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It takes a grand total of two weeks for Natasha to christen their new prison-planet ‘Hope’s End’.
Fittingly, she believes. Natasha recalls her grandmother, a Russian Orthodox woman who took her religion seriously, steel spine held up by steel faith. Babulya would put the fear of god into all the children with talk of hellfire and brimstone, of wastelands where the Devil ruled. If Babulya saw where her granddaughter struggles today, she would demand to know what sins were committed to get her descendant damned to such a place.
Chained and collared, toiling in hot desert mines by day, freezing in the naked dirt by night.
Hope’s End indeed.
She makes the mistake of mentioning the moniker to Diana. Diana goes quiet; she puts a hand on Natasha’s shoulder, forces her to look the princess in the eyes. “Hope does not end,” Diana says seriously, bluer-than-blue eyes boring into her. “It can’t; I won’t let it.”
Natasha has never seen someone so sure of their words. It’s hard not to believe Diana’s belief; her optimism is infectious. And yet—
This place, this horrorshow of a place, makes doubt easy.
With every chip of stone in the mines, she can feel a piece of herself chipped away. With every blow of the chisel, her skin bruises and breaks. How do you keep heart in such conditions? How does Diana?
They are fed twice a day, their rations meager. Once before the work, once after the work. On a less cruel planet, Natasha would call these meals breakfast and dinner.
But they are not on a less cruel planet, and these can barely be called meals. Street-puddle taste aside, they’re lacking both nutrients and volume. Perhaps they’re sufficient to the alien prisoners—although considering the sunken frames and slow shambling, Natasha doubts it. Still, she is at a particular disadvantage. She and Diana are the only humans, and Diana is tough in more than spirit. It takes several painful weeks for Natasha’s less superior digestive system to adjust.
The rations are portioned out by a stone-faced woman with scales creeping up her arms, disappearing under a blocky collar of her own. She’s blank with routine as she upends her ladle into cupped hands.
Bowls would be a luxury. There are no luxuries here.
(Bowls, beds, baths—Natasha is appreciating all her former comforts with weeping-wound nostalgia. Never again will such amenities be taken for granted.)
They sit cross-legged on the ground, backs leaning against a large rock. Protecting us from attacks we can’t see, a cynical little voice in Natasha’s head whispers.
A young girl chatters at Diana in clicks and high-pitched chirps. Diana smiles down at her, uncomprehending, but no less loving for it. “Here, my child,” she says softly, breaking off a majority of her ration and handing it to the child.
Kindness.
It’s a rarity here, in these dismal conditions—and yet Diana heaps it on those around her. She’s a bottomless well of benevolence.
Natasha hopes her daughter has a warrior like that in her corner.
Truly, Diana is a marvel. She has strength in spades, fueled by the fire of her soul. She manages to make comrades out of exhausted husks. Natasha cannot have faith in those who feel the same hunger that bites in her belly. She has seen what they will do for scraps. Desperate people cannot be relied on—but Diana is not desperate, somehow unmarred by their environment.
“I would think a princess would handle the transition to slave much less gracefully,” Natasha remarks.
“My people have been held in chains before,” Diana says. “It is unjust, but I can endure.” Her gaze sweeps over their fellow slaves, women of all species and kind—none of them as hardy as an Amazon.
I don’t know if I can, Natasha thinks.
Days and nights, the endless cycle of work and torment and terror. She does not have gods to believe in, nor that indomitable womanly spirit that carries Diana onwards. Natasha is just a human being, flung to the corners of the universe and plunged into the depths of hell. She is fallible and she is breakable and each day is another weight on her shoulders, cracks beginning to snake up her glassbone legs.
Another girl shuffles over, and Natasha can see Aleks in the gap-toothed gnash, in the childlike way she leans in. Longing so fierce it brings a wave of dizziness in its wake crashes over her. No. It does not matter if she can or can’t endure—she must.
For Aleks.
Diana surrenders the rest of her ration to the child’s small hands. Natasha wants to press her thumb to the dimple of Diana’s smile, like maybe if she touched it she would understand.
God, does she want to understand.
Natasha’s always been a scientist by study, an explorer by nature.
The mechanics of Diana, what makes her tick, what gear compels her forward? Does her spirit burrow into her marrow, into the soft bone parts of her? Any answer she gets will inevitably be tainted by bias. Natasha can only ever truly know her own heart. She can point to her driving forces, the curiosity and the stargazing and the raw burning ambition.
(And she has—oh she has. On the cold cold cold nights when the ground leeches the soul out with her warmth, Natasha circles back to every decision that led to now, every minute choice that landed her in chains, light-years away from those she loves.)
