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.

67. Countdown

~Happy New Year, everyone. We're getting so close! :D

I know I probably forgot to reply to a few reviews over the holidays, so I'll work on getting caught up in the next few weeks. Thanks for your patience.

...and please don't hate me for the end. D:~

T-minus one week.

T-minus one week!

Dr. Drakken takes a moment to swipe the nervous moisture from his hands before he redons his black gloves. His shoulders wiggle gratefully, if not entirely gracefully, glad to be back in his lab coat. He just tried on his tux – not for the first time, of course; it arrived weeks ago. But when he'd first put it on, the seams had been stern and uncompromising against his body, like they were mad at him, like they were just daring him to release a single drop of his tacky-in-every-sense-of-the-word sweat onto their finery. Mother said all fancy clothes feel that way at first and then get more comfortable eventually – only how is "eventually" supposed to happen when he's only going to wear it once in his lifetime? So he's started breaking it in by spending a few minutes in it every third day…or whenever he remembers to. He's excited to wear it because of what it signifies, and that soothes, if not every places it itches, at least many of the more bothersome ones.

When he tried it on the first time, Drakken had made the mistake of looking at the model in the photo stamped on the box. That fellow and Drakken had looked about as different as two human men wearing the same outfit possibly could. But that fellow isn't marrying Lapis, so…his loss.

Speaking of the wedding…

Drakken gropes around in his pocket, his fingers catching on what's lived there for the past month or two: a piece of paper, folded in half, crinkly like a potato chip from the many times it's gone through the washer and dryer, its letters thick and emphatic because his muscles clench tighter every time he has to rewrite them. Most of them have checkmarks beside them by now, but it never hurts to check one's checks.

Tux is at the top. No problem there. It's well on its way to being broken in.

Below that is Catering. That's been taken care of as well. Kim Possible's husband has assured them the cake is almost done. Drakken is personally a little surprised that the buffoonish young man has managed to bake and assemble an entire wedding cake without falling into it and ruining it (though he hasn't said so, as it would kind of go against the positivity-and-unity vibes they've been striving for). And the rest is also ready to go. Little trays of fruit with cheese and chocolate dips. Something called "Bundt cakes," which must be a newish recipe Drakken hasn't heard of yet, but they're not cupcakes and that's all that really matters in the end. Finger sandwiches.

Drakken chuckles to himself as he remembers the look of horror on Peridot's face when he first relayed that term to her. "Finger sandwiches?" she said, sounding like one was caught in her throat. "You're going to…eat another being's touch stumps?"

Lapis was savvy enough to shake her head, but she still looked at Drakken for the full explanation. He will admit he puffed himself out a little as he told her that finger sandwiches weren't made of fingers – they were made for fingers, to be lifted and transferred to the mouth easily.

Peridot blinked at him from behind her star-shaped visor and then nodded as if that were the answer she'd been expecting all along. "Yes. That is much less disturbing."

What a sister-in-law he's getting.

Below that is Ask Shego. He's managed that, too. While everyone else has already accepted their roles in the upcoming nuptials – Drakken likes to say that sometimes because it sounds more intellectual than "wedding" and doesn't make his palms sweat as hard – he'd held off a while with her, because there's no good way to ask your female friend to play your best man.

"You really know how to flatter a girl, Dr. D," had been her reply.

Her eyes went narrow, and though it looked more like thinking-narrow than about-to-pounce-narrow, he hastily followed it up with, "I mean, not that you're a man, of course. You're a woman, obviously, and you're very good at being a woman! I mean, not that you have to live up to some standard, but no one could mistake you for a man…"

Drakken had heard his pitch growing higher and felt his skin growing splotchier, and Shego finally held up her hand and agreed to do it for his blood pressure's sake. Her words, not his.

"We can call you the 'best person' instead," he told her. "I just want you to be the best person because you're my best friend, right?"

"Hmm. Maybe you do know how to flatter a girl." Shego snickered, but something flashed across her paleness that she only lets come out on very special occasions…and, as far as Drakken knows, that she's only really shown to him.

Talk about flattering.

Shego recovered, of course, by the time Peridot showed up in her little yellow sundress, looking every bit like a kid in one of those children's boutique catalogues – well, maybe a children's boutique from Mars. She twirled and twirled while Drakken made the appropriate "oohs" and "aahs" of the rightfully impressed.

"Will Drakken have a wedding dress, too?" Peridot asked when she came to a stop.

Shego wrinkled her nose and didn't miss a beat. "Eww, no. He doesn't have the legs for it."

"Yes, I do!" Drakken shot back, and then realized he had acted on pure instinct. "Wait…what am I arguing?"

"He's going to wear a tux, Peridot," Lapis told her little friend. "You know, like the suit Steven's getting."

"Steven already has a 'suit,'" Peridot said, her eyes squinted, almost suspicious.

"Yeah, but in case you haven't noticed, he's like twice as big now," Lapis said.

Peridot nodded slowly. "Ohhh. And his appearance modifiers can't stretch with him."

Lapis and Drakken exchanged an eye-roll that felt like a kiss, only better.

Wedding registry is next on the list. That nice kid Wade helped him get that set up and then Peridot gave the Gems of Little Homeworld a crash course as to how to order things online. (That's going to be interesting on a number of levels.) Since Drakken already has most of the things necessary for home life and since Lapis isn't going to require much, physically speaking, most of the items on the registry are things Mother thought would be "sweet" for them to have, like matching Her-and-Him towels. Or they're things Drakken just thought would be cool, like the salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like Spider-Man and Electro in battle. Shego had about collapsed in half laughing when she read it, but Drakken was only two percent offended, because Lapis was there too, grinning, that sweet pixie-smile that always enchants him so.

Then there's Invitations. Those have been sent out, and most RSVP'd to. Eddy's one of the groomsmen, of course – on his best behavior, or else – and his parents are coming as well, an aunt and uncle Drakken hasn't seen in decades and hopes he'll be able to recognize in the days to come. Just in case they don't recognize him, he left a note on the bottom of their invitation that read, By the way, I have blue skin now, but medically I am fine, in his neatest handwriting with Lapis at his elbow to check for spelling.

A surprising number of his fellow former supervillains – or former fellow supervillains – are coming, as well. Obviously, there's the Seniors, Senior in the honored position of father of the groom and Junior…elsewhere. (Drakken hasn't really memorized the seating arrangements. Pearl's been working on those.) But Duff Killigan and Professor Dementor have agreed to come, as has DNAmy, whom he invited mainly to show there are no hard feelings. Well – there are, but "hard" as in "difficult" rather than "hateful." He hopes she finds a good match for herself one day. Or a good psychiatrist.

Vows comes next. Drakken has already finished those and hidden them away in his underwear drawer for safekeeping. It occurs to him now that he should probably get someone to spell-check those, too – the vows, that is. Not Lapis, obviously, because that would give away the surprise, and he would rather not let Shego run her red teacher-pen over his declarations of love (she has yet to learn how to wield it gently). Maybe Pearl. Or Steven, while he's still here.

Oh. Yes. Steven will be leaving after the wedding.

Drakken still can't quite get that reality to sink into his brain, mostly because it just clashes so much with the rest of the décor in there these days. Lapis told him about it two months ago, and she'd cried when she'd told him. He's only seen her cry a few times and it always makes him want to put his fist through a wall – or through the face of whoever made her cry, only that's clearly not an option this time because Steven.

Steven who needs something in his life to change before he cashes in his decency chips and becomes a supervillain. Drakken knows the signs well. (Although the transforming-into-a-hundred-foot-monster bit is new to him.)

Anyway. Getting someone to spell-check his vows. They have to be their best, and not because Drakken wants everyone to hear them and marvel at how well he expressed himself – well, he does, a little, but more than that he wants Lapis to hear them and understand how very loved she is.

Rings is inked underneath that. Drakken tap-dances his fingers across the itsy-bitsy box on top of his dresser, where Lapis's present awaits her finger. His mother's ring, which she happily handed over to him. Sometime in the last thirty-some years, she stopped wearing it, and he never noticed.

The ring puts a bittersweet knot in Drakken's throat – sweet because of his mother and bitter because of the man who gave it to her. The man who lurks at the edges of Drakken's thoughts like a computer virus just waiting for a certain program to launch so it can warp its code and ruin it.

Or something like that.

Drakken swallows the memory with more force than it takes to get down a vitamin pill and gazes at his own gloved hands. When he showed Lapis his mother's ring, she showed him the one she got for him – forged by Bismuth's expert hands (which Drakken still has some trouble not picturing plunging into Lapis's gut, but he's getting there) and filled with soil from Homeworld. It looked even dustier and duller than the soil down here, but he told her it was beautiful, and he wasn't lying.

He remembers the awe in her voice when she first spoke to him about Homeworld, the wisps of sadness that flick in and out of her eyes even now when she talks about it. She wanted him to have something from the place where she was made. It makes Drakken feel important in a way he always thought he would need nations salaaming at his feet to achieve.

