Corporate espionage was a very pretty turn of phrase. It sounded almost innocent, benign, like accidentally spilling too much gossip around the water cooler. It did not sound like a controlled explosion on the other side of the Vishkar complex, drawing all security personnel. It didn't sound like Satya using a pass that did not belong to her to gain access to a room she wasn't supposed to be in, stealing information she swore to protect, in order to give it to a woman that had a verifiable kill count.

Never too far away, Sombra hovered over her every move, murmuring instructions when she could get close enough.

"Cutting it a little close, bella."

The blue core in the center of Satya's left palm lit up, flickering purple. Static traveled up the length of her forearm, a tremble where she was normally steady as a surgeon.

She balled her hand into a fist. "I will be fine." Satya had the unnerving ability to look right through her, even when Sombra had her cloaking device activated. "You should be more concerned about your own route of escape, if this goes awry."

"I'm invisible." The air around her rippled as she watched Satya trot down an aisle of supercomputers, each taller than their combined height. Satya found the one she was looking for at last, waving her left hand in front of it and summoning a console to type her instructions. "You're not."

Soft blue light radiated from every circuit, every crevice in the walls. More than a heart, this room felt like Vishkar's entire nervous system. Sombra trailed clawtips over it all, seeking entry and being denied without fail. It was maddening, to be shut out like this.

That was why she started working with Satya. Her tireless hunt for the truth led her straight into the architech. Sombra hadn't been surprised at all to find a kindred spirit already feverishly digging at Vishkar's rotten core with a kind of devotion that bordered on obsession. There were always people like her on the inside, thirsty for power, lunging for weak spots with mindless hunger.

Satya was an asset, at first. Ideally they would have never met or spoken in person.

"Not trying to put pressure on you." Her eyes kept darting to the door as she struggled against the urge to shove Satya out of the way and just rip everything she needed from the core processor.

It wouldn't be efficient, first of all. It'd piss Satya off, and she wanted Satya on her side. Sure, Sombra could force her way through it all, tear out the guts and sift through it later. But why use a bomb when a scalpel would rouse less suspicion? "I'm just saying I'd rather not climb out of here over a mountain of dead bodies."

Eyes trained on the holographic monitor in front of her, Satya smirked. "You would do that for me?"

"I'd do anything for you."

"I'd call you a hopeless romantic if I were in a charitable mood, but you're just a liar, Sombra." Satya tossed aside the screen, letting it flicker into a stream of blue light as it returned home to roost. "I have it. Let's go."

The two of them were in and out in forty minutes.

Sombra released her grip on all the security cameras, letting them escape their constant loop of empty hallways. She followed Satya outside, to her private car. The cameras and microphones in there were already muted; Sombra did it as a matter of habit.

Satya relaxed as much as she ever did, a long sigh escaping her as the self-driving car took them home.

To Satya's home, Sombra corrected herself. The architech crossed her legs at the knee, staring resolutely forward with a concerned frown tugging at her lips. Stress would strike deep marks onto her skin one of these days, Sombra was sure, but for now she was lineless and expressionless, cool as you please.

Just by looking at her, Sombra would have never guessed Satya's true motivations. At first glance she seemed cold, ruthless. She climbed the ranks with a sneer, if she deigned to express anything at all, if she didn't pick you apart with eyes dark and flat as an omnic.

Maybe that didn't sound kind, but in fact, Sombra loved omnics. She adored them. The fact that they followed a code in the most literal definition- they made so much sense. They were the next step in evolution, and they couldn't wipe out humanity fast enough in her opinion.

Humans made sense too, in a way, but they often had less reason to, and thus they were always disappointing her.

For years she kept her distance from the architech, moving Satya across the board by carefully feeding her information in ways she was liable to discover on her own anyway.

Then Satya got too close to the truth. And violence always follows the truth.

"...Listening to me?"

Sombra blinked a few times, dragging herself to the present. Materializing next to Satya, she put a hand on her lap. "Yes."

"Liar."

