is, the wailing muffled and the exhalations grabbed and pushed back before they can truly come loose, and though you hear the thin sharp cries, it does not sound to you like a shorebird at all. It sounds like a friend in distress.

You swing yourself to the ground and walk across the room, your feet quiet on the floorboards. The bedroom door is almost as silent as you swish it open and pad out into the short hall that holds your room and the bathroom parallel to one another. At its end, around the back of its last curve, a small dark figure sits huddled against the living room wall. It has to be Peridot, though it takes you a moment to sort her form in the moon's light. She is crumpled nearly in half, the distinct triangular shadow of her head scarcely above the sharp summits of her knees.

Her shoulders heave back and forth like ships pitched about in a storm. She is crying.

A sudden cold arcs over your back and burns the center of your gem. It is common for Peridot to get upset yet rare for her to be truly unhappy, and though it feels like it has been a long time since you have last seen her cry you know it hasn't been, not even by Earth's standards. The thought disinters the memories you have buried since Steven came back to himself.

You step toward her, slipping between the couch and the wall. "Peri? What's wrong? Did something happen to Steven?"

"Oh. No. I'm sorry to have disturbed you, Lapis," Peridot says, her voice as brittle as slate. "Everything is fine."

Your hands drop to your hips. "That's my line. Try again."

"But that's the thing! Everything is fine! Steven is not in danger! No one is in danger!" The silver light drifts closer to Peridot, and you watch as she sets her face, attempts to brace it up. "I'm simply having an emotional malfunction."

Her words catch on a sob, and the laugh that was forming in your throat sinks to a place beyond recovery.

"How come?" You sit down across from her and reach through the storm to touch her shoulder. "You seemed really happy earlier this evening."

"I was really happy earlier this evening!" Light glints off Peridot's visor, and you can imagine her eyes streaked red beneath it. "You have to understand: I was so greatly gladdened that you and Dr. Drakken are now to be officially and eternally bonded!"

You wait, saying nothing. There is more she needs to say; she will say it when she is ready.

"And then just now, it occurred to me…everything is going to change," Peridot says after several seconds of emptiness. "You and Drakken are going to move in together, and this house is way too big for Pumpkin and me to occupy by ourselves!" At the sound of her name, a round dark shape scuttles across the floor and comes to sit, whimpering, at Peridot's feet; Peridot rubs her head absently. "And what about your room? It's such a cool room, and it was built just for you. It shouldn't be empty!"

She begins to shake under your hand. You close your eyes and there she is, the most unexpected companion on your Earthbound journey: Peridot contacting Dr. Drakken when you returned from the boat with Jasper's fingers seared on your skin; Peridot pestering you to play with her and water the crops she thought would arise to become her army; Peridot sprawled out beside you on the barn floor as you sat in your bag-of-beans chair and read.

"Peridot, it's gonna be okay," you say. "There's a lot of stuff Drakken and I haven't worked out yet, but we've been talking about where to live. We're thinking we'll go back and forth from Middleton to Little Homeworld. After all, I love…my room, too. I wouldn't want to leave it behind."

You glance down at her to see if she grasps your meaning.

She doesn't. "But what about us?" she says. "What will become of those games we love to play? Our Camp Pining Hearts marathons? Our collaborative sessions of literary enjoyment?"

That is far too fancy a name for you reading her stories, but this time you have no urge to laugh. You smile at her instead. "We'll still have time to do all that stuff."

"But just us or with Drakken around all the time?" Peridot says. "You know I hold him in a very high regard, of course, but the dynamic when it's just us –" she gestures to herself, to you, and to Pumpkin – "is just…it's like Camp Pining Hearts Season Three. It's my very favorite! And I don't want it to turn into Season Four, because that season was awful!"

"Um, yeah, we'll have time for just us," you say. "There are gonna be a lot of days when Drakken has to work, and I don't think they'd really want to let an alien civilian lady into their top-secret government labs. We can hang out then, just like always."

Peridot looks at you, and even in the shadows you can see how wide and damp her eyes are. "You are certain of this?"

You shrug. "As certain as I can be of anything."

"Because things are going to be so different after you marry Drakken," Peridot continues, almost as though you have not spoken. Her fingers roll together without forming fists. "And when things change, relationships change. And I have consumed enough media entertainment to know that friends can stop being friends."

You stand up, a sweet ache ringing the outline of your gem at the sight of her, tiny and earnest in the darkness. You think of the words that washed through your mind earlier, the ones that bind humans to their families, and one of them rises to you as if it has simply been waiting for you to call.

"Yeah, but…" you say slowly, "sisters can't stop being sisters."

Peridot sniffles. "How is that relevant?"

You place your hand on her yellow tower of hair and give it a gentle shove. "'Cause we're sisters, you clod."

Peridot lets out a shriek, and then her arms are around you, her nose marking your skin in the same place where Steven's and Lisa's gems lie. She falls against you, laughing and crying and babbling; it is exhausting just to listen to her, to envision the rapid movements of her lips. Pumpkin circles the two of you, yapping and nudging your legs.

Eventually, you give Peridot a squeeze and release her. She watches you with as much wonder as she did when you crafted a giant liquid hand from the barn's lake and used it to punch the Rubies' ship into the ground – the first time you protected her.

"I'm gonna go try to get a little more sleep," you say. You take a step toward your room and add over your shoulder, "You can come and sit in my room if you want to."

The dimmed moonlight is all you need to see the smile that comes over Peridot's face. She hefts Pumpkin up with one arm, tucks her tablet under the other, and follows you. You know she will take up position at the base of the bed, just as she would at the foot of the couch in Mama Lipsky's living room, and she does, she and Drakken and Steven flitting in and out of your dreams until the sun comes up again.