Gift

In retrospect, she will note how deeply ironic everything about her war experience is: how learning to deal out death is what finally gave her life, how choking is what finally gifted her with the space and resources that she needed to truly breathe.

"Wars give men purpose," Ludendorff told her once.

"Women, too, sometimes," she replied.

It took him a moment to figure out which of his words he was meant to substitute with hers, and all three possible variations made him chuckle.

Polonium (Po): Atomic number 84, rare and extremely radioactive element in the chalcogen group, no known stable isotopes. One of its isotopes, Po-210, is highly toxic.

She is lured to Paris by the discovery of polonium.

Really, she comes to Paris for many reasons. She does it to escape from her parents' tedious expectations that she marry respectably and settle down, to defy the dismissive tutors that insisted she would never excel in a university setting, to prove to herself that she could (and would) be as outstanding a chemist as she believes she can be. But she chooses Paris over other scholarship offers because it is where a female scientist and her husband have recently discovered polonium, and where they are still experimenting with radioactive elements. And surely that means that France will live up to the egalitarian Enlightenment ideals for which it has become so renowned.

She arrives at the start of term in a surprisingly calm state, the expected nerves tempered with practiced, grounded self-confidence. The few instructors who had nourished her passion for science in her youth informed her over and over again that a talent like hers was a rare and precious thing, the sort of gift that came from God alone, and she knows that that gift will remain with her, wherever she goes and whatever she does. She might be in a new and unfamiliar country, but she maintains an unexpected degree of serenity as she settles into her new quarters and adjusts to the sensation of hearing nothing but rapid-fire French spoken all around her.

She doesn't worry about the need to make new friends. Years of diligent study, of quietly reading treatises in Latin instead of socializing with other less-intellectual children, have transformed her into a being of facts and figures, of equations and imagination, liberated from the material concerns of regular people. Companionship is a luxury, not an essential. It is far more important to focus on her studies than it is to ingratiate herself to anyone else; her talent will earn her whatever allies she needs, she is sure.

When her courses begin at the Sorbonne, she is initially convinced that she has prematurely entered paradise. Here, she finally has professors with knowledge of chemistry and physics as precise as she needs to answer questions that she had long harbored; here, laboratory equipment is well-stocked and readily accessible; here, she has access to a library filled with rows and rows of books, more than she could ever hope to read if she remained at the university for the rest of her life. For the first few months, she darts from lecture to lecture, immerses herself in treatises and scientific journals, plunges deep into every crevice of chemical knowledge she can find.

It is the most pristine form of happiness she has ever known.

And then the problems began to work their way up through the smooth illusion of her reality.

She knows that she is one of the most innovative students in the department, able as she is to easily confound many of the other students using her meticulously self-taught knowledge (pulled from papers published across the globe in a multitude of languages). And yet she is consistently passed over for opportunities that are handed out to male peers who still stumble over the basics of the field.

"Once in a generation, a student like you comes along with an intuitive understanding of chemistry, a real gift," her professors tell her over and over, repeating the sentiment that she has come to know so well; and yet none of them will accept her into their labs. When one finally offers to let her become his research assistant, it quickly becomes clear that where she is concerned, the sort of chemistry that interests him is not the kind involving beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks, and she turns down his proposal in horror.

Scientific journals accept her articles with rapturous awe, until one somehow learns that "I. Maru" is not, in fact, a man, and the revelation is whispered from ear to ear until not a single publication will even respond to her inquiries.

Word gets back to her that one of her advisers has presented a formula that she developed at a conference, as if it were his own; and, as no one would believe a small, dark woman with a fierce glare and a strange accent if she claimed the innovation as hers, she maintains a painfully bitter silence.

And yet she still loves her discipline with an all-consuming passion that drives her on, in spite of the unending humiliation. She stays up late at night, her mind awhirl with bases and reagents, with valences and radicals, with combustion and radiation, with matter and subatomic particles and the spaces between, with crystalline forms whose structures lock into place unbidden because of the mysteries and wonders of chemistry, until her eyes shut of their own accord. In the mornings, she often rushes to her lectures with the inverse of her looping script imprinted on her left cheek, an inky tattoo pressed where her head rested against a page of her notebook as she slept.

