Chapter Text
Whatever the competition was between her and Lapis, failure was on the horizon. Roughly two hours after dinner Lapis had sent Steven into a tailspin by pointing at Connie and saying “Her pajamas are cute. What do you think?” He blushed and stuttered and panicked, and it was all very adorable from a certain point of view but Peridot was only concerned with the fact that all of her attempts ended with sharp objects flying through the air.
So she tried a different path by setting up a local network, connecting everyone’s phones to it, and then sneaking in through a few gaping holes in security in order to browse all their personal files unnoticed. If social media conglomerates could do it guilt free, why couldn’t she? This kind of casual use of her skills normally filled her with joy, but tonight it felt just a little hollow. Kind of like this kind of thing was inherently unethical regardless of its prevalence.
She was good at her class. She was good at her job. Ethics hadn’t ever been a major concern. It was one of those things that you just had to accept in the field - that your job probably was doing more harm than good to the world as a whole. As long as she’d been in it, the tech industry was skeevy. There were upsides. She didn’t get into it because she was skeevy. It let her wear casual clothes, and no one expected her to be much of a people person. She got to spend the day solving puzzles. That was why she’d gotten into it.
Any job she went into would have data theft - which technically wasn’t theft. It was really just about tricking people into clicking yes on agreements that they never intended to read in the first place and shoving all that info into a giant machine learning algorithm that you prayed wouldn’t start publicly using racial slurs. Well, almost any job. In theory, she could find a job that didn’t do that kind of thing.
She could probably even find a job that could arguably improve the world rather than just the kind that exploited people for money. It would take a lot of searching, and it wouldn’t pay very well, but it was theoretically possible to work with computers and be an ethical person. She’d just need to find a place with cheaper rent. Cut back a little on fandom expenses. Maybe she could even learn how to cook a little.
The thought was horrifying.
She chewed on her thumbnail, staring at her own phone screen. What would she even do with information once she had it? Who knew if she would be able to come up with some clever way to make Steven and Connie blush, just to impress Lapis? It wasn’t like she was good at romance. So was that it then? She’d be unethical again, because she was always unethical, because there was the slightest chance that she would come out ahead at the end of the day?
Lapis was asleep next to her, and she thought about waking her up. Though, really, the more she thought about it the more she decided Lapis wasn’t the person to go to for ethics lessons. Although she seemed to have ended up on the right side of things, she clung to the edge of morality while enviously eying those who had long since let go. She imagined if she woke Lapis up and asked her about the phone, Lapis would eagerly rush through the Connie’s files and hesitate only a few moments before continuing through Steven’s.
Peridot pushed her phone into the pocket of her pants and hopped out of bed. She thought some fresh air might do her some good. It never had before, and she found the concept of fresh air ridiculous, but there was always the chance that this time would be different. As she entered the main room, she found Connie laying on the couch. Her hand was resting on the hilt of her sword that was strapped to her back, and she was looking up at the dark ceiling as if something interesting was up there. Peridot tilted her head to get a look and saw nothing.
She froze, staring for a moment, then cleared her throat in hopes that she wouldn’t startle the knight and get stabbed.
“Hey,” Connie mumbled.
“Uh, you okay?”
“Trouble sleeping,” she said. She sat up, her back resting against the couch as she pulled her knees to her chest with a frustrated little sigh. “Ever since I got my memories back I’ve started having nightmares. My mom says they’ll probably fade soon, but my brain needs to process everything that happened first.”
A lump of guilt sat in Peridot’s throat, and the room felt silent as she tried to work around it.
Connie broke it. “What about you? What are you doing out of bed?”
“Oh, you know, just your typical late night existential crisis.” She laughed awkwardly and pointed at the door. “I was just going to stand outside and… breathe? I don’t get the fresh air thing. I guess I’ll go breathe.”
“We could talk about it.”
“I don’t think you want to talk to me.”
Connie stared, and Peridot cringed. Maybe that was too direct. The air felt heavy and uncomfortable as they looked at each other in the dark, and Peridot’s eyes slowly drifted to the sword behind Connie. How far away was the nearest respawn? Would it be rude to request that Connie killed her quickly and relatively painfully, or was she just supposed to bow her head and take whatever was coming? Friendship was almost as confusing an enigma as romance.
“I’m not holding it against you,” Connie said, shaking her head a little. “Nobody’s perfect. You apologized. I… I’d be happier if we could just go back to being friends, Peridot.”
“You don’t want to kill me?”
She arched an eyebrow. “Are you offering? Because it would really level everything out.”
Peridot groaned, sinking onto the couch next to Connie. “No thanks. Let’s just stick with the friendship.”
“Okay, friend.” Connie reached out to pat Peridot’s knee. It was incredibly awkward, and her hand jerked back to her own lap. Without speaking, both of them immediately decided they were not going to be the kind of friends that touched.
Peridot covered this time. “How did you know that you wanted to be a Knight?”
“The second I knew what it was, I knew it was for me.” She grinned, shaking her head with a little chuckle. “I can’t explain it. It’s a calling, you know? I’ve always wanted to help people and make a difference. It was just figuring out the best way to do it. The more I studied, the more being a Knight just worked for me. Don’t you feel that way about your class?”