She remembers the day she set off, sitting beside her suitcase, Aleks in her arms, her in Mishka’s. They were silent, of course. Even though she had checked and triple-checked that she had everything required, it seemed unwise to break tradition.
They left in silence too, although there was no cultural custom requiring it.
Natasha held onto Mishka’s arm the whole drive. He made no protest even as it restricted his movement, wheel-wise. Every time she looked at his face (she couldn’t stop looking at his face), he was blinking hard, tearless by the skin of his teeth.
“I can’t go,” she said when it was time to step from the car. To move an inch from her family seemed impossible.
Mishka cradled her face in his firm hands. “We will manage, my love. Go see the stars.”
So she did.
Look where that got her.
(Still, she can’t bring herself to regret it. Shame and guilt sit oil-heavy in the depths of her, but she would not trade away her brushes with the universe. Space was always her dream, and even now that it’s a nightmare, some part of Natasha doesn’t want to wake up.)
She misses her husband. She misses her home. She misses speaking her native tongue—although not as much as she misses hearing it.
She misses her baby.
Eight years ago she held a wrinkled red newborn in her arms and swore, exhausted as she was, that she would do right by her daughter, her beautiful baby girl with her scrunched-up face and miraculous little scream.
There are oceans between them, seas of stars and nebulae and spiraling galaxies. Natasha has dreamed of this her whole life, but that doesn’t mean she can traverse it. She’s trained for a river and a riptide pulled her under and spat her out in the middle of the Pacific.
Well. Space she wanted and space she got. Aliens and mysterious planets and strange spacecraft. The last is particularly of interest—
Her heart races whenever the low whir is within hearing distance. Her body locks up in fear.
Natasha has nightmares about finding herself illuminated by the ship, pale yellow washing over her like a funeral shroud. The hum of foreign equipment is a death knell. Not hers, not today, but there’s always tomorrow. Fear’s good at keeping the slaves compliant, and Natasha is not above base terror.
Human. Being.
Still, all the fear in the world would not be enough to quell that damning curiosity lurking in the back of her mind.
Their technology is clearly more advanced than Earth’s. The fact that they can beam people up in the first place tells her that much. Natasha’s fingers itch with the urge to touch the ship, to take it apart and learn its inner workings. Maybe people can’t be quantified piece by piece, but machines sure can be.
When Natasha was nine years old, she was deathly afraid of the radiator in her parents’ bedroom. Her father said she was too old to have such silly fears. He took it to pieces, showed her how they fit together, and then told her to rebuild it. She did, and she never feared its rumble again. Natasha thinks that maybe if she knew how the ships worked—or even just what they did with those they take—then they would strike less terror in her heart.
Her father taught her to be curious instead of afraid. He taught her magic too.
Not for the first time, Natasha finds herself mourning the loss of her deck. The cards got her through many a long and lonely night back on her own ship. She doesn’t know how to do magic with the scant materials on hand, and frankly, doesn’t have the energy to figure it out. Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow she’ll pull a pebble out of one of the girls’ ears.
A commotion jars Natasha out of her thoughts—a guard bellowing at a woman stumbling in line. Diana’s blue ices to glacial as she observes the encounter.
And that—that won’t lead anywhere good. Usually, that ends in Diana taking a beating for someone who won’t even thank her afterwards. Natasha hates nights like that, nights she spends pressed to aching skin, nights where the princess breathes like there’s a gun to her head. Diana can’t get black-and-blue like normal people, but she still feels hurt. Sometimes it’s like she feels all the hurt around her, absorbing it through sheer empathy. Lovely, but absolutely brutal. And thankless.
Always, always thankless.
“Are all of your people like you?” Natasha asks, desperate for a distraction. Desperate perhaps, to know whether Diana’s innate goodness is shared by a whole race of women.
Diana works a dark curl around her finger. “We all hold the Amazon ideals, if that is what you mean.”
They speak in an odd blend of Russian and Greek. Natasha hasn’t the energy to teach Diana Russian properly, but the woman is a language sponge. Their melting pot of communication is just what they’ve found works best for them. Natasha can’t always—Greek is difficult when she’s this tired, the syllables slurring on her tongue. Their fellow prisoners speak a common tongue, so they’ve been trying to pick that up too (Diana to much greater effect).
“I was raised by my people, the only child on an island of warriors and healers and scholars. All the knowledge I have was imparted by them. I learned compassion from watching those around me. I learned judgement at my mother’s waist.” Wistfulness thickens her tone.
Natasha scrapes the last bits of foodstuff from under her nails. She eats it because of course she does. “That sounds like a wonderful education.”
(She herself clawed her way up through the thankless jagged halls of academia, succeeding not thanks to, but in spite of her mentors.)