(Once, one of her classmates steals a formula from off the side of her face, shooting flirtatious sidelong glances at her all lecture long as he scribbles in his notebook. He presents the formula to the faculty and instantly wins a fellowship for her three months of painstaking work. She bites her tongue and carries on without a word of complaint.)

She almost meets her idol one bleak afternoon. She goes to a lecture in a large, drafty room and halfway-listens for an hour to a woman in a dark blue dress describe experiments with uranium and electrometers. It's nothing she doesn't already know; she has read every one of the professor's publications so often that she can practically recite them by heart. Rain patters insistently against the windowpane, the sky outside gray and churning. After the lecture, she is tempted to approach the woman as she collects her notes, to introduce herself as a fellow female scientist, to ask how a woman can possibly become truly successful in a field like this; but she already knows. It's a matter of innate intelligence, and of back-breaking work, and of persistence and grit and sheer dumb luck. (And of course it never hurts to have a husband who will help find you lab space and assist your experiments and add his name to your papers, so that anyone who doubts your brilliance will still be willing to accept his.) No, she realizes, she really doesn't have anything to ask, because this stern-looking Polish chemist won't be able to provide any keys for the locked doors that so many young female scientists find between themselves and recognition. All that a personal encounter can do is to diminish a figure that she has held in such high regard for so long. Up close, even a Nobel Prize winner might manage to look like nothing more than a fellow mortal.

When she finally receives her degree, and an offer to pursue a doctorate elsewhere, she accepts both without a second thought. And as her train departs Paris in a grind of metal against metal and a billow of thick black smoke, she reflects absently that nothing would please her more than to one day see the chemists of France humiliated just as deeply as they have humiliated her these past years.

Iodine (I): Atomic number 53, rarest and heaviest of the stable halogens (which react to produce salts). Its name comes from the Greek word for "violet," due to its ready sublimation from a purple-black metallic solid to a violet-colored gas.

Germany, unified only forty years before, is tentatively testing its boundaries on the world stage when she arrives, trying to determine for itself what it means to be a global power in the age of the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions. Her experience in Paris has taught her not to approach even an allegedly modernized country with too much wide-eyed optimism, and so, expectations tempered, she finds that she quite likes Berlin. There is something comfortingly logical and efficient about the German way of doing things; everything is orderly and behaves as it should. It gives her the same satisfaction that she takes from conducting the same experiment over again just to ascertain that it produces the same result.

Her new lab is nothing flashy: a quiet old professor researching industrial chemicals, plus a few other doctoral students who regard her initially with interest, and then with a sullen suspicion that she returns. Still, the professor treats her fairly and gives her a surprising degree of free rein around the lab, for which she feels extremely lucky. And the other students leave her alone while she does her work, which is all that she can really ask of them.

(Nevertheless, she doesn't trust the others in the slightest, and she decides to take preemptive measures against any tricks that they might try. Recalling how easily her classmates in Paris stole her ideas, she approaches the professors of the Assyriology department and asks if she might sit in on lectures. They grant her request with bemusement that quickly turns to bewilderment, as they watch her effortlessly master the abstracted pictograms of Sumerian and the subtle art of mimicking on paper a stylus stroke in wet clay. Being proficient in an impressive handful of languages already, her rapid facility with cuneiform surprises her far less than it does her professors. She begins to write her notes only in a jumble of scripts that she knows her fellow research assistants will never be able to read.)

She has no real interest in industrial chemicals, but the university is willing to pay for her doctorate if she will put her research into this field. And so she puts aside her daydreams of experimenting with radioactive substances and approaches her work with her usual degree of diligence and innovation. Her professor is pleased, and the other doctoral students are mildly irked, which is as it should be. She knows that she is better at this than they are. She knows that she still has a unique talent, although she can no longer say for sure if she believes that it is a gift from God. (Years of unanswered prayer for even a hint of the recognition that she deserves have left her extremely skeptical as to whether or not there ever was a God, to begin with.)

Her years in Berlin pass in a stupefying blur, one day like the next. She earns her doctorate, but, more importantly, at some point she discovers the beauty of gas.