The vines spring from his neck as if in anticipation of the next item on his list: Flowers. The one he is presently on his way to address.

Drakken gives Commodore Puddles a few scoops of food and makes sure the cactus monsters are okay with him leaving and then walks out to the hovercraft. Well, he skips out. The ability to maintain a casual stride is diminishing at a direct inverse ration to the proximity of his wedding date.

For months now, he's been hovering – hopefully not too creepily – at every florist's within the area, consulting with the friendly flora that live in his neck on their favorite. They tingled with disapproval at ones where the bouquets were jammed together like sardines, or had been watered so often their leaves were soggy, or whose brightness reminded him of someone wearing a lot of makeup to cover a bad night's sleep. They finally gave a thumb's-up – well, you know, figuratively – to a market in crumbly little Lowerton, of all places.

Drakken clicks the hovercraft's force field into place after he climbs out and lets his skipping feet carry him to the flower counter, where he addresses a youngish guy with an earring, who immediately struggles against a double-take. It's automatic, not rude, but Drakken still wishes for a moment that he were back in Beach City, among a bunch of Gems who have seen far stranger sights than him.

"How can I help you?" the earring guy says.

"I would like to order some flowers!" Drakken says in his most polite voice. The vines and the petals all leap forth at once.

They think they're so clever.

The earring guy doesn't cover his double-take that time. "…the heck?" he mutters.

"No, you're not on Candid Camera," Drakken says, still pleasant, still smiling. "I really do need some flowers. That aren't attached to my body."

The man's expression changes, lifts a little. "Hey – aren't you that plant guy who saved the world?"

Hmm. If that's how he goes down in the history books, Drakken thinks, he would be satisfied. Although he does hope they at least spell his name right – in two years' copies of Jack Hench's villain directory, he was listed as "Draken." Probably an intentional slight on Hench's part as payback for the number of times Drakken had outsourced (all right, stolen) from him.

But that's not a path he needs to walk down right now.

"Yes, indeed," Drakken says, standing just that smidgen straighter. "It is I – Dr. Drakken!"

The man replies, "Cool," which Drakken's ego just about slurps up with a straw, and then adds, "So what do you need other flowers for?"

"I'm getting married next week," Drakken says, and only the hint of a squeal slips through.

The man nods. "That green chick I saw you with on the news?"

Drakken's face goes hot, every blood vessel in his cheeks groaning with, Ugh. This again.

"No!" Drakken says pointedly – and then realizes that this fellow hasn't done anything to insult him, not really, and he should stop acting like he has. It's a hard notion to let go of, but he conjures up a picture of Lapis, her bangs hanging shyly down to her eyebrows, and all his thoughts reorganize themselves so he can smile. "My fiancée is an alien herself, actually. Not the kind that invades Earth, though – the kind who defends it."

All right, so that's not quite the whole story, but he is summarizing the updated and revised edition of Lapis Lazuli. What point is there in recounting the earlier misprints?

The guy smiles back, and all that's behind it is mild confusion, nothing dangerous at all. "Wow. Well, congrats, bro."

He's a bit too old to be a teenager, but Drakken recognizes youthful slang when he hears it and feels himself warming to it. "Thanks, my homie." He holds out his palm, which the young man taps with more bewilderment than enthusiasm – still, it's much better than nothing.

Drakken spends another fifteen minutes moving from flower to flower like a honeybee, getting chided once when he tries to scoop a bouquet into his arms because apparently he's just supposed to point to the ones he likes and they'll add them to the budget. No simple task considering he'd buy them all if he could, if he couldn't imagine Shego's face narrowing into an ax shape when the entire contents of the floral shop got shipped to the beach. As it is, he selects only the ones that make the plants that are part of him practically turn somersaults.

They still feel strange inside him sometimes, like somewhere beneath the flesh and muscle and bone he knows all too well he's discovered a trapdoor into a secret chamber that was never there before. There are moments when he trips over the trapdoor and stumbles, but he loves that secret chamber as much as he's ever loved any lab – because of it, he saved the world, and his nightmares are things he can wake up from now.

Drakken gives the man the time and date and location of the wedding. Nods along as the man tells him that they'll deliver the flowers early so that people won't have to scramble to lay them out an hour or two before the wedding, but not too early or they'll wilt. Tries to appear fully engaged, and it's not entirely a lie, even though he suspects his vines are listening more closely than he is.

The total that flashes on the screen isn't as exorbitant as Drakken had dreaded, and he's been keeping tabs to ensure that his once-anemic bank account is strong enough to handle some withdrawals. Nevertheless, his hands are clammy as he reaches into his wallet and pulls out his credit card, pinching it carefully, half-expecting it to lunge out of his grip and purchase an entire greenhouse without his permission.

It doesn't, of course – that's just an elaborate analogy constructed to downplay his culpability in his financial fiascos of the past. It stays perfectly still as he wedges it into the slit on the screen, chip-side-up on the first try. He still feels nervous holding it, though, the way it demands his every movement be carried out with a degree of responsibility even unfamiliarer than his powers.

More unfamiliar. Less familiar. He doesn't know, doesn't care.

Relief whooshes through Drakken when the terminal politely instructs him to remove his card, and he does, more than ready to return it to the depths of his wallet. He waves goodbye to the man behind the counter and skips – he truly cannot help skipping wherever he goes – back outside.

Sunshine streams over him, and Drakken's flowers revel in it, greedy to have their fill before fall comes along. In a few days, it'll be September – and a few days after that will be the wedding.

The wedding.

His wedding.

As stunning as the thought is, he can't say (not in honesty, at least) that it doesn't feel real. It is real, very, very, very real. It's wired into every part of his body, fueling him.

Amethyst shows up a few hours later on the Middleton warp pad to collect him. To Drakken's surprise, she has her hair tied on top of her head in a ponytail, and it stacks up almost neatly. She grins when she sees his eyes widen. "Like my wedding 'do?" she says.

"I do," Drakken says, the two words nearly setting the surface of his tongue on fire, even though he's saying them in a totally different context than he'll be saying them a week from now. And he does like it. He also likes the look on her face – light and playful the way Amethyst always looks unless someone's in severe danger, but beneath that lies something a little gentler, a little more grounded. This wedding isn't a joke to her.

She grabs his hand and hoists him onto the warp pad beside her with embarrassingly little effort. A full-body tingle shoots through Drakken as she thrusts out her arms, and the hand holding his transforms into a purple streak of light. A too-close, distorted version of the cosmos most humans will never see rushes toward him but, just like every other time, they are there and gone before Drakken can study them, leaving him blinking in Steven's house as his internal organs fall back into their correct places.

He doesn't stay in shock long, though. These days, there's one instinct inside him, and it says, Go-go-go-go-go-go, GO, and he listens.

Drakken bolts across the room, through the door, and down Steven's deck steps. His feet do an impressive job of not tangling together in front of him, not sending him face-first down the flight, and he starts to think he's home free when his toe catches on the second-from-the-bottom stair. Before he can pitch too far forward, Amethyst catches him with a grin that offsets the sting of her snicker.

"Thank you," Drakken tells Amethyst, and those two words tumble out of his mouth like a pair of puppies, underused but eager. "I mean, for catching me. But also for – for being Lapis's bridesmaid and everything."

"Dude, of course," Amethyst says. "This is the most fun thing that's happened in a long time." Her voice dips down to a husky whisper. "And I think it's been really good for Steven, too."

Amethyst glances over one shoulder, tucked into a stretch of fabric that gathers compactly at the tops of her arms and descends into medium-length, classy-but-frill-free sleeves. What she wears beneath that branches in two like a pair of shorts, something easily hidden when she swings a short layer of flippy material forward so that, for all intents and purposes, she's wearing a dress. He's seen those before in some of Shego's Club Banana catalogues, though he can't quite remember what they're called. Sporks?

One glance at how the beach before him has been transformed, though, and Drakken forgets all about sporks and shorts and who's wearing what.

Okay, so it hasn't transformed in the strictest sense of the term – it's still a beach and recognizable as such, with its summer-bleached sand and clumps of dune grass and Lapis's ocean at its end. But when Drakken looks at it, he also sees the big wooden podium-stage that Greg always assembles for on-the-beach concerts and then takes apart when they're over, positioned in the almost-perfect center of the beach, the banner the meemorp class stenciled spreading like a smile from one end of the archway to the other. Chairs sit in organized rows, split cleanly down the middle forming a sand-lined walkway that appears to have been fussed over with measuring tape and a keen knowledge of proportions – Pearl's work, no doubt. Nice chairs, too, the kind with cushioned seats and lumbar-supporting backs, which Drakken appreciates even after it occurs to him that he won't be sitting on any of them for long. He'll be standing in the front, at the microphone stand that'll take the place of the altar, trying not to spring up and down like he's on a pogo stick.

Then again, maybe he'll go ahead and embrace the pogo stick imitation, because he can't imagine Lapis minding. It takes a lot to perturb her, which is one of about twenty quadrillion things Drakken loves about her.

