okay you’re all aware of yellow pearl, the shitlord1950s secretary
“that’s no excuse”
she has a smugness about her that seems funny compared to a) what we know about pearls and b) the stoic sad blue pearl everyone is fawning over. and its true that yellow pearl seems exactly like that kid in elementary school that would tattle on you in a second to get a pat on the head from the teacher–but y’all are forgetting something.
the moment yellow diamond speaks, saying pearl’s name
she flinches. immedietely. unthinkingly. yellow diamond doesn’t even sound that angry, just vaguely annoyed, and yellow pearl’s automatic response is to shrink
when yellow diamond asks her why someone is calling on the diamond line, she rushes to answer, doing her best to avoid being blamed for what’s happening. when she says “i don’t know” she sounds almost panicked, and she quickly tries to shift blame to peridot
and when yellow diamond reaches her hand down, yellow pearl backs the hell up
like yellow diamond hasn’t even moved the camera at that point the only thing that moved is pearl, she moved the fuck back the second yellow diamond reached her hand down. and fuck i would too if the hand was bigger than my fucking body
in conclusion, blue pearl isn’t the only pearl that needs protection
so i was wondering where rey learned to understand binary (the language of astromech droids) because she’s a lone scavenger living on a desert planet and i was thinking that maybe sometime in the course of her star destroyer spelunking adventures, let’s say she’s 14 years old; she finds part of an astromech droid that’s still functioning just enough to talk. so she decides not to trade it to unkar plutt for portions and takes it home instead, cleans it up. hooks it up to an old comm screen so she can see what it’s saying while she’s still learning all its beeps and whistles. and then at the end of a long day, when she gets home, she scrubs the sand off her face, pours the sand out of her boots, and just sits and talks to her barely-functioning astromech droid, whose knowledge is thirty years old: coruscant, the seat of the empire (what empire?) updates on the construction of the death star. bounty notices for han solo, smuggler. the imperial senate, disbanded (but what about the new senate?)
the hot, dry air of jakku, making mirages of old memories just outside the shell of her AT-AT. the desert so quiet that you can hear sand sliding down the dunes, in soft silky layers. rey, scraping crumbs off her plate with her fingertips, pressing her droid with more questions. what’s naboo? what’s a forest? how big is a forest? what’s a tree? how many trees are there? (no one else tells her about these things. no one else talks to her.) the droids go everywhere, she realizes. they see everything and keep everything, scavengers of memory and information, of events and people and ideas. she learns binary until she gets good enough to detach the comm screen and just listen; during the day she quietly practices binary to herself, whistling each beep and tone as she hikes the dunes to the star destroyers, her calves aching. when she gets home, the droid greets her with a happy beep. for a few months, it feels nice, strange, hopeful. it feels odd to have someone waiting for her. refreshing, almost.
and then one day rey comes home and the astromech droid doesn’t beep, no whistle of greeting. the light in its glassy round eye is dark. the fuel cells are dead. her heart sinks. she searches the star destroyer endlessly for another working fuel cell, tries to trade for them at niima outpost, but to no avail: the model is too old, and any fuel cells that could work are all being used for other things. that night she wears her x-wing helmet and sniffs, watching the stars, wrestling with hope and despair in equal measure; in the morning she drags the droid to unkar plutt and trades its parts for twelve portions. the first portion is bitter and tasteless, more so than usual, but it’s alright, rey thinks. her friend even fed her.
and now she talks to all the astromech droids that pass through niima outpost. they don’t mind talking to her. they’re happy to tell her how hyperdrives work, what a compressor does, how to fix an acceleration compensator. and every time she hopes that maybe, the droid will end up on a distant planet somewhere else, and it’ll mention a girl on jakku, a girl who polished its casing and oiled its hinges, a girl who’s been waiting for a long time, and someone will look up with a twinge of recognition and realizeit’s time to go back. it’s time for her to come home… it never happens. but rey tries anyway, because the droids go everywhere, see everything, meet everyone… so she stays, and waits.
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