“Paradise shielded me while my people prepared me. I was destined for a life outside the island.” The corner of her mouth tugs up as if snared by a fishhook. “Although I never suspected my journey would lead me quite so far from home.”
Their lives are so different, and yet their experiences here are mirrored.
“Neither did I,” Natasha says dully.
She stares down at the red ground between her legs. It’s harsh and bright and there’s nothing like it on Earth. The loud voices have stopped—putting her once more at the center of Wonder Woman’s attention.
“Tasha,” Diana says, and the familiarity makes her dry throat ache.
Natasha breathes the thin foreign air. Her lungs burn, polluted and sanded raw. “I can’t remember what color dress Aleks was wearing the last time I saw her.”
Her failure has plagued her for days.
In the all-consuming darkness of the mines, she closes her eyes and tries to remember. Was it her white church dress that Auntie Valya gifted her? Was it the baby pink number Natasha stitched herself? All that she can conjure is Aleks’ chubby face and beatific smile. Will one day that fade too?
“I am not a mother,” Diana says gently, placing a comforting hand on Natasha’s thigh. “But I am a daughter. I have always admired my mother’s wisdom, strength, ingenuity—all traits I try to embody and have observed in you. You are an exemplary woman and your daughter has great cause for pride.”
Natasha’s eyes burn, but she does not have the hydration for tears. Diana’s reassurance is a balm to the scraped raw parts of her.
“Your mother must be very proud,” Natasha manages to croak out after a solid minute of working her jaw.
Diana lies her head against the red stone. “I try to make her so.” She looks very young all of a sudden. Diana is so mature and respectable that it’s easy to forget she’s barely more than a kid herself.
A shrill whistle cuts through the air like a scythe, signalling the end of mealtime.
Diana’s off like a shot, gone to help the most frail get to where they need to go. Stragglers get a beating if they’re lucky. If they’re not…
Natasha glances at the empty sky nervously before shifting to a half-kneeling position. Getting up is a process nowadays. The stone wall aids her balance, at least.
She stands on weak wobbly legs, clumsy as a newborn fawn, to stumble to the sleeping area.
(She’d call it the sleeping quarters, except it’s literally just a different patch of barren stone—one specifically designated for sleeping. Hell, ‘the night corral’ would be a more accurate term.)
Natasha was in good shape before—as all cosmonauts must be—but her strength has been starved out of her. Hard labor takes its toll on the body.
Symptoms are cataloged as diligently as her previous health journals were, lines written in without pen or paper, just the mental tallying of all her body’s failings. Brittle hair snaps when she runs a hand through it. She shivers in cold even during the oppressive heat of the sun’s peak. Dizzy spells are common, black creeping into the edges of her vision. In the mines, the blackness is so great that she can’t tell the spells from normal consciousness, can’t distinguish the gnawing of hunger from the strain of overtaxed muscles.
If the artificial cold of her starved body is taxing, it is nothing compared to the all-encompassing freeze that night brings. The icy wind is sharp enough to cut bone. Even the still air is cold enough to burn the sensation from her skin.
Diana runs warm.
All the kids caught onto that one fairly quick, so they sleep cozied up to her gentle warmth. A space heater twice over. Natasha is too tired to appreciate the humor of it.
She lies down, flat on her back. Once Diana is done with her helping, she curls up next to her. She drags Natasha into her arms, hordes of alien children wriggling into every small gap so as to be pressed to the Amazon’s eternally sun-soaked skin. Natasha, by nature of being Diana’s primary target in bedsharing, is the one who benefits the most from her friend’s heat. A decision made not of sentiment, but logic. Diana has seen her at dawn, the dangerously blue lips and fingers she cannot even twitch.
There is no moon on Hope’s End.
It’s fitting—pitch black and unseeing, the dark is as oppressive as the day. Diana glows, invisible and the center of the universe, the heat source they all orbit around. The hope source.
Natasha treasures her memories of moonlight. What she wouldn’t give to be able to look upon Diana in sleeping, to witness her at peace, face not reflecting the troubles around her.
Alas.
The one benefit of the dead-moon sky is how visible the scant few other light sources are, celestial carpet clear as lights-out in her ship.
She knows several acclaimed astronomers who would kill for such a view.
The stars are so different here.
On nights when she has the strength, she maps them in the dust, tries to hold the configurations in her head. There is science in the suffering, and she is at her core an explorer, walking where no other human has walked before—even if that walking is done in chains.
Tonight she is scraped bare, the bones of her picked clean by the grueling hours of work. Anything she tries to learn now will slide out of her mind before dawn.
Tonight, the stars blur when she blinks, silver streaks burning behind her eyelids.
Tonight, Natasha sleeps.