It takes a moment to find her in the activity in front of him, as Garnet runs wires into the speakers on either side of the stage and turns to give Greg a thumbs-up, as Peridot juggles three metal urns meant to hold flowers at once, as Bismuth surveys the scene with her hands boxed into a camera shape by her face. But Drakken's eyes don't stop until they find her, Lapis with her messy bob and her skin just a few shades bluer than the ocean. She stands toward the edge of the group, somewhat distanced but still clearly included, Pumpkin in her arms, both their heads tilted toward her pint-sized green friend as Peridot's pinched-nose chatter shoves through the air in all directions.

The excitement that jitters in his veins like caffeine affects her in a different way, he knows, burrowing deep and private inside her. Even now her posture is so still, her expression so calm that any bystander would think she was as blasé about this as Shego. They'd be wrong, though. Drakken can imagine all the itty-bitty little touches unique to her, even if he isn't close enough to see them yet – the subtlest of upward hooks at the corner of her mouth, the easy lift of her chin toward the sky and the water, the relaxed lines of her skinny neck, the nonchalant droopy-eyed look so that nobody but her best friends can see how warm and vulnerable her gaze really is these days.

Drakken realizes with a start that he is incredibly glad to be one of those best friends – that it might, in its own way, be even more of a privilege than being her fiancé.

He clears his throat to herald his presence. The sound comes out a few keys higher than he would prefer, but with Lapis it doesn't matter.

"Hey, Drakken," she says, all soft and casual because she's Lapis, and she gives him a sideways hug with the arm that isn't holding her plant-pet. The top of her head barely grazes the bottom of his underbite, and he wonders – again – how you can want with everything in you to protect someone even after you've watched her rip the sea in half and tie chains around people who by all accounts should be seventeen times stronger than she is.

"Hello, Lapis. How are things coming along? You know, for our wedding?" Drakken reaches for a distinguished, Senior-like quality and almost achieves it, until that last word kind of turns into confetti and scatters everywhere.

Lapis does smile at him then, one of those special tiny-toothed smiles that always makes him feel light and floaty, as if there's helium in his chest instead of oxygen. (Which there isn't, of course, because then he would be asphyxiating, and he's certainly not feeling that.) "We're right on schedule, I think."

Peridot bobs her head without looking up from her tablet. "Currently, we are seventy-nine-point-eight percent prepared. If we continue on this trajectory, we should reach completion a full day before the actual event."

"Wow," Lapis says, her eyes exaggeratedly wide. "I am so glad to know that." She turns to Drakken. "Aren't you glad to know that?"

Drakken nods and can't hold back a grin. He'd never known there was such a thing as cruelty-free sarcasm before he met her.

"How's the tux coming?" Lapis runs a hand down one of the ridges adjacent to Pumpkin's stem.

For a moment, Drakken can feel the starched cut of the shoulders forcing his back to straighten, first exacerbating the tangled kinks of pain in his back and then ironing them out. He shrugs the feeling away. "Still kind of stiff, but it's getting better. I bet I'll have it broken in by the big day."

And if he doesn't, he tells himself, there are much worse things that can happen to someone. Things he doesn't need to think about right now.

Drakken shakes his head to kick out any lingering prison-thoughts and roots around in his pocket for his list. He can feel his throat working around the words as he mumbles his way down the line of tasks. Tux, Catering, Ask Shego, Wedding registry, Invitations, Rings, Vows, Flowers.

And there, right before the paper ends, an ink stain. Possibly a blot put down by nervous-wiggly hands, possibly a word that he forgot to copy over. The roof of Drakken's mouth burns dry. Is there something he's forgotten? He hate-hate-hates knowing there must be something he's forgotten…

Drakken's eyes go into full-fledged darting mode, leaping from his two favorite Gems in front of him to the gaggle of other lesser-known Gems milling around the chairs with Greg up on the stage, chatting with Steven and leaning against one of his…his surround-sound speakers. Or stereo. The exact designation doesn't matter.

An awful realization cartwheels through Drakken's mind and then drops into his stomach with a jerk.

He remembers what he forgot.

"Oh, snap!" Drakken bursts out. He searches himself, hoping some more words will be forthcoming, but they've hunkered down in the folds of his brain for the foreseeable future. Before he can try to coax any of them out with a good quadratic equation, his quad muscles take over and run him forward, and then he's across the sand and on the stage, tripping over an extension cord and narrowly avoiding a collision with the ground thanks to ninja-like reflexes.

(Well, not his reflexes. Garnet catches him and pushes him back upright like she's operating a construction crane, but the important thing is that he doesn't have a bloody nose.)

"Drakken?" Lapis lands beside him and folds her wings back into her gem like a penknife. (Probably not the most romantic of comparisons, Drakken will admit, but it awe-strikes him every time he witnesses it.) She sets Peridot and Pumpkin down and blinks at him. "Is something wrong?" she asks, her face incredulous and absolutely unalarmed. Reason number eight thousand why he's so happy to be marrying her.

The words are free now, tumbling through him like a rockslide, and the first one to spill over his lips probably makes no sense whatsoever. "Singing!" he cries, and then he stops and tangles his fingers together in his ponytail until he can provide context. "I mean – music! I forgot the music! For the reception!"

"Do not fret, Dr. Drakken." Peridot pats his arm. "I have already taken care of that."

"You?" Drakken says, hoping his voice isn't too close of a match to Shego's when she doesn't believe a word he's saying. He never thought of Peridot as being particularly musically-inclined.

She nods and folds back the cover of her tablet, her fingers flying across the screen at a speed that would surely leave even Kim Possible's computer kid in the dust. "I generated an algorithm of human music from within the duration of the last hundred years and provided it with the working details of your relationship with Lapis. It created a 'playlist' for the two of you."

Drakken lets out a startled laugh and glances at Lapis. Her face is idling in neutral.

"Is that…acceptable?" Peridot says, and Drakken sees a rare current of uncertainty run behind her eyes. "Or is it too robotic?"

Drakken laughs again. Is she kidding? It's an ignorant turn of phrase, "robotic," presuming that all robots are cut from the same cloth, when everyone who has grown up on a steady diet of science fiction can tell you that every sentient robot has a different personality – from CP-30 who is basically Pearl with golden foil for skin, to R2-D2, every bit a metallic puppy. If Peridot is a robot, she's one of the nicest and most delightful robots he's ever met.

"It sounds perfect," Drakken says in all sincerity, and then remembers that he's part of a team. Of course, he's part of a team – everyone getting married is part of a team – and he trades a look with Lapis once more. "To me, at least. Lapis? You okay with that?"

"Okay by me," Lapis says, and Drakken is very glad she didn't say fine. It's never been a good day when Lapis says fine. She lifts her shoulders and lets them fall, but Drakken has seen her be blasé before, and that's not the vibe he's getting here. She simply seems peaceful, as if stress isn't grabbing for her with its pinchy little invisible hands.

Drakken hasn't quite made it there yet. He feels sweat break out on his hairline as he cries, "But who's going to play the music? Don't we need a – a DJ? I mean, ordinarily I would love to try my hand at DJing, because I think I could have a knack for it, but I'm going to be busy being the groom…"

"I took care of that part," Steven interrupts him. "One of my friends is literally studying to become a DJ."

"Your friend Extra Cheddar?" Drakken says.

"Sour Cream," Steven says with a giggle, and before Drakken can maintain that he at least knew it was a potato-chip flavor, he adds, "I called him, and he said of course he'd come back and do it."

Drakken momentarily believes himself to be back in the tuxedo, its collar squeezing at his throat. A kid whose name he can't even remember is going to do this – for him? No mind-control required? Drakken vaguely considers if he should perhaps be harder to impress than this, but he's had so many of these moments since his reformation – moments that knock the ego right out of him and bare its soft white underbelly, which is almost as vulnerable as his own skinny blue stomach.

Vulnerable. It's a strange word, a stranger concept. It reminds Drakken of one of those candies that start off with a sour pucker but then slide into sweetness if you can tolerate them for a minute or two.

"So!" Drakken gives his head another shake, clearing it as best he can. "Where are we in rehearsals today? Do we need the bridesmaids and groomsmen yet?"

Aside from Shego, the best non-man, he's chosen four groomsmen to walk with Lapis's four bridesmaids: Kim Possible's husband, Computer Kid, Agent Kane from Global Justice, and – reluctantly – Eddy. Drakken has paired him with Garnet because she won't take any guff from him, and because she'll probably only knock out one or two teeth if Eddy tries to hit on her.

Which he's already warned him against. "She's in a committed relationship," Drakken told his ape-like cousin, and Eddy nodded and thankfully didn't ask him who with. He would have had to answer "herself," and that would be a whole other journey.

"Nah. I'm still working on getting Pumpkin to carry my train," Lapis says, even though she's currently wearing her crop top and ribbon-belted pants, as un-frilly a bride as there ever was. "You can stay and watch, if you want."