"You know half of my mind is always in the deep web at any given time." Sombra's thumb stroked over her bare thigh, that bit of flesh exposed from the high slit in Satya's dress. "If you want my full attention, you need to earn it." Her hand wandered higher, then skirted up Satya's hip to snatch the data card from her pocket.

"Or I could just turn you off."

"Nahhhh. That's too cruel for you." Sombra was only half-paying attention again, muttering idly. Purple strands leached out of her gloves like a living thing, a virus infecting that little blue disk until it threaded lavender and then deep violet. A skull flickered onto the screen as it started decrypting the information Satya had stolen for her. Even with the architech's help, Sombra would need at least a week to sort through all of this. "So what were you saying?"

"I was asking how this would help us."

Sombra's eyes flickered up, studying the other woman in a single up-and-down sweep. She didn't answer at first, not sure where to start. "Won't know for sure 'til I break this down." Sombra returned to the code, the latest strand of that mile-long net.

Satya pulled her gaze back up with a finger under her chin. "Don't lie to me again, Sombra."

She did a quick check of her own hormones, making sure stress didn't raise anything too high. Just another set of data that she needed to control. "Or else what?"

Satya didn't rise to the bait. "You wouldn't risk both of us on a half-baked scheme if you weren't certain it would produce results."

"I appreciate the trust, mi alma, but you know sometimes I just do this shit by the seat of my pants. There's never a guarantee any of this will do anything to help you, or me."

Unwavering eye contact. Satya didn't believe her. She was trying to strip her down again, find good where there wasn't anything but bad.

She was amazed someone like Satya would trust her at all.

Of course Sombra tried seducing her shortly after revealing herself to the architech, but she didn't expect it to work.

For a while it was just sex. They survived enough scrapes and close calls that it felt right.

Then Satya proved what she was capable of.

About six months ago Sombra got a notification at two in the morning. She kept close tabs on all her assets, especially her only "in" at Vishkar. The news made her heart drop, followed by pure, hot rage: someone was going to try and kidnap and kill her tonight. It wasn't the first hit on Satya, but it was the first to get past all Sombra's firewalls and strike without her being able to stop it.

Sombra went to the abandoned lot fully expecting to find Satya's mangled corpse scattered over the building plans. A future site for Vishkar development, it stood out like a set of broken teeth on the desert landscape. Shining white towers, half-built yet somehow already on the verge of collapse.

Satya was waiting for her, seated in front of a pile of dead bodies with a gun on her lap. Or it looked like a gun. Satya said it was a tool for stripping paint from concrete. It had a pretty... melty effect on people, too, it seemed.

She was shaking. For the first time Sombra saw her eyes were genuinely dark, the light crushed out in a dissociative fit. Shame it took snuffing out for Sombra to notice it had even been there to begin with.

"Where are you?" Satya's hand covered hers, grounding her to reality again.

Depends on who you ask. Sombra was everywhere at once, the implants in her skull connecting her to the global network. She was in the past, calling a guy she knew to dispose of the bodies and driving Satya to her apartment, the same one they were approaching right now.

Sombra blinked a few times. "I'm right here." She twisted in her seat, holding Satya's face with both her hands. "Right here. I swear."

Slowly, Satya relaxed against her touch. She rarely allowed anyone to touch her. Not out of a sense of superiority as Sombra first assumed, but because Satya was as fragile as a length of glass.

Sombra could see it betrayed in the slightest shift in her expression, the tremble of a lip or the uncertainty in her eyes.

That night- the night of the murders- Sombra realized this woman was something she'd never encountered before. More than a haughty artist, or a power-hungry, ladder-climbing croney. Satya was the rarest creature of all: someone who was really, truly trying to save the world.

That cold glass veneer had cracked the day Satya was forced to kill someone. Sombra convinced her, somehow, that they couldn't skip town that very same night. She was someone who'd spent her whole life running, she said, and she knew that right now Satya needed to stay where she held the most power, go to work like nothing was wrong.

It'll be a power move. Trust me.

Satya did trust her. That was the wildest part.

She made Satya take a shower and toss her bloodstained clothes into the garbage. Satya stayed in there for at least an hour, and spent another one sitting on her bed, blow drying her hair and then carefully combing through it.

