Work Text:
The laboratory of Doctor Carmilla is wholly inhospitable to mortal life, Raphaella has concluded.
Even ignoring the hostile lifeforms, temporarily deterred by precise scalpel cuts and pistol shots, there’s no sense of organisation to the dark and echoing chambers. Where there are paper files, they aren’t written in any language that still lives; where there are monitors pieced together from scraps, their systems don’t respond to any blood except that of their creator.
In short, Raphaella is rather fond of it.
The operating tables seem like a promising place to start, stained the rusted colour of old blood. Very old blood, she concludes after a brief observation. This whole place is one big biohazard.
Nearby, there are workstations covered in gleaming metal. A shoddy reproduction of a heart; something that might be a liver or might be a lung; a set of coils wound into the shape of a brain. Prototypes for the real thing, at a guess, although Raphaella has no desire to perform such invasive surgery on herself, thank you very much. Her chances of survival are already slim.
She considers the quicksilver vials that line one shelf, catching the faint hints of light and reflecting it around the room. Transfusion is a better option than surgery, but it’s hardly foolproof. Besides, there isn’t nearly enough of it to replace a human body’s worth of blood.
With a sigh, she rolls up her sleeves and sets to work, one hand always resting on her gun. She’ll have to work this out the old-fashioned way.
By the time Raphaella is ready to operate, the world has blurred into a haze of starvation and sleep deprivation. The vials of mercury have given her enough of an edge to survive, but it’s a half-life, tentative and doomed to failure.
She stares into a sheet of metal polished mirror-clean, absently noting the dark circles below her bloodshot eyes, the smears of oil and silver and rust across her skin.
Feather-soft metal yields below Raphaella’s shaking hands. She’s no engineer, but the machinery is singing to her like never before. It all interlinks so perfectly, pistons and plating poised to keep her alive for eternity. Her bones are not hollow enough to let her fly, of course, but she will have millenia to refine her designs — refine herself — into something wonderful.
With the final burst of energy in her gun, she shoots a warning shot into the air.
Her scalpel is heavy in her grip as she sits down on an operating table. The sheets of mirrors are angled perfectly; she watches herself draw the blade slowly across the skin of her shoulders, heedless of the crimson that trickles downwards in her wake.
When she slides her wings into her flesh, she shivers at the heavy ache of it. Her muscles flex below the metal, and her wings shine in the darkness as they spread wide. Raphaella buries her head into her knees, laughing until she can’t breathe and then laughing even more.
No mortal follies fade — not the pain nor the hunger nor the exhaustion — but she feels secure in her hypothesis that none of them can kill her anymore. Delirious with discovery, she cuts into her own palm. The slow process of healing is fascinating to watch, her flesh knitting together until her skin is porcelain-perfect once more.
She passes out, still-laughing, and does not dream.
When she wakes, Raphaella stands up on shaking legs, reborn angelic by her own hand.
It is quite apparent that the crew of the Aurora have forgotten that she ever boarded.
Raphaella doesn’t take it personally. She found several sets of remains while she was searching the laboratory, often in the mouths of mutated creatures looking for their next meal. Clearly she isn’t the first to take the opportunity for scientific advancement — simply the first to succeed.
Still, she doubts they’ll forget after she politely knocks at an entrance and five heads turn to face her. She gives them all a thin-lipped smile, remembering the exact methods she’d used to incapacitate each one upon entry to the ship.
“We were never formally introduced, were we?”
There are five gunshots, not quite synchronised.
“Fuck,” Raphaella says, gritting her teeth through the pain. When she doesn’t keel over and die, she revises her instinctual burst of anger into irritation. “This shirt was tattered enough already.”
She unfolds her wings behind her, careful not to show the strain of the motion. One by one, their gazes catch on gleaming metal. One by one, they recognise that she’s made herself like them.
“Raphaella La Cognizi,” she says. “Charmed, I’m sure.”
“Goddamnit,” one of them mutters — the self-proclaimed captain, Raphaella recalls. He gives her a tired once-over, then motions to the empty space between the wooden man and the metal one. “Brian, deal the lady a hand of cards.”
The months pass in a series of conversations and card games, interspersed by seemingly random acts of violence. Raphaella takes the opportunity to observe the dynamics between crew-members — almost exclusively hostile, yet with an intense familiarity that can only be borne from knowing people for a very long time.
The crew are clearly taking the measure of her in turn, but it’s almost welcoming compared to that initial burst of gunshots. She reasons that they know they’re not getting rid of her until they hit solid ground, so they’re making the best of what must be an uncomfortable situation.
Two months in, Jonny hands her a set of dice and tilts his head.
“So, what’s your story, then?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Raphaella says. The dice come up snake eyes. Damn.
“Come on, you don’t end up on a desperate quest for immortality without something to motivate you. So what is it? Money, power, glory?”
Raphaella considers it for a moment, pushing the dice across the table to Brian.