It happens one day as she is waiting for a reaction to finish up, and spends the time idly watching a chunk of iodine in an boiling flask sublime into a gorgeous thick cloud of brilliant purple. She has never before liked to work with states of matter that aren't as easily contained as solids and liquids, but something about that violet plume appeals to her as it twists and curls and escapes out the neck of the flask, freed of the physical constraints of the vessel that attempts to confine it.

She begins to experiment with elements in their gaseous forms in her spare time, a decision that her professor views with tacit amusement and her fellow doctoral students greet with scornful derision. (Her professor even convinces her to submit a short paper on her discoveries to a conference at the Royal Institution in London, which informs her in a curt response letter that, while her research is "notable," only men are allowed to speak at the conference.)

She views her fixation with gases as nothing more than a harmless side activity, one that she never expects will amount to anything substantive.

And then a flurry of gunshots rings out in Sarajevo, and Europe plunges into war at a dizzying speed.

Sulfur (S): Atomic number 16, abundant non-metallic chalcogen, reactive with most other elements (forming chemical compounds such as highly corrosive sulfuric acid). Sulfur is known in the Bible as "brimstone" and melts to a blood-red liquid.

Oxygen (O): Atomic number 8, abundant and highly reactive with other elements, oxidizing agent. Its allotrope dioxygen (O2) makes up a substantial portion of the atmosphere and is used in cellular respiration.

Nitrogen (N): Atomic number 7, abundant and capable of releasing massive amounts of energy through the breaking of the three covalent bonds between its diatomic form, N2 (hence its frequent use in explosives). An element in the pnictogen group (whose name is taken from the Greek word for "choke"), nitrogen is an asphyxiant gas; in some languages, it is called "azote" (Greek for "no life").

She is recruited from the university by the German military for its new chemical weapons program only a few months after the war begins. They offer her unlimited funding, and, now that she has received her doctorate and has no desire to spend the rest of her life developing industrial chemicals, she accepts. It doesn't even occur to her to feel any hesitation or remorse for what she is being asked to do; the French and the Germans have been lobbing weak canisters of tear gas at each other since the war's start, and as one side is bound to come up with something stronger sooner rather than later, she would much rather it be her triumph than that of the despicable French chemists she so resents. As long as the Germans are willing to pay her for her research, she is willing to develop their weapons.

Still, she positively loathes the military commanders - self-aggrandizing, posturing embarrassments of human beings who sneer down their noses at her when she stands her ground and demands more supplies and equipment. When she asks them to provide her with prisoners of war on which to test her latest innovations, they positively recoil in horror, with almost comical squeamishness. What, here? they ask her. But that seems somewhat inhumane, to make lab rats out of human beings. Have they forgotten that they are paying her to develop these weapons to use on the enemy's soldiers? Or, like the cowards they are, do they not mind the notion of death by blossoming clouds of noxious gas, so long as they don't have to witness it firsthand?

The only one of them that does not join in the hypocritical handwringing is General Erich Ludendorff. He merely sits there, watching her with calculating eyes that follow her as she leaves the war room and storms back to her tiny excuse for a laboratory, hurling a beaker against the wall in frustration and taking faint satisfaction from the sound of it shattering into a hundred silicate shards as it smashes against the bricks. She closes the door behind her, shoves a gas mask over her head, and flicks on several spigots that begin to unleash several types of hissing gas.

The knocking begins just as the fabric of the mask gives way to the acid eating through. She feels the gases brush softly against her left cheek, mingling imperceptibly; and then a devastating pain crackles across her skin. She inhales involuntarily, and her lungs fill with the corrosive substance. As the polite rapping turns into a frantic pounding, she realizes that she is laughing, her agony transformed into something like elation at the fact that the gases are working, at the fact that a substance created by her own two hands is making her flesh flare and simmer and burn. She barely registers when Ludendorff kicks in the door of her laboratory, backs away coughing, then ducks into the room and drags her out, slamming the door behind him before more of the gas can drift through into the corridor.

When she regains consciousness in a hospital bed, her face swathed in layer upon layer of oozing bandages that stifle her ability to breathe properly, she finds him interrogating a nurse quietly in one corner of the room. Upon seeing that she is awake, he charges forward.

"What is it?" he asks eagerly.

