“Hey—look at this one!” Hannah nudged Lara to get her attention. Lara looked over to see Hannah’s screen, and Hannah played a video she was looking at, a silly skit of a mech doing household chores. “That’s you!” said Lara, and Hannah blushed. The skit was cute, but Lara suppressed an irritated sigh. She couldn’t say she didn’t enjoy sharing fun moments like that with her wife, but she was at a pretty emotional moment in her book, and Hannah’s interruptions were making I hard to focus. The two of them were relaxing in bed together; when they weren’t needed on missions, the two of them were free to spend their days however they wished. They’d been on five missions after their training; nothing critical or dangerous yet, and certainly nothing involving any enemy mechs (though there had been several close calls with tracking devices). Lara had brought Hannah to Focus level 3 several times in those missions, though never higher; as much as she enjoyed watching Hannah’s body go slack and pliable in the cockpit, Driller had described level 4 as “intense,” and frankly Lara worried about what that would do to her pilot. “At level 5, you almost have to remind them to breath for you,” Driller had said. Lara, upon hearing that, had had a difficult time keeping a straight face.

It was nice, having free time. Lara had spent a lot of it reading her romance novels; she loved seeing people discover new emotions within themselves—especially new emotions about another person—for the first time. Hannah, apparently, liked spending her free time (when she wasn’t dragging Lara into bizarre cooking experiments) looking at silly videos, making sure Lara stopped to watch them generally when Lara was most focused on something else. (Lara, in her more cynical moments, suspected that the interruption was the real activity Hannah was enjoying.)

It wasn’t a problem. It was fine. Lara liked spending time in bed next to her wife. If it really bothered her, she would say something, right? So her silence must mean she was fine with it. It was fine. Lara went back to her book.

“Why did you come after me, Giannson?” Karelos demanded. Giannson’s eyes seemed to burn into Karelos’s cheeks, making them feel hot. He shivered.

“Someone needed to,” Giannson rumbled. Karelos felt his voice deep in his chest. Was Giannson always this tall? Karelos thought.

“I can make do on my own, you know. I’m not some spoiled prince with no—”

“You ARE a spoiled prince, Karelos!” Giannson stepped forward, banging his arms on the wall around Karelos. They were so close. Karelos could see his lips—

“Hey, look at this,” said Hannah, tapping Lara’s hand excitedly.

“Focus 2: let me read my book in fucking peace, pilot,” Lara snapped.

Hannah fell silent immediately. It took a moment for Lara to realize what she had actually said.

“Ohmigod, Hannah, I’m so sorry, I didn’t—”

She cut off as she looked up to see Hannah staring at her with wide, stunned eyes. Wide eyes and very red cheeks and ears.

“Oh, you don’t,” Hannah swallowed visibly. “You don’t need to apologize.”

“Does…does that still work outside the mech?”

“Not exactly, but, um. But it does, uh.” Hannah seemed to be struggling to focus (ironic, Lara supposed). “um, yeah, but you wanted to read so I will let you do that.”

Lara smiled and went back to her book. Or, at least, she tried, but she was even less able to concentrate on the emotional complexity of it. Her wife was squirming right next to her, after all. She instead pretended to read and enjoyed the presence beside her, caught between her command to stay quiet and unobtrusive and her clear desire for…certain attentions. It was fun to leave her like that. After a long minute, however, Lara decided to take pity on her wife. She put her book away and leaned in for a kiss.

Hannah pressed herself tightly to Lara, hands hungerly reaching and dancing across Lara’s body. She wound up in this state frequently nowadays; the mech seemed to have raised her libido to a hair trigger. Lara couldn’t say she didn’t enjoy Hannah jumping her bones at every opportunity, but it was becoming hard for Lara to keep up.

Suddenly Lara had an idea, and a grin crept across her face. She grabbed Hannah’s head and pulled it back, a little more forcefully than she intended, so that they could see each other’s faces.

“Focus 1: suck my dick until I cum.”

It was fascinating to watch her words affect Hannah. Hannah’s face didn’t go slack—not the way it did for the mech’s internal camera—but there was a subtle change nonetheless; a hunger, maybe? A slight but distinct neediness she didn’t normally show. It was incredibly hot.

“Yes sir,” Hannah said, and moved to get into position. There was a desperation to her movements that Lara wasn’t used to. Hannah was normally smooth, collected, in-control during sex; she knew what she wanted and how to get it. Now, she was rushing, stumbling over herself. She almost never used her own mouth during sex; she said she didn’t like her face getting wet. This time—oh, she keeps licking like that and she’s gonna be absolutely soaked, oh my God oh my God—she seemed to be paying that absolutely zero mind.

It's like her need to follow my orders completely overrode her preferences. And this only at Focus 1.

Lara came hard, gasping for breath as Hannah’s tongue danced over her.

