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There is beauty in connection. There is beauty in solace. There is beauty in the way the two fight and scream and rage.
Nastya has always known this: it was very nearly the principle she built her life on. She was the princess, this meant a certain degree of isolation (for lessons, tutors, staying out of the way, keeping up appearances) and a certain degree of connection (for speeches, gatherings, meetings, personal escapes), but it was all interconnected anyway. After all, her lonely childhood was almost never without a nearby cord or port to connect her to a virtual world that could often be just as lonely as the real one, and her albeit sparse social life had always been culled by her parents’ desire to keep her brothers in the public spotlight and her out of it.
Not that she minded. She enjoyed solace. She still does.
Nastya wakes up in a cold sweat, gasping for breath like she’d just regenerated after drowning. She blinks into full consciousness, still disoriented. There is additional feedback in her system somewhere, like the crackle of an intercom, and she realizes her wrist is still plugged into one of Aurora’s many on-board ports. She rips the cord out, the sudden silence in her brain washing over her. Without the static, she can think more clearly.
She is onboard the Starship Aurora — her girlfriend — and she is awake and sitting in the engine room. Her brother Jonny is shooting things in the other room, which she can not only hear but feel as a faint pang in her abdomen reminds her.
Aurora hums with mechanical energy, a question asking why Nastya disconnected, and Nastya smiles at her girlfriend and scrubs the residual cold sweat from her even colder forehead.
“Sorry, Aurora,” she says quietly, and although she knows Aurora isn’t mad, she diverts her head from the view of the security camera. “I just… need a breather. Sometimes staying connected all the time— it reminds me too much of Cyberia. I can still understand you without the binary, love.” Nastya places a gentle hand on the floor, and it is warm.
Until it is not warm, and Nastya’s hand is in snow, and she has to struggle to her feet before she understands what is happening. There is blood on her other hand as she looks at it, and it is not silver but a bright, ghastly red. This is not right. She has not had red blood since—
“Anastasia,” a voice growls, and it is familiar but not familial. Not anymore. It is unfriendly. “There you are.”
This is not right. Tutor was never out here, in the snow. Nastya had been alone in the snow. Why was Tutor here? But the pain hit her next, more acute than any death because it was the first time she had been shot and she would not forget that. Was this a memory? A horrible dream? Perhaps both.
“I am the only one who can save you.”
That’s not Tutor. That’s Carmilla. Nastya looks up blearily through the snow and pain and tears and sees the imposing figure before her, the dark-cloaked form of the Doctor. She reaches up to take Carmilla’s hand, and her head spins and whirls and sickens until the blackness of the Doctor’s silhouette has engulfed her and she is in darkness. It is speckled with pinpricks of light — stars, Nastya realizes — and in the distance she can see a familiar shape. Aurora. Why is she sitting in space?
She turns away to assess her surroundings, and finds herself staring at a distant star, with a single sheet of old, weathered plating drifting away from her. She suddenly and desperately wants to feel the weight of that metal in her hand, to pretend that the warmth that thrums through the Aurora is still here, but it is too far and the coldness of space is already choking her and freezing her. Why is she always cold?
For once, could she be warm in her nightmares?
She blinks into reality — perhaps it is reality, she hopes it is reality — and finds fire in her veins. Everything is burning and pain and she thinks she is sobbing but she can't tell. There is so much, too much, and she wishes she could go back to the cold. It is ironic, but she is in too much agony to laugh. Perhaps she is laughing, and not crying. How is she to know? She doesn’t cry often enough to be able to tell. But no, the angular face above her is Carmilla, so this must not be real, even though every drop of brand-new mercury in her body is screaming that it is real because it hurts. It is not real, she fights to remind herself, even as the mechanism pumps her body into excruciation cold enough to scorch. She knows what happens after this moment, so she must be in the past. The knowledge doesn’t ease the pain.
Nastya begins to wake.
The ship Captain stares at the thing now lying on their floor. The pilot had called it in (“Boss, there’s a… maybe a person? I dunno. It’s floating out in our path.”) and the Captain couldn’t just leave a corpse there in good conscience, not when it was directly in common traffic paths of the Alliance’s transport channels. So they had maneuvered to pick it up, and now there is a freezing cold space-dead corpse of a woman on the deck. Her skin is an odd color of dull grey, and she’s curled into the fetal position. She has brown hair and metal-rimmed glasses, and she’s wearing an old, thick coat from a planet, group, or government nobody on the ship is able to identify. She’s a mystery, albeit a dead one.
And then, stiff from the void and utterly impossibly, the corpse stretches a hand. The ship’s heating system is usually pretty warm, as many of the officers and crew members are from a more tropical planet in the Alliance’s system, so this thing that could not have possibly been human thawed almost unnaturally quickly. Its eyes were the last to respond, but when they opened they were tinged with silver.
Only the pilot and the Captain are still in the room, and only one of them is focused on the corpse. Some backup would be nice, the Captain muses, and the form on the floor takes a deep, shuddering gasp. For some reason, the fact that it breathes unsettles the Captain almost as much as its first uncomfortable motion. That’s another thing. Why is it so difficult to think of this (presumably) person as a person? The Captain thinks it must be how grey it is. It looks much like someone put a silicon skin over a mannequin, at least in color.