“No.”
It was quiet again, because a flat no was the kind of thing that ended conversations. She cleared her throat and forced herself to elaborate. “My parents permanently died right when I got into college. I was already on the tech track, I was good at it. It felt risky to change, so I just stuck with it. I liked it, but I probably just liked it because I was good at it. Or maybe I’m good at it because I liked it. I don’t know. It’s not a calling.”
Connie shrugged. “Doesn’t have to be. Having a calling is kind of rare. You don’t need one to be happy.”
“But now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!” Peridot cried, barely cutting herself off before she was loud enough to wake the rest of the house. “If you don’t have a calling, how do you figure out what to do with your life? I can’t just want to make good money, because that just ends up with me working for a murder corp.”
“You can’t think of anything that would make you happier?” Connie rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “And there’s nothing that you know you’d hate doing?”
“Everything I hate is off the list. I’m not going to be a park ranger and spend my whole life around trees. I’d rather die.” She snorted and rolled her eyes.
“But you don’t have anything that really makes you happy.” Connie nodded thoughtfully.
Peridot did have hobbies. Her life wasn’t joyless. She loved fighting online about shows, and watching movies, and reading books, and sudoku, and all kinds of things. They just weren’t the kinds of things you could make a career out of. She wasn’t used to devoting much time to them, anyway. Work was her life. She worked hard. She made good money. That had always felt good in its own way. Contributing to society like a good little worker drone, and being rewarded with mountains of cash.
Connie said, “Whenever I’m stuck like that, I just do the right thing.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?"
She laughed, shaking her hands. “I’m sorry! I mean, like, ethically. Ethically right. When nothing is going to make you happy or miserable, you should do the thing that seems morally right. Taht way you can at least go to bed every night knowing you did the right thing.”
Peridot scowled. “How does that help figure out what you want to do?”
“It doesn’t.” She shrugged.
“Thanks for the help.”
Connie stood, unsheathing her sword. Peridot yelped and cringed, rolling back and preparing for her inevitable demise, but Connie simply spoke as she moved the sword slowly through the air. “Because I have a calling, I get myself into trouble. I have a code. I have rules. I do the right thing no matter how it hurts me, and sometimes that means the people I care about get hurt. Having a calling doesn’t make you happy, Peridot. Lapis isn’t having the time of her life taking care of Steven, but it’s what she needs to do. Some people are like that, and some people aren’t.”
She let the sword glow as she sat back down, laying it across her lap. “There are other things I want. Love. A family. I even want to publish a book some day. You don’t just figure out what you want once and you’re happy forever. You just got to do whatever seems like the best choice right now. What could you do right not that would put the most good into the world?”
“Joining the Crystal Gems, hacking the DDC, trying to take them down so no one else gets turned into monsters and the world is a safer place.”
“Then do that.”
“Except I’ll be quitting my job. You know, the thing that makes me money? The thing I do all day?”
“The thing you hate,” Connie pointed out.
“I’d be betraying them.”
“You’d be betraying the people you hate,” she agreed.
“I’ll be a nervous wreck!”
Connie didn’t even say anything to that. She leaned back in her seat and gave Peridot a look, and the older girl sighed. She was right. Peridot was already a nervous wreck. Even with her allegedly safe job, she was still on edge about getting into trouble with the Diamonds, and with the police as well. At any moment Yellow might pitch a fit and then she’d be in that speaker room, listening to a song that turned her into a monster.
“Listen, Peridot, sometimes all you can do is your best.” She sighed. “There’s a lot of stuff that just isn’t in our control. We’re small people.”
“That’s terrible.”
“That’s capitalism,” she agreed. “You should try a co-op sometime. Changed my life.”
That got a laugh out of her. She was glad that Connie and her had both clearly decided touching was off the table, because this felt like the kind of moment where they should hug, and Peridot had absolutely no interest in that. The air felt a little clearer now, at least, and Connie’s sword no longer felt like it was literally hanging over her head. She took a deep breath and looked at Connie. “If you need to talk, I’m here too.”
“I don’t have anything to talk about,” she said with a shrug. “How’d stuff with you and Lapis?”
“I don’t know. Fine?” She muttered and put her chin in her hands. “That’s a whole other thing. I don’t know how our relationship works. Sometimes I think we’re not even girlfriends. Sometimes I think we’re just friends who have sex. And sometimes I wonder if I even experience sexual attraction, or if I just act on it because it’s easy and it’s what I’m supposed to do, and I always do what I’m supposed to do. How do you figure that out?”
Connie’s eyes were round in the dark, full of sheer terror. “I can’t help you."
“No, I know.”
“You need to talk to Steven.”
“Yeah.”
Silence.
Connie’s voice dropped lower, sounding bashful, “Is sex fun?”
An opportunity was an opportunity. She stretched and stood and said, “You should ask Steven.”
As the girl stuttered and stumbled over her words, and Peridot headed back to bed, she wondered if maybe she did have a chance at being good at all this after all. She took the local network down, and fell asleep beside Lapis.