“Uh, cancel Focus mode, pilot,” she said hastily, laughing. “Wow, I see why you ask for that all the time. I might make you do that more often.” She basked for a moment, and then realized that that might have been a bit presumptuous, to say that without checking in with Hannah. She looked down at her wife, slightly worried. “Would you be okay with that?”

Hannah had stars in her eyes over her…quite messy mouth. “Um, could you hand me a tissue? The whole box, actually. But, uh—yeah, please do that to me whenever. I still wouldn’t choose to do this myself, but godDAMN that word is powerful.”

“We might want to play around with this,” mused Lara. “See what I can make you do.”

“That’s kinda scary when you say it like that, but we should try it. But, um. Before we do that—” she broke off, apparently embarrassed. “Do…I get a turn?”

***

The acrid scent of mech fuel filled Hannah’s forehead, where the air quality sensors were located. Mech fuel left a distinctive byproduct in the air that lingered for hours; “smell”, such as it was in a mech, was therefore the most reliable method of tracking a mech that didn’t want to be found. A target could suppress its radar returns, camouflage itself into the environment, or send out decoys, but it couldn’t stop burning fuel if it wanted to be more useful than a 4-ton hunk of metal. Unfortunately, that did mean that the most reliable method of tracking hidden enemies was dependent on the wind.

The enemy mech Hannah was smelling wasn’t trying to stay hidden, however. It was blaring radar out at very particular frequencies designed to locate other mechs. The flip side to that was that the scans it was sending could be triangulated in turn, giving Lara—though not Hanah directly—its precise location.

After the first radar pulse, the enemy mech started moving; it clearly wanted to take the information of where Hannah was somewhere. “We need to find out where it’s going, pilot,” said Lara. “We’re following it, and stealthily. We don’t want it to know we know its rendezvous point.”

Hannah didn’t really understand the situation; Lara had stopped bothering to share the mission brief with Hannah a couple of sorties ago. “It’s one less thing to worry about if I don’t need to make sure you’re up to speed,” Lara had said. “Just follow my orders and you’ll be fine.” Hannah vaguely wished she had more context for what she was doing, but she couldn’t deny that it wasn’t strictly necessary. She trusted Lara, after all.

“Edict 2: Stay in low RCS mode.” The command washed over Hannah, and she pulled all nonessential sensors under a smooth, painted skin. She then doubled over to become quadrupedal, the mech settling in to move more like a leopard than the humanlike biped form it normally held. This should cause all the radar returns the enemy mech sent out look merely as noise, while still allowing Lara to triangulate the target’s position.

“Focus 3, pilot. I’m marking the target’s location on the map. Stay within the highlighted ring—close enough to track, far enough to avoid further detection. I’ll give you more commands  to ensure you stay hidden as you follow, pilot.”

Suddenly, Hannah was floating in syrup; the mishmash of senses and inputs that made up her existence as a mech vanishing from her conscious thoughts, fading into the background of her current existence. The only thing that remained was the highlighted ring; it existed on the map that she could see in her vision at all times, but it also seemed to shine in the visual inputs of the outside world she was directly looking at as well. The mech itself (which she was too far away to clearly see anyway) didn’t matter any more; all that mattered was the small strip of land that she was allowed to exist in. Everything else was nothing, nonsense, darkness. The thought of leaving it was a nightmare; the very act of staying within it was a joy that she felt both in her heart and in her crotch. This was where she belonged, and she was content here. Nothing else was enough; nothing else was correct.

The enemy started to move, bringing the edge of the world frighteningly close to her. “No,” she cried out without meaning to, and she loped forward as fast as she could to preserve distance. She could probably survive leaving the world, but she couldn’t bear to fail Handler.

“Oh, also, Edict 4: Stay downwind of the target.”

“Yes sir,” said Hannah. It came out as a moan.

At this level of Focus, the Edicts started to feel different. Focus was about detachment, leaving things behind. Edicts, on the other hand, were about attention, listening, doing. A low-level Edict couldn’t supersede any commands in the same level of Focus, so the Edicts usually faded from a crisp massage into a warm buzz, often incorporating itself into the relaxing, simple worldview of the Focus.

But Hannah had never felt an Edict 4 before.

A sun seemed to burst into existence inside her mech. Her whole body was warm and bright and in the warmth was an order she could feel on her skin, and in the brightness was direction she could see with her eyes. It was wonderful and insistent and right and—

And then the wind began to change.

The warmth, the glow, became a single point on her skin. All the heat, burning through her in a single beam that traced itself across her body: STAY DOWNWIND. She felt like she was being cut open. She couldn’t bear it. It was too much, it was too much, it was too much. Desperately, she moved, bounding to a new place within her world, a place properly downwind of the target. The sun’s heat softened and returned to being wonderful instead of painful, reassuring instead of punishing.