Sombra had sat next to her, not wanting to leave but unsure if Satya wanted her to stay. Carefully, she stroked a hand over Satya's head. Satya hated having her hair played with, but something starving in her erupted that night, needing touch, desperate for any kind of comfort Sombra could give her. She braided Satya's hair like they were girls, and then Satya took her hand and pulled it between her legs.

Her skin was still steaming hot from the shower, but it was nothing compared to the slick warmth that coated Sombra's fingers. She lost count of how many times she made Satya come that night. She didn't remember a lot of things about that night, except that it was the most satisfying sexual experience she'd ever had in her life.

Fun fact, murder actually feels great in the direct aftermath.

Weeks later not so much.

But Sombra, for all her schemes and plots, didn't think about any further than a few months into the future. Three weeks from now was an eternity when you measured your life in nanoseconds and upload/download speeds.

She was an instinct, an impulse. All she was, was someone who held powerful people accountable.

And very very soon, Satya was going to be one of those people.

Cause like, a woman like her either dies young or rips the stars from the sky.

Right?

"Sombra."

The angry tone, her name shouted like it was some final straw. Satya had been talking again. Talking right at her, while Sombra was lost in some other universe.

Reality slammed into her in the form of white metal joints, clutching her head and shoving her face against the car window. Satya's grip could crush bone, she knew, but the real danger was that solid blue core. The one that could bend reality itself, and it was humming right up against her implants.

Then Satya turned her off.

The whole world went dark. Every single light, every computer, every hack in progress. Her heart monitors, the stress mitigators, the careful dosages and control of every chemical in her body. All of it.

Forced to exist in only one place, Sombra gasped, a shuddering breath that fogged up the window. Satya pressed harder, sitting closer until she was nearly on top of her.

"Tell me I didn't risk our hide for nothing. Tell me exactly what you hoped to gain from this." She took the disk from Sombra's hand, waving it in front of her face. "You reckless, thoughtless little fool!"

Sombra was still reeling. She couldn't answer. Unable to keep track of her own heart rate or hormones, she was grounded, slave to an uncaring universe that continued rolling without her input.

More than that, she was helpless to Satya's universe, one that she ruled as absolutely as any god.

Still she didn't have a real answer for Satya. She couldn't say anything that they hadn't already gone over, and she knew Satya hated it when Sombra just spewed the same bullshit again and again. "Everywhere there exists people who think they answer to no one. Eventually they'll answer to me. This is one step closer to that."

"So who do you answer to?"

Sombra flashed her a smile. "Well, you, of course."

For once she was telling the truth. It would be a shame if Satya didn't believe her.

Visibly uncomfortable, Satya relented. The grip on her head relaxed, and Satya sat back to give Sombra some space.

Despite it all, she could tell Satya did believe her. Even though it didn't make any sense. Satya should hate her- ever since Sombra appeared, everything in her life shattered and collapsed, a huge seismic shift. But against all odds, Satya kept believing in her.

She had to trust that Sombra was telling the truth or they would both die. And she made that choice, every single day.

"Where are you?" Satya said again, but softer this time. It was mournful, conflicted. "Are you here? Are you really concerned with what might happen to us? Or is this just another game to you?"

Whenever Satya turned her off, Sombra could fully realize just what she meant by that statement. The translocator scrambled her brain on the best of days. Even when her body stayed still, half her consciousness was usually halfway across the world trying to batter down some rich Swiss guy's online bank account.

She could almost sympathize if it weren't so stupid. "If I didn't take this seriously, would I give you all these ways to slit my throat?"

The turrets that always knew where to find her even when invisible, the backdoors, the fact that Satya could even turn her off at all. Those things were all so huge! Those weren't idle displays of affection. It was Sombra giving her the fucking killswitch, for god's sake.

For a genius, Satya could be really fucking dense sometimes.

She had to help Sombra out of the car. Without her systems micromanaging everything from her cortisol levels to her sweat glands, Sombra felt helpless as a fawn.

Some part of her enjoyed it, of course. Letting Satya make the whole world vanish. Cause when you're the shadow, it's impossible to get lost in the dark on your own.

