fandomhigh | Library, Wednesday

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Library, Wednesday

The books were actually behaving themselves today, and so Peridot was making use of any of her spare time in the library by looking up the properties of Earth's metals. She wanted something sturdy, but lightweight, and preferably only faintly magnetic...

... Maybe capable of having an antimatter blaster built into it...

Not that she didn't enjoy being short, but she couldn't find the ladder again, and was having one of her 'I really miss my limb enhancers' days. If she could just figure out adequate replacements, maybe a ladder would be entirely unnecessary anyway.

Maybe. Hopefully.

Probably not.

[OOC: Open!]

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"Primitive," Peridot agreed, hopping back down to the floor and crossing her arms in front of herself. "But... crudely effective, I suppose."

"It filled it's purpose."

Breq looked up.

"What are spaceships like where you come from?"

"They're like..." Peridot paused for a moment, thinking of a good way to describe them to someone who had never seen them before. She looked down at her hands, quirked a little smile, and shrugged. "They're fast. Capable of reaching speeds faster than light, though we only do that under very specific circumstances. The last time I came to Earth, it was aboard a Gem Warship, which is shaped something like a hand."

Exactly like a hand, actually.

"Like a hand," Breq repeated. "Did you bring a lot of soldiers?"

She turned another page. These - they weren't even proper ships, were they? - looked like mere toys, and yet they reminded her of being her whole self, instead of this one, limited body. She fell silent, not quite listening to Peridot's response.

"Only the one soldier," Peridot replied, frowning a little. "As far as Homeworld was concerned, one Jasper was all we needed."

And that would have been true enough, if not for Steven's half-human heritage.

Breq looked up. "Just one?"

She had had hundreds, thousands more in storage to replace them when needed. And she had just been one troop carrier.

"And what if you had lost her? I assume you did, but what was the plan."

"You don't just lose a Jasper. Especially not that one," Peridot sighed. "She's still alive out there somewhere. We were separated when the rebels destroyed the ship."

You didn't need a backup plan for losing Jasper. Jasper was the backup plan.

"Is she still a danger?"

It was obvious that she could be.

"Very much so," Peridot confirmed. "And nobody knows where she is."

Which was kind of a problem.

"In your universe? Or here as well? How do you find her?"

Breq did have a problem with destroying whole planets. It had taken her a while to find that out.

"In my universe," Peridot replied, shrugging her shoulders. "She's nothing to worry about here, and isn't terribly likely to show up out of nowhere. As for how to find her..."

She shook her head a little.

"Garnet's been looking," she explained. "But a lone Jasper on a strange planet who doesn't want to be found isn't going to be found. We suspect she's somewhere at the bottom of the ocean."

"And you can't go back there? Or is it just your homeworld you can't go back to?" Breq asked.

She flipped another page.

"I suppose they could justify it? Your people, I mean. There is always a way to do that."

"I can go back to my universe," Peridot replied, shrugging her shoulders. "I choose not to. I'm finding this place to be far more accommodating in my efforts to come to understand this planet, since I'm going to be here for... forever."

More or less literally.

"And my people will find a way to justify anything that suits them best," she said, tiredly. "Especially if the Diamonds want it to happen."

"They are not alone in that," Breq said. "Most people do. It's just a matter of what they can do about it. And who pays the price."

She was still looking att the page.

"And what they do to those who see through it."

Peridot wrinkled her nose.

"Yellow Diamond tried to obliterate me," she noted. "For calling her a clod."

It had to be done, okay?

Breq was impressed and had she been someone who expressed herself by facial expressions she would have smiled.

"Someone I loved stood up against a tyrant, when she was forced to act. She died for it."

Peridot found herself a little bit at a loss for how to react to a statement like that. On Homeworld, the appropriate response would have been a 'good riddance,' if anything at all.

This wasn't Homeworld. And Peridot found that she actually wanted to care. So she was silent for a moment before offering a tentative, "I'm sorry."

That was the right phrase, wasn't it?

Breq had executed officers before for disobedience. Lieutenant Awn had been different in so many ways. For one, it had been unjust.

"I'm not sure if I could have saved her. I thought I couldn't at the time."

Peridot considered that for a moment, too. She was fairly new to the concept of regret, but...

"If you thought you couldn't, then you couldn't," she said, finally. "Sometimes, perhaps, people can surprise themselves, but it's unreasonable to blame yourself for not doing something you had no way of knowing you were capable of."

"No. I know. It's not reasonable, but not all question you can ask yourself are."

Possibly that didn't apply to Gems.

Peridot opened her mouth to protest that, because where she was standing, logic and objectivity were everything.

She stopped herself and frowned a little, instead.

"You're talking about regret?"

"Yes." Breq looked up. "Does that surprise you?"

Peridot shrugged a little.

"I never understood regret until recently," she admitted. "I never had anything to regret. It always made more sense to do my best and continue forward, learning from my mistakes. Now I understand it isn't always so simple."

"You never had any choices?" Breq guessed. "Or thought you hadn't?"

"Up until I came to Earth, it never occurred to me that I could choose," Peridot explained. "I served my purpose. I piloted ships, I ran Kindergartens, I did science. I didn't say no."

Why would she?

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