“Curiosity,” she says at last.
“… Wait, that’s it?” The naked disbelief on Jonny’s face is almost amusing. “I mean, make it up, for all I care — as long as it’s a good story, I don’t give two shits how boring and meaningless your life was before.”
Raphaella smiles. Her scalpel is long abandoned in Doctor Carmilla’s laboratory, but she carries the memories of it in the glint of her teeth.
“Fine,” Jonny relents, his expression turning sour. He scoops up the dice and storms off. He’s quite the sore loser, Raphaella has learnt.
Another month later, and she’s standing by the pilot’s seat, staring out at the galaxy. Brian gives her the occasional glance, but unlike some people, he appreciates the value of silence.
She’s studied space travel, of course, but to experience it is something else. The universe is so vast and solemn, utterly uncaring even as it provides the foundation for life as they know it. They’re a flash of colour and life in the nothingness; she already knows that entropy will lead to her end eventually, just as everything will eventually disintegrate.
“When will we reach solid ground?” Raphaella asks, after a while of contemplation.
Brian blinks, the movement precise and mechanical.
“We’ve got at least six months left, and that’s only if Aurora decides she wants to speed up. Nastya’s the only one who could convince her to do it — I’ve just got to hope.” He raises his eyebrows in commiseration, does something with his mouth that might be a smile.
“How much at the longest?”
“A year or two.”
“That sounds manageable. I’ll be leaving you once we land.”
Brian blinks again, and this time the metal of his face shifts into a startled expression.
“I never intended to stay,” she explains. “I have better things to do with immortality than spend it with a crew of hyper-violent vagabonds. I’m a scientist, not a pirate.”
“You might not have a choice.” From the others, it might be a threat, but Brian states it in simple factual tones. “None of us did, not really.”
“I chose to do this to myself,” Raphaella says archly. “No one else gets a say in it.”
Brian doesn’t reply. Sighing, she leans her head against the cold window. It’s another week before either of them move again. The universe is carrying on without them. Of course it is.
Raphaella manages a decade alone on the dull little planet they’ve landed on before she finds herself sitting at a bar with Ashes.
“It didn’t work out, yeah?”
She doesn’t bother dignifying that with a response as she orders the strongest drink the bartender is legally allowed to serve her. They sit in silence for a while. At least it’s not Jonny, she supposes. This much alcohol seems like a danger around Ashes — she doubts the building will survive the night — but at least the conversation is sedate.
“We’ve all tried it, you know. Going off somewhere on our own for a while. Hell, it’s what Nastya and Ivy are doing.” Ashes laughs, their scorn echoing in their glass. “It never fucking sticks.”
“Why?”
“None of us are really sure. Doc Carmilla wanted a band to play with, and since she’s gone—” Ashes shrugs, downing the rest of their drink. “You used the stuff in her lab. You’re as bound to it as the rest of us. Whatever that means.”
Raphaella folds her wings tight against her back, the metal weighing her down.
She doesn’t fully remember her time in the laboratory; the memories have faded into blurs of sensation and vivid freeze-frame images. She has no idea if she knew the risks of what she was doing. She has no idea if she cared. Delirium will do that to a person.
“You want to burn this place down with me?”
“It might be therapeutic,” Raphaella admits, swirling her drink in its glass.
“Great. Many hands make light work when you’re pouring gasoline.”
When they get back to the ship after a few months of creating havoc — “Think of it like a crash course,” Ashes had said, an expert in every chemical reaction that caused things to ignite — there’s an unfamiliar face onboard. Unfamiliar to Ashes, too, by the way they arch their brows.
“Where did we pick this one up, then?”
“Oh, somewhere,” the Toy Soldier sing-songs. “He’s quite a friendly chap, really!”
“Does ‘he’ have a name?”
“I’ve just been calling him the Baron!”
True to the Toy Soldier’s words, ‘the Baron’ greets Raphaella with a beaming smile and a shining handshake. Idly, she wonders if he’s metal all the way down, or if it’s just surface-level.
She introduces herself, and his eyes dance with mischief.
“Ah, a fellow member of the aristocracy,” he says with a wink that tells her everything she needs to know about his so-called nobility. “Baron Marius von Raum, at your service.”
“I’m as aristocratic as you are, I’m sure,” she replies, bringing his hand to her lips.
It’s the beginning of something close to a friendship.
Raphaella enjoys the planet of the Acheron. She toys with Daedalus in his youth, but his son is far more interesting. She encourages Icarus’ ambitions, watches him make himself a set of wings, and she doesn’t shed a tear when his father sabotages him and sends him tumbling to the ground from the tallest skyscraper in the City.
She doesn’t see most of the crew for all those centuries, but she and Marius share a quiet correspondence through the years. His psychoanalysis of the Olympians is amusing, even if he seems to be entirely allergic to the scientific method.