Drakken frowns for a moment. When he considers watching Lapis make a pre-wedding aisle stroll, his mind shoots to the time when he was nine years old and was able to peek at his Christmas presents two weeks early while Mother was preoccupied with work. He remembers it all too clearly: the excitement, the thrill of defying convention, the release of the tension that clutched at his skin – followed almost immediately by the deflating, gone from too much tension to too little, the knowledge that the surprise was gone and he could never bring it back.

"I don't know," he says, kicking one heel against the stage. "I don't want to spoil anything."

"Totally fair." Lapis gives her Tinkerbell laugh. "Well, if you wanna stay, then stay. If you wanna get lost, then get lost."

How does she make even the words get lost sound so sweet?

She sprouts her wings again and flies back to the furthest row of chairs. Drakken stares after her. His insides are liquified, but not molten – another sensation he would have considered a paradox before she came into his life.

A thick little hand closes around his wrist, and Drakken leaps back to reality. Literally leaps, his boots leaving the stage. But it's no one scary, just Amethyst grinning up at him.

"You wanna go split an order of fries?" she asks.

Drakken glances around him, but no one else is looking her way. "Me?"

"Duh. You're practically the only one I can ask. Steven's not all that into junk food anymore." Amethyst wrinkles her wide nose playfully, but Drakken can see the sadness hiding in her eyes. "Being all responsible and crud."

"Oh." Drakken rocks up on his toes, his body loose and floppy, not sure where to go. "Can you be responsible and still like junk food?"

"Boy, I sure hope so," Amethyst says. She gives him a wink, a kind wink, and Drakken decides to take her up on the offer even before he remembers just how delicious the boardwalk fries are.

---

The rehearsal of Pumpkin's part must go well, because the next day, they receive the all-clear to bring in the maid of honor and the best non-man. Which means that Shego meets Drakken at the warp pad the next morning in the same pretty green dress she wore to his medal-ceremony at the UN. Of course she would wear it on the two biggest, most affirming days of his life, and the rightness of it all makes his nervous pieces not jiggle quite so hard.

Of course, calm doesn't stick around long these days, especially not once Amethyst comes to collect them and thrusts out her arms to activate the warp pad. Drakken is shoved toward the stars as she punches a hole into space, and the tunnel around him is bright and it's terrifying and it's terrific, and then it's gone, the breeze now briny in his nostrils. He stands there another second, letting the atmosphere resettle above him, and he can't believe he wasted any time being so entranced with Warmonga's array of extraterrestrial Doomsday devices when the Gems have had this all along.

Thoughts of Warmonga send Drakken's gaze pinballing to Shego as painful things stick in his throat. Now she is someone not easily impressed, and yet Drakken can't help but wonder if her first trip on a warp pad has dazzled her, maybe even dizzied her the way it did to him before Greg so helpfully pointed out the best place to let your eyes rest to ward off what was several notches above vertigo.

Shego doesn't look any greener than usual, but the cynic's tilt doesn't crouch around her lips like it normally does, and when Drakken informs her – perhaps a tad too giddily – that she's now one of only a handful of humans to have experienced warp travel, it takes her a record fourteen seconds before she responds with, "Oh, yeah. How did I ever live without that experience?"

He turns sideways so she can't see the smirk on his face and lay him flat on the sand for it.

That's when he catches a glimpse of Lapis somewhere between the rows of chairs and the podium where the pastor will stand. She's got her head hunched in conference with someone else whose identity should be immediately obvious to Drakken but somehow isn't – it's hiding in plain sight like one of those pictures in a puzzle-book. It takes him much longer than he would care to admit to remember who the maid of honor is.

Lisa.

Drakken tries looking at her, and then he tries not looking at her, and then he tries kind of halfway looking at her, and that seems to be his best bet. As long as he keeps her in his periphery he sees her similarities to Lapis and can convince himself he's seeing double, like maybe he just has another concussion and his vision is going wonky. But when he looks close enough to see the ways she differs from his girlfriend – the scraggly ponytail more like his own, the golden freckles scattered across her cheeks, the gem glaring so brazenly from her navel – other memories startle cycling through his head like a CD he can't eject. He sees her giggling as if Lapis had just performed a stand-up comedy routine instead of singing the single most beautiful song he'd ever heard; he sees her lashing out at Lapis, slapping at her with the ocean, and his veins start to pound.

It's an ugly, sick feeling, like having a fever with chills so that no temperature can feel comfortable. Drakken tries to scrunch the feeling up and push it away to someplace where it doesn't hurt so much, but it will not be scrunched or pushed. He knows she apologized to Lapis, and he knows she meant it, but he also can't ignore how feeble an apology, even a sincere one, sounds in light of what she did. . . what she almost did…

And he should know.

An unexpected, unwanted feeling creeps up on Drakken like a bug on his arm. He's been there, too, standing there with nothing but apologies to offer people he has immensely wronged, after realizing that all his reasons for wronging them were never any stronger than cheap wet napkins. For the first time, he truly understands what Kim Possible and her boyfriend – now husband – must have gone through when they decided to give him another chance, how much ruin and rubble they swept aside to allow room for something new to grow.

Literally grow, Drakken thinks with a wry smile, rubbing the spot on his neck where one of his most mischievous vines likes to appear. It – and the thought of oh my gosh, I'm marrying Lapis! – set his mood upright again.

Drakken takes several more gulps of oxygen and hurries after Shego, who has, of course, recovered and is now striding down the beach with everything on her cooperating.

Lapis looks up at him and smiles, and she looks so happy. Not that she seemed unhappy before, but something different happens when she sees him, any hint of aloofness dematerializing and a quiet sort of enthusiasm rising in her eyes so that it sparkles them the way the sun sparkles the ocean's waves. Amethyst told him on their fry-run yesterday that he was good for Lapis, and that's something Drakken will never get tired of hearing. (Well, okay, he'll never get tired of hearing any compliment, but that is one of his personal favorites.)

"Hi, Drakken," Lapis says. "Hey, Shego."

"Heya, Squirt," Shego replies. "Didn't know you had a twin."

The word clone rattles in Drakken's mind, but he controls himself admirably and doesn't say it.

Lisa takes one teeny step backward and casts a timid look over Shego – from the top of her ridiculously prolific hair to her…high heels. Great, she wore high heels. Now she'll be taller than him. He doesn't think she's trying to look intimidating, but she's Shego. She doesn't have to try.

"It's okay," she says to Lisa now. She flashes a sweet grin – sweet with a sharp edge to it. "I don't bite."

"That's true," Drakken concurs. "I've seen her do a lot of other things, but never bite."

Shego smothers her whole face with her hand. Drakken isn't sure if it's a groan or a laugh that she's trying to stifle, but with Lapis still standing there and shimmering like the ocean, he supposes it's not terribly relevant.

Lisa lets her own smile dawn. "Oh! You must be Shego. I'm Lisa. Well, that's what everyone around here calls me, anyway. I'm the maid of honor."

"Yeah, Lisa and I go way back." Lapis sets her hand on Lisa's forearm and glances up at Drakken, and in the midst of her shimmer he sees a punchline waiting. "We've known each other since Kindergarten."

Shego and Lisa exchange eyebrows-pointed-up looks as Lapis dissolves into flat-out laughter, giggling with one hand pressed to her side like the happiness already smarts. She never seems to mind whenever someone doesn't get one of her jokes. It's a quality Drakken envies about her.

"So – do the maid of honor and the best…whatever Shego is…walk down the aisle together?" Lisa says at last.

Drakken nods. "Arm in arm."

Lisa shrugs and loops her arm around Shego's, while Shego stares at Lisa's hand like she's trying to determine whether or not it could be carrying rabies. It looks so incredibly uncomfortable for both of them that the kinder half of him feels a little bad for linking them this way. But he won't lie – it's nice to see Shego not perfectly at ease for once.

She lifts the corner of her mouth at Lisa. "I gotta tell you right off – you're not my type."

Lisa shrugs and lets out a giggle that's almost familiar but higher and not as soft, as if someone has taken the register of Lapis's laugh and expanded it, not realizing that it's the wrong size now. "That's okay. I don't think you're mine, either. How do we look?"

She directs this last sentence at Lapis, who responds with typical candor, "Um…really awkward. But it'll probably be okay."

"Yes, we'll have flowers in a few days. Everything's less awkward with flowers," Drakken rushes to add before Shego can start rolling her eyes.

It must not be quick enough, because her eyes roll anyway. "Annnnd cue the petals," she mutters.

Drakken's hand jumps to his neck and, sure enough, at least two petals are poking their happy ways out trying to play Ring-Around-Drakken's-Face. He supposes Shego thinks she's making some sort of point, which deserves the grumble he delivers her but not much more. He thought at the time of his mutation that his flowers might be transforming him into something stronger and more monstrous, the kind of upgrade only the best villains earn at climactic moments.

Instead they set him free.

Drakken could stay inside that memory for a good long time. The way the ribbon swished around his neck and the medal thunked against his chest, snazzier than anything that had ever come in contact with him before. The roaring applause of the crowd like he was at karaoke night, only a thousand times more potent. The tears that drooled down his mother's face – joyous tears for once. He'd finally made her proud.