Satya got a kick out of it too, she was sure. Shapeless and powerless, she bent Sombra every which way like one of her hard light beams. She pulled her inside, kissing her hard. "Undress."

"Yes, ma'am." Not a hint of sarcasm attached to the words. Not when her pulse was already pounding between her legs, anticipation unfettered by any kind of self-control. Satya steered her to the bedroom at once, forcing her to bend over the mattress. Without prompting Sombra's legs eagerly spread open, waiting for more.

Except more didn't come. Slowly, Satya began to laugh, rich and low.

"What makes you think I want that?" Her hand ran down Sombra's spine, toying with the ports on her back. The lights were all dead, everything dark until Satya decided to release her.

"I want it," Sombra muttered, trying not to sound like she was sulking. "You've fucked me every other time you turned me off. Can you blame me for getting a little pavlovian about it?"

Satya ignored her. "Showing signs of strain. But no damage." Strong fingers traced the length of her bare scalp, over strips of metal fused to bone. As the inspection went on Sombra realized this was a maintenance check, not a seduction attempt, and forced herself to relax. "You're overexerting yourself."

"Mmm." Sombra lowered her head, shrugging to pretend that she was still unbothered, that she wasn't shaking with a mix of anger and fear and need.

"I can see your ribs," Satya murmured, her prosthetic warm as flesh as it bumped down every notch in Sombra's spine. "When was the last time you ate?"

Good question.

"You are going to stay turned off for at least a few days." Satya said it like an announcement, not asking Sombra but ordering her. Sombra opened her mouth to shoot something back, sharply remind her that they had work to do, when she heard the rattle and hum of hard light. The gag appeared right between her jaws.

Muffled, Sombra bit down on unforgiving plastic, face hot with rage. There was more whirring, the shifting of something being made from nothing, and then warm constraints laced her arms up behind her back.

She was pinned, soft white sheets underneath her and hard light behind her, and that white prosthetic gently creating a mask over her eyes.

Then she was really, truly in the dark.

Now Satya was touching her like a woman, and not a machine being tuned up. Aching with desire, Sombra moaned, arching her hips back to meet Satya's fingers. Please more, she wanted to say, and she tried to say it, but it came out a garbled mess. When she was turned off, words were all she had. And Satya stripped that from her.

Satya laughed again, carefully exploring her entrance. No one had ever touched Sombra the way she did, stroking every ridge and bump like she was learning her for the very first time. Like she didn't know exactly how to make her fall apart. "You really are a fool." Her index and middle finger held Sombra open and exposed, every cool breeze making her painfully aware of her own arousal. "All your claims of power fall apart at the slightest provocation."

The prosthetic always carried more heat than her other hand, warm from the blue, pulsing core she used to shape reality.

An eager and enthusiastic participant in hookup culture, Sombra was used to rushing in, getting off, and then dipping out. Being with Satya meant a different kind of commitment than women usually asked from her; a submission to her total control.

She always balked at anything attempting to restrict her freedom, but at the same time, Sombra could never say "no" if the reward was good enough.

Satya always made it worth her while, even if getting there was maddeningly slow.

Even as she slowly modded herself to be less human and more machine, Sombra still took deep pleasure in anything that drowned her in raw sensation. Drugs and alcohol, anything that stank of debauchery and made the lights- the lights that chased her every waking moment- the lights either too blinding to see or shut off entirely.

Satya made a mess of her, rewarding her submission with constant stimulation. A few firm, rough strokes over her clit would have ended it at once, but Satya entered her with two fingers. She gave her time to adjust before that creeping, dizzying climb started again. She kept Sombra's mind from wandering, prosthetic rubbing soothing circles down her spine.

"That's good, dear. Just relax."

She kissed Sombra's back, licking away at a bead of sweat rolling down her neck. Sombra wriggled, whining in protest. A neat freak like Satya should hate prolonging sex like this, she figured. Sombra certainly did, hated how her body continually asserted itself as more liquid than anything else.

But at the same time, it just felt so good.