The wind was unfortunately erratic as she followed the target. Hannah had to desperately dash from place to place around the target, brightness turned to pain turned to brightness. She was crying now, barely able to handle the sudden changes over and over again. Worse, Handler would routinely remove portions of her world, saying things like “Stay behind these mountains” or “Avoid the plains areas” into the Focus to change the shape of where she was allowed to be. She just wanted to be good, to obey. A few times she had to leave her world to stay downwind, and doing so filled her with a crushing despair and shame like nothing she’d ever felt before. When she returned to her world, the comfort and peace was immeasurable and she found herself saying “Thank you, thank you sir, thank you sir,” at the relief—until, of course, the wind shifted and the sun burned through her once again. “Handler,” she sobbed into the heart of her mech. “Sir.” Had Handler had another name she would have used that too, beseeching her love and savior with anything she had to get some sort of respite. But when Handler’s voice came, it removed her world more often than it expanded it, and it gave no comfort. At least Hannah knew she was observing her, seeing her tears and desperate thrashing against her restraints. If she followed her orders well enough, would Handler end her torment? Pain wracked her as the wind changed once again. It shifted into delight and then despair and then joy and then pain and then comfort and then shock and then pain and then pain and then brightness and then warmth and then pain and then PAIN AND THEN PAIN AND THEN—

“Fall back, pilot. You don’t need to stay in the ring anymore. I got what I need. Good work.”

Her world suddenly expanded; she was free to follow the wind however she needed to. Hannah would have cried in relief—did cry, really, but who could tell with all the tears of anger and need she’d already shed? As Hannah left the area, Handler canceled the Edicts, and Hannah—who had been experiencing them as a warm sun and a light buzz—let out a snarl, loss sharp and disappointing even after the long, painful chase. Then, finally, Handler cancelled the Focus, and with a rush Hannah would swear she could hear her world shifted into what months ago she would have called “normal.”

And with it, so intense that had her body been human it would have taken her to her knees, came the horniness. Almost like a physical entity was she taken by raw need. She was humping her restraints desperately, trying anything she could to fill herself; the desperation that gripped her after a sortie had long since replaced any sort of embarrassment. She started to drool.

God, I need Lara to fuck me so hard.

***

“Here is your ravioli con pesce, and your alfredo lasagna,” the waiter said, putting the dishes down in front of Hannah and Lara. Hannah and Lara exchanged glances. “Excuse me,” Hannah said. “She ordered the alfredo linguine, not the lasagna.”

“Oh, I’m very sorry about that. I’ll fix that for you right away,” the waiter said, taking the dish.

After the waiter had left, Lara covered her face loosely with her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I order quietly.”

Hannah looked at her wife dryly. “Why would you need to apologize for that? A mistake was made, and now it’s going to be fixed. Simple as that.”

Only a few months ago, before their new jobs, Lara would probably have tried to argue her guilt. Today, however, she just shrugged. “True,” she said, and snagged a ravioli. “Oh, this is good,” she exclaimed. Not every dish at Carino’s Italian Bistro was. They came here not because they liked the big ugly murals on the restaurant’s walls, the general tacky ambiance, or the food, but because it was tradition for the couple to eat Italian food before they went to the theater, and this place was conveniently located within walking distance.

The two of them loved theater, especially musical theater. The first time they’d met had been working a musical; Lara had been playing the (mostly) unwilling victim of a sensual, feminine vampire in a community theater Halloween production that Hannah was the stage manager for. They’d since moved away from that community, Hannah ever chasing the chance to be a mech pilot, but they still jumped at the chance to watch small, niche plays they’d likely never see again.

This time, however, they weren’t going to see something small or underground. The musical they were seeing tonight was one of the hottest in the world. Both women knew every song by heart, and had occupied many a road trip singing it beginning to end. It was about two women: one ostracized from society, trying and inevitably failing to protect her family and get revenge for herself; one privileged and accepted by society, but heartbroken watching how it cast out the woman she loved. It was Hannah’s favorite musical of all time; she dragged Lara (who thought the musical was “quite good, but took itself a bit too seriously”) to see it whenever it was performed in town.

The two ate dinner together, picking off each other’s plates and talking about whatever came to mind (Hannah wound up, over a glass of wine, explaining to Lara the exact differences between a gene-spliced crocodile and the newly created Alodilian™ species) until it was time to head to the theater. They made their way to their seats, continuing their conversation until the house lights dimmed.

As the first words of the play rang into the theater (“Good news!”), Lara looked over at her wife. Hannah had a certain look on her face—a concentration and excitement—that Lara found familiar. It took her a stanze before it clicked; Hannah, right now, looked like she did at the beginning of a sortie. She had the expression that she bore from the time she got into her mech until Lara forcibly took it from her by putting her into Focus.