She'll be bawling at least that hard at the wedding in a few days, Drakken thinks. He envisions her propped daintily in a chair with her short legs stuck out in front of her like one of those white-faced dolls he can't touch without breaking, and then he envisions some big-lug Quartz plopping into the seat in front of her, blocking him from view, and he can't do that, not when Mother can finally see him and not his fabricated talk-show-doctor alter ego. Anxiety elbows its way into his mind, and his arms flail as he tries to run it off before it can bump all the other thoughts away, mosh-pit-style.

"Something wrong?" Amethyst asks.

"Seating arrangements!" Drakken uses so much effort to keep it from coming out a squeak that it comes out a growl instead, and he has to course-correct back to something resembling normalcy. "My mother, I mean! No one tall is going to be sitting in front of her, are they? And by 'tall,' I mean over five feet… I mean, she's been waiting for this moment since I graduated high school, and I can't have anyone blocking her now –"

Pearl flashes him a surprisingly calm smile. "Drakken, your mother's seated in the front row. There won't be anyone in front of her."

"Good! That's what she deserves." Drakken's head bobs in agreement, and keeps bobbing, and just as physics has always promised, that object in motion stays in motion until set upon by an outside force – in this case, the flat of his hand pressed to the back of his neck, and he's not sure which one's clammier. Something hisses in his cranium, a moldy leftover from his villain days, telling him that he must look like a wreck, an oozing glob of nerves, and this will be terrible for his image. An all-too-familiar heat wants to kindle under his ponytail.

Except – what image? He's here, on the beach, and with this group of people, he doesn't have an image. Out among the sand and the sunlight and the surf – he does still love to alliterate when he gets the opportunity – even Shego's sharp-enough-to-cut edges have softened somewhat.

And Drakken's not afraid.

Well, no, that's not true. He's definitely afraid. His gut is full of bees. Nice bees. Sweat bees. The kind that don't sting. But that's just because he's getting married. He's getting married in a few days; he's finally made it here, and he has earned the right to have bees in the belly and bats in the belfry if that's what it takes.

"All right, we'll want that table a good distance away from the stage," Pearl practically sings to Peridot, who currently has said table suspended in midair and is clearly looking for a place to put it down. Pearl's hands glide through the air, their movements smooth as lotion, and Drakken finds himself watching her semi-enviously as his left foot thumps its heel into the sand again and again. "That's where the guests will put their gifts."

The table lands hard, scattering sand grains in all directions. "Gifts?" Peridot says. Her voice is shrill – shriller than usual – and Drakken recognizes the sound of someone who has heard something all week but is truly hearing-hearing it for the first time. "Are we supposed to provide gifts?"

Shego mutters something beneath her breath, and Drakken can almost feel the no, duh coming off her in ripples. If it were someone other than Peridot, Drakken might feel the same way, but it is Peridot, tearing down the beach toward him and then staring up at him with little-girl eyes. Every unkind word, along with most of the kind ones, falls apart on the neuropathway to his mouth, and all he can do is stammer.

"It's traditional," Garnet pipes up from her place toward the back of the line, as nonchalant as ever.

To Drakken's dismay, Peridot slumps like she's just had to forfeit a game of chess. To her worst enemy. "Am I a terrible friend?"

"No!" Drakken employs his most emphatic boom and only later wonders if it sounded too world-domination-y.

"Chill out, P-Dot," Amethyst says as she drags the microphone up and down in its stand. "Nobody's gonna kick you out of the wedding or anything."

Peridot wrinkles her nose in Amethyst's direction, and when she turns back to Drakken, he can almost see her self-assurance locking back into place. "Nevertheless," she says, "I will rectify this error. Expect a present from me tomorrow at the latest."

"Okay," Drakken says, because he doesn't know what else to say.

He could ponder that for a while too, but then Greg, up on the stage next to Amethyst, begins strumming a peppy and sped-up version of "Here Comes the Bride" on his guitar. That means Lapis will be coming down the aisle in just a few minutes, and Drakken faces the same dilemma he's had all week. If he walks away from her, he might burst open like a blister, but if he sees her too early, something inside of him will burst. And anyone who has the kind of frequent-flier miles to the ER he racked up in his villain days – the instruments of evil tend to be even more temperamental than their masters – can tell you that internal injuries are eight-hundred-and-fifty times worse.

That decides it, then. Drakken calls goodbye over his shoulder and zips away from the beach, until the sand turns to brown boards under his boots and he's on the boardwalk, listening to seagulls beg for fry bits and funnel cakes. He fast-walks past both of those shops, his mental GPS kicking in before his conscious self realizes where he's going.

The ice cream shop.

Its lightweight chairs rattle slightly in the breeze and its dark, delicately wrought tables look as humble and meek as ever, as if they aren't a large part of the most important spot on Earth. Drakken runs his fingers across the swirls of one tabletop, and he can feel his pulse pounding in his neck as he showed the ring to Lapis, can hear her "Yes," can see the streetlight he tried to climb in his ecstasy. The world became a new place then, a warm, welcoming place.

It's his in a way it never could have been if he took it by force.

And so Drakken does what he always imagined doing once everything was settled and tamed and right. He turns a victorious face toward the sun.

Well, he has to look away after about seven seconds before it melts his corneas, but in his mind, it's still a triumph.

---

The first guests from Middleton begin arriving the next day. Chief among them, of course, is Kim Possible. She's still pregnant – very pregnant, extremely pregnant – and she leans on her husband's arm a little more heavily than she usually needs to. But when she gives him a grin and a wave, Drakken can see her old self in her eyes: the skinny, feisty teenager who met his gaze as she stood captive on a wedge of metal, maddeningly unintimidated by the sharks that swirled in the water below her.

He's so glad she escaped them.

The boy with her – well, the young man – drat, he'll have to ask Lapis to remind him of that name! – anyway, the good fellow who used to be nothing more than a skin irritant to Drakken folds him in a sideways hug, one hand still supporting Kim Possible's arm. He thumps Drakken on the back, and Drakken raps his knuckles against the kid's shoulder, which he hopes is the appropriate response. He hasn't had much field training in the male-bonding area.

"Dr. D! Always a pleasure!" he says. Without a trace of irony.

"Great to have you here," Drakken says, and the words aren't automated. He finds he means them with every atom of himself. "I hope you're ready for a bon-diggety wedding!"

The kid's face lights up, so Drakken knows he must have used his precious slang correctly. "The second most bon-diggetiest wedding ever," he crows, which Drakken thinks is belaboring the point a bit too much, but whatever.

"Trust us, we can't wait," Kim Possible says.

Before he can respond, her parents step out of the motel doors and stand behind her. Ann wears a look that Drakken can only describe as gracious, while James more closely resembles a granite sculpture. Drakken feels his ears pop a little, like he's just been shot to an elevation he wasn't expecting. It's been years since they were adversaries, years that feel like decades, and yet the sweat bees swarm a little more thickly when he sees them. He's never sure quite what to say to them, except at their daughter's wedding – that had been easy: "Congratulations." But now he's the one who should be congratulated, and he's not sure if they can bear to do that.

"Hi," Drakken says. His voice isn't as big as he wants it to be, isn't big enough to hide behind.

James Possible chuckles, and the sound seems to hit every one of Drakken's reflex points and jolt his body forward. He has mostly forgiven the man for his laugh-fest back in college, can almost believe that young James hadn't meant for it to grow claws and teeth and gouge at Drakken the way it did, but it will be a long time before he hears that chuckle and doesn't assume it's at his expense. He sends his hand out to the side, searching for Lapis's fingers even though he knows full well she isn't here.

"So this is Beach City." James runs a happy-tourist gaze over the skyline Drakken loves. "Well, I'll say this for you, Dre – Drakken. You picked a beautiful place to get married."

Drakken doesn't miss the pause, the hesitation on his name. As soon as James found out who Drakken really was, he refused to call him anything but "Drew" from then on out. It was a name designed to shrink him small, keep him powerless no matter how many doomsday weapons he accumulated.

"Lapis and I picked it out together," Drakken says, a little stiffly.

Then, to his surprise, James sticks his hand forward, halting it about six inches from Drakken's. Some instinct that Mother trained into him compels him to lean forward and take it, even though it feels somewhat akin to a frozen slab of meat. "Congratulations," James says.

"Thanks for coming," Drakken says, and this time it might be an automated response.

Ann comes over to stand beside Drakken – she's every bit as tall as he is, with her daughter's look of authority. Her gentle hand grazes his arm for just a second before she lifts it and says, "We wouldn't miss it. We're happy for you."

If she were to call him Drew, Drakken decides, he would put up with it.

That's when he hears a child-shriek – "Drakken!" – and a bundle too little even to be his mother collides with him and throws her still-dimpled arms around his waist. Drakken glances down at the stubby black pigtails jutting from her head.

