She stands before the ship's viewscreen, considering the very real possibility that her career has ended.
No warm welcome awaited her at Homeworld; news of her failure spread fast, and soured the occasion. Not that anyone would have been eager to see her. Gem City swarms with Peridots ever since mass-production began. One more attracts no attention.
She slides into her chair at the helm. The console glows in welcome. "A Peridot is to be persistent," she recites under her breath, echoing Blue Topaz' favorite refrain, "perceptive, perceiving. Perfection." Her fingers hover above the controls.
And when she is not, continues the echo in her head, she is replaced.
At least fifty Peridots, fresh from their training, stand ready to take her position. She knows this. Her gem aches with the weight of knowing it. Before Earth, before this mission, she was the best – but 'best' means nothing after a failure. Any failure.
She is replaced.
Peridot dips her fingers into the console. For a moment, she stares at them as they hang suspended in the green gel. Lights flash along wire channels like organic nerves, synthetic synapses of her own design flickering and twisting as they adjust themselves around the intrusion. For a moment, nothing changes.
Then electricity shoots through her hands – expected, but no less painful for it. Peridot catches a glimpse of wires burrowing beneath green skin. Light explodes behind her eyes; the roaring of waves fills her, and she shudders at the strength of it. Her gem burns in ecstasy, in anticipation, in eagerness to return her to the one place she is safe and in control, and the roaring builds inside her mind.
The cold dark takes her.
Silence.
In the void, she is boundless. Opening her eyes, Peridot can see her own outline, and that of the ship around her – but she does not end there. Threads of green data, rivers running through the emptiness, link her with a thousand other lights scattered across the void.
She raises a hand; her ship slows. She lowers it; it shudders and begins to hurtle through space, towards the miserable rock planet that is her destination.
A body sits motionless at the helm. It is hers, but it is not her. She is here, endless, one with the network of machines spanning every corner of Gem-controlled space. Eyes closed, she gathers up the self, then drifts it away. The darkness of the technosphere swallows it, tucking it away until she needs – not wants – it. She never wants it back.
Auroras of data swirl above her, conjured by a glance. Information dances in her eyes. A corner of her mind recites formulae in perfect harmony with the humming of the ship; another watches every room in the ship through cameras hidden in the walls. Many are empty. Lapis is nowhere to be seen. Jasper breaks robonoids in the ship's laboratory.
Numbly, she watches as her machines are crushed, one by one. Jasper's grin is feral. Peridot would be angry, but the anger is tucked away somewhere in the ship's electric brain, and she cannot reach it without bringing back the loneliness, the doubt, the fear, "And if she is not—", Blue Topaz's sharp, cold smile—
The doors to the bridge slide open. Faintly, she hears heavy footsteps and the whistling screech of metal dragged across metal. A shiver races up Peridot's physical spine; she feels it even in the technosphere. "These robots are weak," Jasper growls. "Make 'em stronger."
Her body remains still.
Jasper drags the robot to the console and waves it before her head. "Look. I crushed it. Aren't you mad?"
Again, she does not move.
A growl escapes Jasper. Peridot hears it as a pattern of 1′s and 0′s, a stuttering beat that echoes in her head. "Nerd," the escort mutters. She leaves the crushed robot by the foot of the chair.
Peridot drifts. She shrouds herself in data, computations, information. Time is nebulous, meaningless. A fabrication of a weak mind. She could stay here for eternity, she thinks.
Maybe I will.
Jasper returns eventually. When, she does not know.
The first time Peridot went to Earth, she saw a four-footed creature take an object with gray fur and a long tail to a human as a gift. The gesture was servile. Docile. Pathetic. She recalls the incident vaguely as she watches Jasper bringing her another broken robonoid. Pathetic.
The dark place where she has hidden herself cracks open.
What does she care? Jasper's curled lip and look of disgust as they were introduced told Peridot immediately what she thought of her. A worker drone, too weak to even defeat a few traitors on some backwater planet – what was she in Jasper's eyes but a speck of dust?
A trail of flickering light curls in the air and winds its way towards her. With rising panic, she sees it, feels it slipping into her, weighing her down. Her physical body tugs at her, pulls her away from this peaceful nothing –
Jasper stands for a long time by the helm, just watching. Waiting.
Peridot curls her lip. She feels herself saying, "Pathetic," as though someone else were speaking.
"What did you call me?" With a growl, Jasper grabs her and pulls her from the chair, limp, her fingers still buried in the gel of the console. "At least I'm not frying my gem drifting in that creepy technosphere. That's pathetic."
Anger surges inside her. Peace and darkness shudder and give way around her, and the data that is her mind floods into the heavy, lonely body in the control chair. Peridot grits out, head reeling, "Jasper, that is not—"
"Oh. Sorry. You were just trying running away from the fact that you failed Homeworld."
Peridot closes her eyes.
Jasper growls. "Come here." One of her broad hands encloses half Peridot's waist; the other scoops her fingers from the gel. A shiver passes through the Gem's body as the last of her mind is wrenched from the technosphere.
"Stop! Let me go, Jasper."
"Come here." Jasper drags her in close. Her mane of hair tumbles over her shoulders, blocking Peridot's vision, and though Peridot knows it is – like their bodies – only a projection, she still smells dust and metal and the purple leaves that collect in oceans on the ground on Homeworld in autumn as her face is buried in it. "You're going to stop doing that. Now." Jasper's voice is a rumble, as gentle as a purr.
Peridot softens against her. "Let me go."
"No."
If she shifts, Peridot can feel the seemingly fragile ladder of Jasper's ribs beneath her fingers, only a projection but undeniably there. She lets herself trace the muscles beneath the skin, and wonders if Jasper knows all the promises Peridot can hear in that one, insistent, no.