She opens her mouth to reply (as far as the bandages will allow her to open her mouth) and emits only a weak croak.

Ludendorff swears under his breath. His face shows signs of mild acidic irritation, she can't help but notice with a touch of pride.

"Water," he orders the nurse, who dutifully brings over a glass. "You nearly killed yourself in there," he continues irritably when she has weakly gulped down a small sip or two. "What were you testing, and why?"

"Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide," she rasps through chemically-damaged vocal chords. "When combined with atmospheric oxygen, they produce sulfuric and nitric acids - the components of acid rain. I just sped the process using a catalyst. And I had to test it on someone," she adds pointedly. "The fact that I'm alive proves that it's still too weak. It needs to be able to eat through gas masks faster. At the concentrations that will exist in the trenches, where the gases can diffuse into the open air, the reaction will lose much of its potency before it reaches human skin."

Ludendorff stares at her, and then he begins to chuckle. At first, she stiffens in indignation, but then she realizes in wonder that he is not mocking her. She cannot remember the last time she made a man laugh without being the target of his ridicule.

"Brilliant," he mutters. "Yes, that's excellent. With thinking and determination like this, we will win the war."

He stands, rubbing a hand unconsciously over his own slightly acid-gnawed cheek.

"I think we understand each other, Doctor Maru," he tells her. "We are both unflinching in our resolve to achieve excellence in our respective fields - ruthless, some might say. We both know that, in this world, one sometimes has to stomach a bit of unpleasantness to reach a necessary end. I believe that we will work well together."

No man has ever bothered to refer to her as a partner, as an equal of sorts. She is not sure what to say, and so she remains silent.

"I will ensure that you have test subjects, in the future," he promises her. "You are never to pull this kind of stunt ever again."

"I don't regret it," she argues.

"I know you don't, and that's why you are not to do it again," he says with a smile. "You must understand that you are a very valuable asset. Perhaps some divine power has sent you as a gift to help us to victory."

Her amusement expresses itself in a series of chest-wracking wheezes. She is so used to hearing people refer to her talent with chemistry as a gift that it strikes her as ironic to hear someone apply the same term to her.

"What's so funny?" Ludendorff demands.

"I don't believe in God," she answers, feeling the truth would be too difficult to explain.

"No?" He seems entertained. "What do you believe in, then?"

"Science," she answers simply.

Ludendorff laughs again, and then he reaches out and runs his fingers lightly over the bit of her right cheek that is not obscured by bandages.

She freezes as soon as she feels his hand, almost insubstantial, and yet lingering long enough that she can feel the coolness of his fingertips against the warmth of her cheek. It's a fleeting gesture, almost meaningless and yet inevitably proprietary. It annoys her that such a simple motion should affect her the way that it does, that Ludendorff has found such an exquisitely simple way of making her so discomfited. She knows that he can tell that the gesture had an impact. It isn't a seduction, not of the physical type, and they both know it. But they both understand immediately that her loyalty to him is just a touch more substantial than it had been in the milliseconds prior.

"I look forward to seeing you back in your laboratory, Doctor," he tells her. "Get well soon."

Lower minds are inevitably suspicious of scientists who commit themselves absolutely to the pursuit of a knowledge that few others can understand, she reminds herself when he has left, and this is doubly true if the seeker of that knowledge happens to be a woman. Over the course of history, thousands of alleged witches have been executed - hung, drowned, burned, tortured - for seeking unnatural knowledge and power. Yet here she is being given the opportunity to push beyond the boundaries of nature, to break the rules in ways that most would find unnerving for any man to attempt, and to be exulted instead of persecuted. And now, with a tender caress that so piercingly acknowledged the fact that she is a woman - a now-deformed woman in a man's field - Ludendorff has made clear that he finds her precious precisely because of how unnatural she is. How could she not be grateful to him?

It does not escape her attention that Ludendorff likely would never have dared such an intimate gesture if she were still whole, if she were still considered beautiful enough to present a temptation to men and could leverage that power against him. Now, every interaction that they have will be on his terms, with both of them fully aware that he is her superior and that, short of poisoning him, her only advantage in their relationship is the fact that he needs her skills to win his war. She accepts this revelation with weary resignation; she knows that it has always been like this. When she steps back, she realizes that she no longer can imagine a world in which a woman might be able to rise to greatness unbeholden to a man.