"Hi, Hana," Drakken says, and he feels another layer of genuineness take root in his smile. He remembers holding her that night – morning – whatever in-between hour at her house after they'd defeated the Lorwardians, and she'd gurgled in his grasp, trusting that he would never drop her on the floor, much less to a pit of sharks. "Have you been keeping out of trouble?"

"Mostly." Hana pulls back and sets her hands on her hips in a marvelous imitation of her sister-in-law. "How about you?"

"Mostly," Drakken says. "I've been a little bit too busy for trouble lately."

"'Cuz you're getting ready to marry La-a-a-pis," Hana sing-songs, without the kid-cruelty he remembers from his own childhood. She mostly looks delighted.

Drakken nods and concentrates on not letting himself blush. He thinks he's close to succeeding, but then a full set of petals springs out around his head, and from the corners of his eyes he can see that they're bright red.

The little traitors.

Kim Possible's brothers exit the motel lobby just in time to witness this, and the entire Possible clan – including the boy who married into it – bursts into laughter. Drakken's pretty sure he feels the ground wobble under him, just a stitch. There was a time, not so long ago, when that combination of laughter always meant a thwarted scheme and a half-demolished lair, if not a pair of handcuffs waiting to bite into his wrists. The sound compels a security system somewhere inside him to rise, complete with laser guns and spiked clubs. He glances down at Hana's pigtails once more, and her tinkling giggle that didn't even exist until his time as a supervillain was nearly at an end serves as a great abort code.

Of course, he also can't help but note that the twins have had a growth spurt since he first met them. Kim is now the only Possible left shorter than him.

"So the rehearsal dinner is tomorrow night," Kim Possible says now, and it isn't a question. She naturally takes charge of everything around her. Even now when she looks swollen into helplessness, Drakken knows better than to believe she is.

"Right." Drakken nods at her even though she wasn't asking him anything, nods just to convince himself that he can take charge right alongside her, that they don't have to spend the rest of their lives with their proverbial horns locked. "We've been having mini-rehearsals on the beach every day, though, just to make sure everyone's ready. You –" He stabs a finger at the Husband Whose Name Cannot Be Remembered, and the young man's eyebrows flatten out.

"Ron," he says inside a massive sigh. "Ron Stoppable."

Drakken feels a pink-hot blotch on the back of his neck as he peels the last petal from it. The embarrassment of being corrected makes his backbone feel even more out-of-sync than it did before. He was really hoping to just jive his way through that until he could get to Lapis and beg her to remind him what the boy's name is.

Somehow he manages to unlock his teeth and say, "Yes. Ron. Sorry about that. Ron, you should go down to the beach and practice with them, being one of the groomsmen and all. We've got you paired up with Amethyst."

"Amethyst." Ron says her name like it's a crossword-puzzle clue. "Oh, man, I hope she's not taller than me, or that's gonna be way awkward."

Drakken smiles now, a truthful smile, at the thought of Amethyst being taller than anyone. "Not even close," he says.

"Boo-yah." Ron turns to peck Kim Possible on the cheek. That isn't awkward, not for Drakken, because all the things he needs are cozy and secure in his chest – things he once thought were unattainable, things he blamed the two of them for keeping him from.

Drakken beckons for the happy couple to follow him, taking one last peek over his shoulder at James and Ann just to make sure they're not…he doesn't know…doing something that would prove they're not as happy for him as they claimed to be. But James has Hana in his arms and Ann is tickling her until she shrieks, and the whole thing is so nice and normal that his spirit feels mud-caked for doubting them.

"Oh, I can't wait for you to meet all of Lapis's Gem friends," Drakken says. He swings his arm out toward the beach in one sweeping gesture. The thought dances him in front of them, but the next thought, significantly less beautiful, stops his feet in mid-skip. "I hope you'll be nice to them."

Kim Possible gives that jerk of her neck that means Consider it already done. But Ron's face takes on this bruised expression, like Drakken's just kicked his mole rat down the boardwalk – which he obviously hasn't, because the surprisingly cute vermin is peeking out of Ron's pocket, his hair-free forehead also puckered. "Of course," Ron says. "When I have ever not been nice? You know, except for when we stopped you from taking over the world."

"Oh, yes, yes, you've been very kind even as arch-nemeses. Hence why I invited you to be part of my wedding in the first place." Drakken is proud of how smooth and sturdy his voice is and how his insides match it, because, honestly, there's not nearly as much bad blood between them as there could be. ("Bad" blood? Between the shark pits and the magma traps, it'd be no surprise if said blood was cancerous!)

"Bu-ut, I recall you, Ron, being –" Drakken searches for a neutral, nonflammable word – "suspicious when you first met Lapis. You know, her being an alien and everything."

Actually, he tries not to recall it whenever feasible. But right now it's projected across every screen in his brain, the memory of Lapis finding the strength to keep her chin lifted toward Ron's angry stare, and his veins boil so his heart doesn't break. He fists his hands tight behind his back.

"Oh, right." Ron squirms, his freckled cheeks flushing, but then he exchanges confident looks with the mole rat. "That was a long time ago. I'm over that now."

Good. Now this is the part where Drakken forgives him. It feels a little like swallowing a hiccup, but he gets it done.

"I especially need you to be nice to Steven," he says, a touch louder.

Ron's brown eyes cross. "Steven? Okay, I know I kinda slept through a lot of geology class, but I don't ever remember there being a precious stone called 'Steven.'"

Kim Possible all but howls into the back of her hand.

"That's because he's half-human and half-Gem, and he's very precious," Drakken counters. "He's the one who set Lapis free in the first place."

"From the mirror thing," Kim says with a nod.

"Yes. He's sixteen, and he's been going through a really tough time lately." Drakken clamps his lips shut over the details – specifically the monster-related ones. Those aren't his to share, he knows, especially since he is the only person here who knows what it's like to feel all the humanity drain out of you.

"Right," Ron says. "Being sixteen can tank heavy."

"Yes. It certainly can." It pogo-sticks through Drakken's mind – that he's pretty sure his sixteen-year-old life "tanked" more heavily than anything this young man has ever experienced, but he shakes the idea out. This isn't the time to try to outdo anyone.

(Boy, he can't wait to report that back to his shrink!)

Drakken turns to look at Kim Possible. "What about your 'rents?" he asks. Amusement flashes through her eyes, but for the first time he doesn't see her wince at the sound of him appropriating her generation's lingo. "Do you think they can be nice to everyone, too?"

Ann will probably accept every extraterrestrial with only a few questions, but James…James is another story. A story Drakken has no particular desire to reread.

And a story that must be all over his face, because Kim Possible twinkles a grin at him. "I'll talk to them," she says softly. "Especially him."

Drakken forces himself not to collapse in relief, forces himself to turn instead to Ron. "And yours? Can they be courteous to people from other planets?"

Ron gives a happy – mostly happy – snort. "Sometimes I think my parents are people from other planets. But, yeah, I can get them prepped."

Drakken nods and nods and nods again. All prospects of collapsing have fled, replaced by an energy that speeds up every neuron in his brain, every sweat follicle in the surface of his skin. He wants to yell, "Race you to the beach!" and kick up dust – well, sand – behind him, but he doesn't. That would be so very wrong with Kim Possible being so very pregnant.

So he matches his strides to theirs, even though the sensation feels like trying to stuff an excited kangaroo into a package. Luckily, Kim Possible keeps pace amazingly well, even in her delicate condition, and Drakken isn't compelled to drag his feet for her to keep up.

When she catches his wrist with a touch almost as light as Lapis's, Drakken forgets about how fast they could or should be going and screeches to a halt.

"Can I ask you something?" she says.

The sweat bees go into a frenzy, and Drakken feels himself coiling up. Her eyes aren't angry or anything, but there's something so intense about the way her gaze finds his and won't lift. Sheesh, he hopes she's not about to bring up some patch of leftover bad blood between them that still needs mechanical dialysis before it can flow away. That nod is harder, but he pulls it off.

"I'd like to make a toast," she says. "At the reception. Would that be cool with you?"

The sweat bees stop. The thoughts scuttling in his head stop. Everything stops. Drakken just stares down at Kim Possible, glowing and friendly and probably still able to kick his tail in twenty-five different ways, while something incredibly undignified stings at the backs of his eyes, tingles in his sinus cavities. How much goodness must she have in her soul to see anything beyond a list of transgressions when she looks at him?

Drakken sniffs, not quite fast enough to catch the first drip. "Yes," he says. "Thank…you."

There are other words she is entitled to, as well, words like always and supportive and even though and terrible, but they're riding warp pads so fast through his mind that he can't even try to make a grab at them. Kim Possible smiles up at him, as if she already knows. He wouldn't be a bit surprised if she did.

Once they make it down the beach, Drakken doesn't even have time to search for Steven or Lapis or anyone in particular before he's dragged aside by Peridot. She must have parked her nothing-but-the-facts demeanor somewhere else for the day, because she's bouncing around as if in imitation of Spinel.

"Dr. Drakken!" she cries. "I have procured a present for you and Lapis!"