All in all, it’s a good way to get used to the timescales of immortality, but she finds herself relieved to sit in a dark room in the Acheron, surrounded by the rest of the crew. Her wings spread behind her, warm metal curving against her upper arms.
“Have fun?” Ashes — or should it be Hades? — asks her. There’s a smirk on their dark-painted lips as they look her over for weaknesses. They’ll find no cracks in her armour this time.
“I believe so. There were a lot of bright minds in this city, eager to burn themselves out.”
There’s shouting from one of the speakers, a figure shaking his fist on a flickering monitor.
“Is that Daedalus? He seems… unhappy.”
“Might have double-crossed him. Let’s be honest, it’s not like he was interesting.” Ashes’ smirk turns conspiratorial. After a few seconds, Raphaella smiles back. They’re not wrong, after all.
“Would you like to know the chances that you would have perished in the Doctor’s laboratory?”
Raphaella hasn’t spent a large amount of time with either of the recently-returned crewmembers. Nastya seems to find her off-putting company, and Ivy is rarely seen outside of the comfort of the makeshift libraries a few levels above engineering.
But for reasons unknown, Ivy stands in Raphaella’s lab, watching her with curious eyes. Ivy’s gaze follows the movement as Raphaella’s wings shift. She feels uncomfortably (ironically) like a spectacle, a specimen under the eyes of something only interested in the novelty of her being.
(Later, she’ll learn that Ivy will watch her in the same way every morning that passes. The physicality of Raphaella’s form will always be new and enchanting to Ivy, even as she adds more and more information to the gleaming database of her brain.)
Ivy coughs once, perfunctory, and Raphaella considers the question.
“That sounds fascinating,” Raphaella says, all honesty.
Ivy’s eyes light up as she launches into a long list of percentages, all worryingly high. Raphaella had known the risks, of course, and she had survived, but it is rather another thing to hear it all said out loud. Her wings fold around her, and she lets the hum of machinery be a comfort.
“It is, frankly, very unlikely that you emerged from the laboratory alive.”
“But I did.”
“But you did,” Ivy agrees, smiling. “A pleasant statistical anomaly, wouldn’t you agree?”
There are very few of the universe’s most unethical scientists that Raphaella does not meet at one point or another. Each of them is like an echo of her younger self, headstrong and self-centered and— well, to put it bluntly, quite naive.
She has her favourites, of course.
Victoria Frankenstein, so idealistic and ambitious, never once realising that she would be her own downfall. Doctor Gretal, her madness only matched by her expertise in bio-modification; Raphaella had killed Gretal herself when her interests turned to true immortality. The Mechanisms weren’t due to interfere in this war for decades yet, but better safe than sorry.
She remembers Odin most fondly. Not the maddened old tyrant who would eventually succumb to the void’s call, but the freshly crowned ruler of an entire system, sharp tongued and vicious. Politics is something of a science, Raphaella finds. Change a variable here, push a button here, and watch as everything changes. Record your results, and repeat the experiment.
(Sometimes her dreams pulse with shifting impossible hues, the colours weaving a gentle yet incomprehensible melody. Odin’s song, or the song of the being that claimed her; it hardly matters either way. She knows better than to let it into her heart.)
Raphaella thinks about Odin a lot during the sixty years they spend captive. Marius and Ivy mock her for it ceaselessly — but then, she mocks Marius for his near-symbiotic attachment to his violin — or possibly the violin is parasitic. Hard to say without further observation.
“I mean, really,” Marius says, voice swooping with characteristic dramatics. “What makes one tyrant so different from another? It’s a big universe, there’s plenty of them to go around.”
“There was a seventy-one percent similarity between the background of Odin and that of Doctor La Cognizi,” Ivy explains patiently. Those details were told in confidence, but Raphaella can’t find it in herself to be offended. It’s all just information once it’s stored in Ivy’s memory. “I would hypothesise that she is experiencing empathy with the circumstances that led Odin to her fate.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Raphaella scoffs. Sometimes she would prefer solitary confinement.
There’s a secret which Raphaella never tells a soul: she knows how to make herself mortal again.
In theory, it’s a methodology she could apply to any one of her crewmates, though most would be unlikely to survive the process for long enough to appreciate it. Not that any of them would appreciate it; it’s very easy to get used to the convenience of never dying when you should.
But she knows how their mechanisms work better than anyone still living, and in many ways, it would be a simple matter to simply… switch them off. Mortality restored with the press of a button.
She doesn’t plan to, of course. There is so much more left to discover in this universe, so many more variables to manipulate and experiments to conduct, all for the pleasure of knowledge.
Besides, her ending is foretold. Sending herself into a black hole is dramatic, but it’s very her. Perhaps it might not even kill her; perhaps she’ll end her story in the same way she started it. Either way, she thinks Odin would be proud as she laughs to herself in the privacy of her lab.
When the time comes, Raphaella knows that she’ll welcome the discovery of her end, just as she welcomed the discovery of her beginning all those millennia ago.