But a shared victory is still a victory for all parties involved, after all. She may never achieve recognition on her preferred terms, because society may never give women scientists their due credit on merit and merit alone; but the sort of recognition that she craves is attainable, however many Faustian bargains she may need to make to obtain it. And, of all men to whom to owe a debt in exchange for advancement, Ludendorff seems better than most. Of course she knows that he is willing to kill innocents in his quest for total German victory, that he has no qualms about punishing or shooting his own men when they show any signs of weakness or incompetence. But the world has never been a fair or just place. And more than any other man she has ever met, Ludendorff respects her, trusts her. Believes in her. For that, she is willing to make him a victor, a conqueror, a god.

Half-asleep, she hears the medics across the ward muttering to each other.

Ja, da liegt sie, Doktor Maru. Oder, wie ich gehört habe, wird sie von den Soldaten 'Doktor Gift' genannt - passend, nicht wahr? Es scheint, dass die kleine Hexe sich sich nun selbst verbrannt hat...

In her current state, it takes her muddled brain a few tries to translate the foreign syllables of German adequately from sounds to meaning. And by the time she has absorbed the latest expected insults, she has also been reminded that words have meanings beyond the boundaries of their own languages. One man's poison is another man's gift, she reflects drowsily to herself; the Germans might just not realize that the two can be one and the same, until they take London.

The undamaged side of her mouth quirks into a twitchy smile as her eyes close, and, unbeknownst to her, she dreams of what Ludendorff has dreamt for months on end: of Westminster enveloped in thick clouds of suffocating fog.

Author's Note: This was originally going to be a very short drabble riffing on my realization the other day that the German word for "poison" is "Gift" - but obviously it pretty quickly spiraled into a longer reflection on Doctor Poison struggling against The Patriarchy and ultimately becoming its accomplice. A lot of this story sprang from a ridiculously involved text conversation that I had with a friend about the problems inherent in Beauty Equals Goodness tropes, and how uncomfortable I was with all of the moments where it seemed like various men (namely, Ludendorff and Hilariously Accented Pseudo-German Steve Trevor) were preying off any potential deformity-related insecurities to get Doctor Poison to do what they wanted. I remain curious to know if I would have found her to be even more evil if she had not been deformed, i.e., if she had displayed the same confidence and independence as Diana, and yet engaged in unconscionable behavior completely of her own volition.

An additional nod goes to Valarhalla on Tumblr, who in the post "Dr Maru's notes, translated" rather brilliantly interpreted all of the cuneiform visible in one screenshot of the notebook. Her conclusion that Dr. P had discovered ununhexium/livermorium, nearly a century before the folks at Lawrence Livermore actually synthesized it in 2000, is what inspired the bits about Marie Curie and radioactive elements at the beginning of this fic.

Lastly, a few disclaimers. First, I haven't touched chemistry since high school and so based most of the science in this fic off of Things The Internet Told Me, which I'm sure are only questionably correct, at best. And second, while I acknowledge that I paint Dr. P as being somewhat sympathetic in this fic, she still definitely catalyzes horrific crimes against humanity that violate several Geneva Conventions, and I am NOT trying to justify or endorse experimentation on POWs, or chemical warfare (or any warfare, really), by virtue of writing from her perspective. Years of victimization by The Patriarchy in no way, shape, or form excuse torture and the mass killings of civilians and other such atrocities. (Frankly, I remain kind of perplexed as to why I wrote this fic, of all fics, when the fic that I meant to write when I sat down is about Hippolyta and Antiope being badass sisters and battling the gods. Still holding out hope that Patty Jenkins will wake up one morning and decide that that concept should become its own prequel film, I suppose...)

EDIT: A special round of thanks to isaam for very kindly taking the time to correct my embarrassingly-rusty German! Danke!

ADDITIONAL EDIT: Oh wow, I just discovered this article on The Mary Sue ("Wonder Woman, Doctor Poison, and Solidarity In the Face of Patriarchy"), and it basically sums up all of my thoughts and feelings about Isabel Maru. Definitely worth a read, if you want a take on some of the same themes explored above that tackles them in a less narrative-based format...