Over the top of Peridot's head, which can't spring much higher than five feet no matter how hard she boings, Drakken catches sight of Bismuth, an apology etched deep into her face. He'll admit that under most circumstances it might make him a little gloatful, but there's no room for that in him now, not with the sweat bees consuming every available space.

I tried to stop her, she mouths to him.

Drakken goes cold – well, really, just his mouth goes cold, and it tingles, the way it does when he takes a gulp of ice water too soon after scrubbing away with ultra-strength minty toothpaste. He wonders what it says about him as a person that at least half of the tingling is eagerness to see what Peridot has managed to do now.

As if she can read his mind – which she can't, as far as he knows – Peridot grabs him by the wrist, and she is so much stronger than she looks; he's still not quite adjusted to that. She hauls him away from the crowd and brings them both to a stop in front of an object that was never meant to be on a beach. Not for a wedding, not for a funeral, not for any occasion.

It's a mailbox, and not one of those little tubes like the one at the end of Drakken's driveway. No, this is a stout specimen that could double as a bass drum, at least as high as Drakken's waist and probably wider, splattered with pulpy gray from a recent – and none-too-thorough – paint job. Someone has, at some point, inked the word MIDDLETON onto its chest, though it looks more like IDDTN now. The beige clumps at the base of each of its four feet blend fairly convincingly with the sand beneath them, but Drakken sees them for what they are – accusing chunks of concrete, letting him know that this thing was ripped from its foundation and transported here without due process of law. Its metallic jaw hangs open like it can't believe the indignity that's been visited upon it.

Metallic. Well, that answers the "how," at least.

Peridot is beaming up at him like one of those neon-green glow-in-the-dark stars he has stuck to the ceiling of his home laboratory. "Isn't it marvelous? I know how much you adore giant chunks of machinery, and this was the biggest piece I could find that did not appear to be claimed. It doesn't seem to have a function yet, but that can change very quickly with someone of my brainpower around. Just tell me what you and Lapis would prefer it to do, and I'll reformat it to do just that! And if it's not quite the right shape, we can have Bismuth make alterations to it in her forge," she continues, her back to Bismuth, unable to read the please don't make me part of this that fills Bismuth's eyes.

Something is crawling up Drakken's throat – something part guffaw and part scream, which comes out as a creaky, old-rocking-chair moan when it finally finds its way out of him. Peridot's grin falls away, and even as tingly as Drakken's mouth is, he's sorry to see it go.

Still, he can't resist jerking an anxious look back at Kim Possible and her husband. Any minute now, he knows, her wristcom will go off, and it'll be the authorities calling her to report The Great Mailbox Heist and they'll all be sunk.

Instead it's Lapis he sees, padding toward them in her little gold flip-flops that he can barely hear moving across the sand. She's shapeshifted back into her pants and top, so Drakken doesn't have to worry about receiving any spoilers for the big day. Which is good, because he currently has about eight different things stewing and boiling in his mind, and they're not nearly as tasty as chicken broth.

Lapis must read it on his face before Drakken can even define what "it" is, because she says – softly, of course – "Is there a problem?" Her forehead puckers, one scant crease in the pretty blue, but she sounds so calm and nonpanicked. Unpanicked. Inpanicked. Whatever the stupid word is.

"Well, there's a mailbox," Drakken replies. He stabs a tingly finger toward the thing and wonders distantly if Peridot's also managed to make off with letters and packages and postcards meant for other parts of the world.

"Oh," Lapis says. "And I'm guessing there isn't supposed to be?"

"No, there isn't supposed to be!" Drakken can feel himself winding up – if he doesn't monologue at this exact instant, he might truly go mad again. "It's from Middleton –" he gestures to the letters flaking off its front – "and it belongs at the post office, and she tore it right out of the ground and brought it here!"

Drakken drags a hand over his hair. It's standing completely on end, and most of his internal workings have skipped tingling and joined it. He feels like one of the cactus monsters, as though he might prickle himself straight through with one wrong move. But when he hears an itty-bitty noise from below him and glances instinctively down to see what caused it, he knows he's already prickled through somebody else.

Peridot. She watches him, bewildered, like a kitten who can't understand why her owners aren't delighted with the dead bird she brought them. Drakken knows what the poked-kicked sensation is like, because it's in it him too, wince-worthy around his ribs.

"Did I get you a bad gift?" she almost whimpers.

The possibility that she might cry pricks Drakken even further. He lets his eyelids fall shut and consults with the clear place in his brain, the one quiet spot among his ever-busy, every-noisy gray matter, the one that he first heard whisper to him, Your plants can destroy the Lorwardians' machines. You've got to stop them. Every now and then, when he gets still, it'll offer up instructions that he knows by now to trust.

Drakken drags in air, encouraged by the lack of nervous whistle in the sound, and cranks his neck down so he can talk directly to Peridot. "No, Peridot, this is a great gift. I'm sure we could fix it up to do all kinds of amazing stuff!" He vaporizes that train of thought before it can get too far down the tracks, because if he lets himself truly entertain the untapped potential of a tricked-out mailbox, he might not want to give it back, and that won't do anyone any good. "But it doesn't belong to you. It serves a purpose back in my hometown, and you can't just run off with it."

Peridot frowns. "It had no sign denoting a price. I presumed that meant it was free."

"Uh-oh," Lapis murmurs. There's laughter in her voice, delicate but not bothering to hide itself.

Drakken can't join her. His quad muscles have gone weak, and he sags against the gift table and plasters a hand over his face. "Oh, as if the Middleton Postal Department didn't have enough reasons to hate me," he says, opining very nicely and not without reason. The last time he saw them, they were chasing him from the building after he'd asked them ten minutes of questions about just how illegal it would be to send a sample of chicken pox – the only black-market virus he'd been able to afford – via mail to his arch-nemesis.

Nothing daunted, upon their next confrontation he'd ended up sprinkling the contents of the vial into her backpack and when it ended badly for him, he'd taken the opportunity to tell her that she'd been exposed to chicken pox rooting around for her gadgets. At which point she had smiled sweetly and informed him that she'd had chicken pox when she was four years old and thus enjoyed biological immunity.

He can still hear Shego now, in his memory: Told ya she was born before the vaccine. He'd told her to zip it, but when has that ever been effective against her?

Anyway.

"Can't you just tell them that your alien girlfriend's alien best friend wanted to get you a wedding gift, and she still doesn't really know how Earth stuff works?" Lapis says.

Drakken has to tilt his head to the side to consider that, has to squint at it. "I don't think I've used that one before."

"Am I going to have to stand trial?" Peridot is now further into hysterics than he is. "I'm not a citizen! I don't have any rights!"

Drakken snaps back to focus on her and her little whine. He knows how she must feel – well, not the bit about not being a citizen, but the overall upheaval of goofing up and wondering if you'd thus rendered your whole future chemically unstable. That fear is nauseating, and he doesn't want her to have it.

"You won't go to jail, Peridot," Drakken says. He glances at Lapis and thinks he might receive some of her calm confidence through osmosis. "I'll vouch for you, okay?"

And he's almost as confident as he sounds. People don't get twenty years for their first offense, right? Well, he supposes it depends on the severity of said offense – Peridot technically stole government property, too, but since the property she walked off with has absolutely no destructive capabilities whatsoever, that should lean them toward going easy on her.

"But we will have to take it back," Drakken adds. "And apologize."

"I agree." Peridot nods as if that has been her idea all along. "Do we need to go take it back now?"

"Yes," Drakken and Lapis say in unison – well, not quite in unison. He's a few beats behind Lapis, or she's a few beats ahead of him, but, eh, it's close enough.

"As soon as possible," Drakken adds. Even the thought of the Middleton police with their scowls aimed at him makes the sweat bees slosh around nervously in his stomach.

"I plucked it from the ground," Peridot says, her words slow and tremulous. "I do not know how to replant it."

"You leave that to me," Bismuth says, jerking a thumb toward the gemstone in her chest.

Peridot nods again, all business now. "Can the pre-wedding operation continue without the girl-of-flowers?"

Drakken hears the pause in her voice. The kind part of her hopes she isn't inconveniencing anyone, but her ego wants to hear that she's somehow essential. He understands that as clearly as he understands the ordered boxes of the periodic table.

But it's Lapis who speaks up. "I think we'll be able to manage. Just for a bit."

She tweaks Peridot's nose, and Drakken reaches his hand down to her. There aren't many hands he knows that can make his feel big or powerful, but when Peridot slips her fingers between his like a trusting three-thousand-year-old child, Bismuth lumbering behind them, he's overwhelmed by the size difference. It seems to give his body a sturdiness it doesn't often have, a resolve that he will go toe-to-toe with any officers who want to take her in, he will go as far as he can to defend her without breaking the law himself.

Boy, he sure hopes there aren't any cops crawling around the post office yet.

There aren't. Just a couple of extremely confused-looking employees, one rustling through the bushes that flank the front door as if he thinks someone went to all the trouble of uprooting the mailbox only to drag it a few feet away, the other snapping pictures of the empty torn-up slab of concrete with her cell phone. She glances up and gives the three of them a smile that doesn't appear entirely out of obligation and doesn't dim out entirely when she spots Peridot holding their missing mailbox at her side where it wiggles just a few inches above the ground.