The woman — was the gray skin from the depths of space? The Captain had never heard of that happening before — sat up slowly, uncurling like a black-clad banner. It was a wonder that the pilot had spotted it at all. The woman looked about in confusion and the Captain saw that she was much taller than expected, and noticed that the thing had become a woman. It was easier to think of her in such a way when she was moving.
“Where am I?” the woman demanded in a tone that belied her shaken state despite the firmness in her voice. “When am I?” What an odd question.
“You’re on the Starship Hydrargyros,” the Captain replied, trying to sound calm. The Captain could not answer the second question, because times and calendars are different for almost all systems and planets, and so any day would have been the wrong one. At least the woman understands this, because she nods without pressing further.
“Where did you come from?” the Captain asks the stranger, who is now standing with the thick coat wrapped around her for comfort.
“Home,” the woman says, and this is probably the truest answer she could have given. “I was… I was near Valhöll.” She looks disoriented, lost, confused. There is an expression on her face that the Captain knows but does not want to acknowledge. Her coat seems to carry with it the mantle of grief, her silver-shot eyes shine with the steady lamp of anguish, and her expression… It is an expression of pain. The utmost pain. The pain of feeling truth but not knowing it, the blades of sorrow cutting lines into her skin. The pain is feeling with a surety that those you love are gone, but not truly knowing.
“The star we picked you up by,” the Captain gestures out the window, “that is Valhöll.”
The woman looks out the window at the star and her burden weighs heavier on rail-thin shoulders. “It is changed,” the woman murmurs, before turning to the Captain with a flat voice like binary. There is only the absence and presence of sound to denote meaning. “May I access your database?”
The Captain cannot refuse this strange grief-stricken wanderer, and within mere moments of being introduced to the computer, the thin-framed woman is navigating the unfamiliar system with ease. She types quickly and nearly silently, a series of rapid-fire names and frustrations.
The Captain notices the names, and that although they are unfamiliar to the Captain, the database understands.
Raphaella la Cognizi: disappeared around the Tesselow Black Hole System.
Ivy Alexandria: reported dead after the war and subsequent razing of Aird’naxela.
Marius von Raum: reported consumed by unidentified organisms.
DrumBot Brian: reported dead.
Ashes O’Reilly: disappeared in an incident involving time technology. Assumed dead.
Gunpowder Tim: killed after the Gunpowder Rampage when the stolen gunship collided with a space station.
Nastya Rasputina: reported “Out” by members of the crew. Presumed dead.
Jonny d’Ville: killed in bar fight.
The Toy Soldier: will stop pretending.
The Captain can see the crushing pressure begin to fold this slight woman in on herself, cold grey fingers tapping the keys a final time. The trepidation is palpable, and the Captain feels guilty for a moment to merely observe.
The Starship Aurora: No results.
The Captain thinks the traveler would collapse under the weight of what she finds at the last search from the way her hands tremble. She does not break, somehow bending further into standing with bowed head. She straightens and her head settles into a position that looks quite regal. Her gaze fixes on the Captain, and understanding passes between them. She is out of her time, alone and friendless, perhaps without her family as well, and she stands with the composure of a queen.
“I am Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova,” she says with full confidence, as if the Captain could not see the fire and ice exploding behind her eyes, “and I am alone.”
Nastya is not the last of the Mechanisms to die, not chronologically. After all, there is always Ashes, stuck in the heat death of the universe, whom she doesn’t know about. Of course, Nastya lives a lot longer than Ashes. Funny how time works.
No, Nastya spends her second set of years as Anastasia Romanova scouring the universe for bits of her love, scattered and sold and traded and integrated. She finds enough pieces of Aurora (original or otherwise, it’s all semantics anyway) to build a fragmented consciousness. She says hello.
‘I love you, Nastya,’ Aurora says, and then she is gone for good. It goes without saying that Nastya weeps for a long time after that. Nastya weeps until she has no more tears, until she is weeping mercury blood. She cries and freezes and wanders and builds and breaks until all that is in her wake is broken homes and silvered ruins, and the people of the universe know she is the Forever Queen. Her strange coat is distinctive, with unfamiliar patches actually sewn on. Sometimes, if the light catches her skin just right, it reflects into a mercurial halo about her head, in a perfect circle. An unreal crown for a ghost of a monarch, and she wears it with all the dignity of her father. She weeps, and the people of the universe can feel her tragedy without knowing it. Nastya slowly begins to forget how to grieve.
Then she goes in search of an ignominious death to match that of her family. It is difficult to find such deaths as an immortal, but she does her best. She cannot follow her family exactly, she is still a storyteller at heart and must find her own story. She searches far and wide until she comes to the conclusion that, like so many of her very old crew, she must take it upon herself.
So she does.
Nastya finds a remote comet, strands herself there, and sets about bleeding out. It is remarkably difficult, but she manages. It is as ignoble as she could have hoped: from princess to pirate to queen and now to dust.
Ashes O’Reilly finds their old crew member’s body an uncountable number of years later, lying cold and lifeless and perfectly preserved on the comet, nearly flayed in an attempt to bleed. Ironically, in death Nastya has more color to her than she ever did while alive. Ashes sits there with her until everything ends.
Nastya dies in ice, and Ashes in fire. This is, of course, until both cease to exist. Then it is just irony and a nice story for the people adjacent to their world. Did you enjoy the story?
There is beauty in solace.