Loosening the knots in her muscles until Sombra finally relaxed, Satya brought her to the peak and let her fall, dissolving into need, every nerve in her body alert, awake, here.

Sombra couldn't let her mind flicker somewhere else. Every time she tried she just bounced against her own skull, completely isolated.

A crack of plastic and the tacky, silicone-wet smell of lube.

The first thrust came as a shock. It was too forgiving to be hard light, Sombra was sure, but she hadn't heard Satya go retrieve anything from her box of toys. Fists clenching, Sombra screamed around the bit. Satya forced her to stay here in this world, defenseless against the mounting pleasure.

It swelled, growing harder with each rock of Satya's hips. Her soft hand reassured her with pets and strokes even as the prosthetic continued the inspection, finding her secure and unharmed and undamaged- for now.

She was losing her mind. Everything was too tight, her nervous system was too small to hold everything she was feeling right now. Satya, I need you. She tried to talk, knowing it was all swallowed by the gag, crowded in by moans and muffled swears. I don't want you to learn I need you more than you need me.

"Relax," Satya whispered, kissing the side of her shaved head. Sombra twitched at the hot, wet length of her tongue so close to all her ports. Of course she'd built them to be waterproof, otherwise her own sweat would wind up frying all her custom rigs. But it still felt weird, and wrong, and Satya knew it. "I won't hurt you."

She would. Sombra knew she would, if she had to. There wasn't any limit to what Satya would do if she thought it was necessary. Over and over again she found ways to surprise Sombra, making her regret ever seeing Satya as anything more than an asset.

I want to be your tool to build that better world, I want you to use me, use me, use me, use me, use me-

Then the rhythm changed. The fingers over her clit stilled, then retreating, leaving a wet smear on the inside of Sombra's thighs. Holding onto her hips with both hands, Satya changed her angle slightly. Slow at first, then insistent. It didn't feel as good at first, no longer like Sombra was the sole focus of her attention.

The sound of her name, spoken in a breathy moan.

"Sombra."

She almost never got to hear that. Satya refused her touch more times than not, only ever snapped her name in anger.

"Ah, Sombra." Not like this, the grip on her hips tightening, one hand on the back of her neck.

In a flash of delight, it hit her: Satya was using her. Either she'd slipped a vibrator into her end of the strap-on or she'd discovered how to grind against the base just right, but she was chasing after her own pleasure now.

Restrained, blinded, locked in her own head, her body overwhelmed with sex and her aching clit. Sombra choked again, jaw starting to sting from biting down so hard.

It built, taking her higher and higher every time. When she came there was no fighting it, and no hiding it. She sobbed- or maybe laughed- whittled down to nothing but her pulsing cunt. Satya had to know she'd come, felt the gush of heat dripping down her thigh. The way Sombra finally relaxed, letting go of everything to drift alone in the darkness until Satya was satisfied, too.

They took a shower together afterwards, Satya's prosthetic set aside so the soap wouldn't gum up all those delicate joints.

Sombra rarely spent the night, but she couldn't leave until Satya turned her on again. That was just asking for trouble. So she sat on her bed, pouting and trying her best to look cute until Satya finally relented.

But she didn't leave.

Sitting in the vee of Satya's outstretched legs, Sombra absent-mindedly ate cold leftovers as the screens danced in front of them. She even drank water, just to get Satya off her case. "This might not take longer than a few hours, now that I look at it."

"You gave me an inaccurate estimate earlier?"

"I miscalculated. It happens sometimes. Try not to look shocked."

"I'll make the attempt." Satya's arm wrapped around her waist, pulling her closer as she read over her shoulder. "Now will you tell me what's so important about this data?"

"Okay. It's a long story, though."

"I'm not going anywhere." Satya promised her, leaning over to kiss her cheek. "Neither are you, if you know what's good for you."

Sombra chose to believe her, or to at least believe in that untenable trust that had somehow sprung up between them. There was no reason she should, no scenario where this didn't have 'bad news' written all over it.

Well there was one explanation, but it was so off-putting that it ruined her appetite, not that she had much of one to begin with.

God help her.

She was in love.

.

A/N: Written as a commission for tumblr user Grimtriggers.