Drakken makes to speak, but Peridot, curse the luck, collects her thoughts first, and as desperate as they are, they still tromp out of her like little soldiers. "Hello," she says. "We are returning your mailbox." She sets it down on the asphalt with a thunk that isn't as hard as it could've been but makes Drakken flinch nevertheless.

The woman nods once, waiting.

"It did not have a sign in front of it asking for 'payment,'" Peridot continues, "so I wrongfully assumed that it was free of charge, and I absconded with it. It was meant to be a wedding gift for two of the people whom I most cherish in the world." She states that fact the way she states every other fact, but Drakken still has the urge to swallow hard. "They informed me of my error, however, and I have come to restore it to its rightful owner."

The woman eyeballs Peridot for a second, as if measuring whether she's a mischievous eight-year-old supergenius or a pint-sized criminal mastermind. It actually wouldn't surprise Drakken if she decided on the second one, especially not with Bismuth looming beyond her like the hired muscle and Drakken standing there like…what would his role in the gang be?

He never has to find out, because the woman's gaze moves to him and something sparks in her eyes. Two somethings, actually, both of them beautiful and welcome. Recognition – and respect.

Drakken tries to maintain a straight posture, but inside his hands are clasped and his shoulders are rolled back in glee; inside, the lub-dub, lub-dub in his temples has been replaced with a delighted squeal. She knows him as the man who saved the world, and the same clear place that got him here in the first place tells him to use it.

"It was an innocent mistake," Drakken says, wide-eyed and nodding persuasively. "She didn't mean any harm."

"I cannot fix the damage left behind, though," Peridot says. "That is why I have brought in my friend." She steps aside, bringing Bismuth in with a grand sweep that she might have learned from Drakken himself.

"I'm in construction," Bismuth says, giving the woman her gentlest and most reassuring look, as if she knows all too well how intimidating she can be.

"I humbly beg your forgiveness," Peridot says. "Please do not charge presses against me."

She lowers her head, something Drakken rarely sees, and actually manages to project sincere humility. The surge that goes through Drakken is ironic – she's humble, and he's proud of her.

The woman blinks, a good number of blinks, so many Drakken loses count, but her still-there smile is kind as she lowers it to Peridot. "I suppose we can let you off." She shifts her gaze back to Drakken's. "Kids will be kids, right?"

Drakken steps sideways in front of Peridot and slides a hand back to cover her big mouth before she can protest. "Oh, yes, indeed," he says, resting his other hand atop her triangular rise of hair. "I mean, look at me. I caused several cement-related disasters in my youth, and I turned out just fine!" A qualifier itches inside him, and he adds, "Eventually."

The woman places her hands on her hips and winks at Peridot. "All right, young lady," she says. "But I don't want to see you running off with any more mailboxes."

"You will not see that," Drakken says quickly.

Peridot clasps the woman's hand in both of her tiny green ones and blurts out, "Wow thanks for your mercy."

The woman is still smiling, though Drakken notices she keeps a sharp eye on Bismuth as the big Gem bends over and inspects the gaping holes Peridot left in the cement. Drakken turns away before he can watch her fists go into their preparation-clench. Most of the time, he can forcibly forget who he first knew her to be, much as Kim Possible and her husband – Ron, right? – have to do for him. But if he watches her work, that will slip, and he will remember, and the sweat bees in his stomach will multiply into something far more venomous.

Drakken stalks several yards away, plants his feet in the still-green early-autumn grass, and concentrates on breathing in a regular rhythm. A tug at his belt directs his attention downward to Peridot.

"Wow thanks to you, too, Dr. Drakken. For verifying my character."

This, too, she delivers in her usual matter-of-fact tone, but Drakken doesn't miss the sheen of admiration behind her visor. His self-esteem devours it and wants more. But there's something else at work inside him, something that swells and lightens at the same time, that isn't affiliated with that. He grins down at her, stopping for only an eighth of a second to consider how goofy he might look, and says, "Of course. What are brothers-in-law for?"

Heh. He even managed not to say "brother-in-laws."

"I don't know." It clearly pains Peridot to say those words, which Drakken can also relate to. "What are brothers-in-law for?"

Oh. Right. It's a term she's not likely to have encountered before. That makes it Drakken's duty to explain it to her, a job he's always liked with Lapis. He clears his throat and begins, "Well –"

And that's when his pocket begins to vibrate, buzzing like a sawblade. Drakken leaps a good foot into the air and lets out a shout of surprise before realizing that – oh – it's just his cell phone. Naturally. He roots around in his pocket and he finds it, the solid shell-like weight of it familiar in his hands even while it continues to jerk around like a jumping bean. The screen lists the caller's identity: KIM POSSIBLE.

Drakken flips the phone open. "Hello, you've reached Dr. Drakken. Hero and groom," he adds casually, as if it's an afterthought.

Hmm. The screen said KIM POSSIBLE, but Drakken thinks it might have gotten some wires crossed, because what greets his statement is silence and uncertainty. And Kim Possible is rarely silent and never uncertain.

"Kim Possible?" Drakken says.

"Hey, Drakken." Yes, scientifically, that is Kim Possible's voice, but there is a quiver to it that is more alien to him than anything about his bride-to-be. There was a point in his life when Drakken would have assumed anything that could make her voice shake was good news for him, but that time is long past. "Um…are you still in Middleton with Peridot?"

Drakken nods for a moment, then regains control of his senses and says, "Yes."

"Okay. Um, we've got a bit of a situation back at the motel."

Drakken's heart doesn't bother to skip any beats. It runs ahead, charging forward like a cheetah, so that he has to jog in place to keep up with it. "Is it Lapis? Is she hurt?" he blurts out.

"No, she's okay." He can hear Kim Possible softening on the other end of the line. (Well, metaphorical line when it comes to cell phones.) "Nobody's hurt, actually. It's just…well, it's kinda hard to explain over the phone," she says, "but if you aren't going to be back for a while, I can try."

Drakken's lips go dry. "No. I can be right there."

Somehow he hangs up and he bolts halfway across the parking lot before realizing the warp pad won't listen to him on his own, so he calls for Peridot, who does listen to him and who throws an "I'll be back later!" at Bismuth over her shoulder as she grabs his wrist and drags him for the second time that day. Drakken can't help noting that she used "I" instead of "we." Whatever's going on at the motel, she thinks it might keep him a while.

That's not reassuring.

Then they're on the warp pad and she spreads her arms, and the thing turns him inside-out and then shakes him back into place on an identical pad just outside Steven's house. Drakken takes a step off, stumbles, and grunts his gratitude to Peridot when she catches him. As soon as his insides and outsides feel basically solidified, he runs across the sand.

And keeps right on running until he's on the boardwalk again, his body sweating and shaking, his side a painful jumble of ligaments. Drakken stops only long enough to massage it with both hands and squeeze some excess perspiration from his ponytail, and then he picks back up at a speed-walk that carries him right to the motel.

The motel is still there, he can tell right away, so whatever the "situation" is doesn't involve it having been burnt to the ground or accidentally launched into the next galaxy. The automatic doors part for him with barely a squeak, and the lobby looks just like it did earlier today – unimpressive and cute, with carpet that isn't fully homogenous and chairs tilted at conversation-friendly angles. Drakken recognizes many of his guests standing around – Kim Possible and her husband, whose name has slipped right from Drakken's mind even though he knew it ten minutes ago; Hana and the twins and the rest of both families; Dr. Director and Agent Kane from Global Justice; even DNAmy and Duff Killigan. All of them are meant to be here, and none of them are people Drakken has any reason to fear – with maybe the exception of James, but he's carting suitcases to the elevator and doesn't even acknowledge Drakken's entrance.

A man also stands at the reception desk with his back to Drakken – tall, oldish by the looks of him, his hair grayed out like Senior's. He may be impatiently rapping on the desk's bell for attention, but he isn't ringing any bells for Drakken.

And then he turns around.

Suddenly, Drakken is falling, spiraling, saved only by one hand reaching out and seizing something – part of the wall, he thinks, because it isn't carpeted and it can't be high enough up to be the ceiling. Surely he must still be on the warp pad. Surely he must have never gotten turned right-side-out. Surely something about malfunctioning Gem tech must be able to explain what he just saw.

Drakken blinks, three or four times, and everything around him swoops back into focus before his contacts, his vision going from smeary to too-bright and bracing in mere moments. He's not on the floor, not even close. He's got one hand against the nearest wall, one cheek smashed on top of it, and a sideways tilt to the rest of him from where his knees buckled. And when he looks up again, it's not the infinite black of space he sees, but something else dark and nebulous.

Someone else.

With his ears ringing and the sweat bees growing stingers, Drakken gulps and without thinking says a word he hasn't had cause to say in ages, a word he doesn't think he's happy to be saying now.

"Dad?"

~Yes, I promise we'll have an explanation next chapter.~