Hannah, intent on the play, didn’t see the grin steal across Lara’s face.

Then, Hannah felt Lara lean in close to her, and the hot puff of air into her ear as Lara started to whisper.

“Edict 2: don’t look at the stage, pilot.”

Hannah’s eyes were shut almost before she realized what Lara had said to her. “What are you doing?” she whispered back. “Lara!”

She could have looked at the stage, despite the order—in theory, at least. She wasn’t in the mech; there was nothing actually enforcing the Edict. None of the pain flowed through her face and eyes the way it would have, nor did any of the pleasure and relief.

She could almost feel the soft, warming prickles against her eyes, like a ghost of what was supposed to be there. A shiver ran through her body. That was a mean thing Lara just did, Hannah thought, but you can just watch your show anyway. Open your eyes, and just settle back in.

Hannah opened her eyes. She found herself looking down—not at the stage, but at the pit orchestra. She listened to the footsteps and words of the actors on stage, jumping and singing and dancing just out of her field of view.

Okay, Hannah, you can do this, just ignore Lara. Look up juuust a little. It’s no big deal.

Hannah turned to face her wife. Out of the corner of her eye she could see one of the famous set pieces of the show, a mechanized dragon, suspended above the stage. It was as close as she could bring herself to get.

“Sir, you’re not even watching the play yourself,” Hannah whispered in a quiet whine. Lara was looking at Hannah, mouth in a wide, fox-like grin.

“I have my own play right here,” she whispered back. Hannah glared at her wife. She tried once more to convince herself to look at the musical; failing, she returned to glaring at her wife instead.

“Don’t worry, I’ll turn it off for you sweetheart.”

“Thank—”

“After I do this: Focus 2. Tell me if there are any letters missing form the names of the cast members in the playbill.”

Hannah found her attention inexorably shifting to the playbill in her lap. She let out a “hmph” of frustration, a little louder than she’d meant to. This is stupid, she thought. Why—there’s an “a”, a “b”, and a “d”—am I bothering with these—ok, that’s “i”, “o”, “u”, almost every vowel—stupid games? I just—that’s a “c” and an “f”—wanted to watch a nice show. The peaceful clarity that usually accompanied the Focus instructions wasn’t quite absent, here—it should have been, given that she wasn’t in the mech,  and certainly the annoyance that would have been impossible in the mech was felt in full force—but it wasn’t influencing her the way it normally did. Instead, she just…didn’t feel any desire more important than to find letters, even when she desperately wanted to watch the play. It somehow didn’t matter quite as much, now.

She skimmed through the cast list three, then four times, and then reported, “There’s no ‘x.’” On stage, out of sight of both women, a magnificent new set was revealed to the theater, filled with sparkling gems and moving parts. “Now please let me watch the play again?”

Lara’s grin had only gotten wider. “Focus 3, pilot: sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

Hannah stared at Lara in horror, a horror that only rose as she found herself starting to sing. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” came out of her. She tried to make it as quiet as possible, but a true whisper felt like “not singing”, and she had been told to sing, so she knew it wouldn’t do. The orchestra swelled; different instruments entwined in a perfect, beautiful harmony to support a song with many different separate voice parts weaving in and out of each other to create a wonderful, complex whole. It was beautiful, echoing through the immense theater.

To Hannah, her own voice felt like it echoed just as loudly. Her breaths came fast and hot—she needed desperately to shut her mouth. But the words tore themselves out of her. She saw, in the audience, people exchanging glances with their companions, clearly frustrated with her behavior. Her words were jarring, cacophonous, and she couldn’t stop them. She kept going and going and going. “Like a diamond—” she sang. The few lines she’d sung felt like they’d taken years. But then, finally, it was too much. She dropped her voice down to a true whisper to say, “People are looking at us, sir, please, please let me stop.”

Lara held Hannah’s gaze. Lara’s cheeks were flushed, her lips slightly parted. The two lead women in the musical clasped hands, learning to respect each other for the first time. A month ago, Hannah exuded self-assuredness and confidence. Now, Lara looked at a face filled with anxiety, desperation, embarrassment, and wanton need.

After what felt like another eternity—an eternity that had Hannah spending every single ounce of her self-control to not obey, to not follow the commands that promised clarity, peace, and focus—Lara finally said, “You can stop singing, pilot.” Hannah let out a sigh of relief.

And Lara opened her mouth one more time. “Focus—”

With desperate urgency, Hannah kissed Lara hard on the mouth. They kissed, just as the lead actress kissed her boyfriend, and Hannah grabbed her wife’s hands and held them tightly, pleasingly. Hannah pulled back and said, “Please, sir. Can I watch my play?”

Lara looked back at the stage for the first time in many minutes; Hannah, still feeling the Edict, looked hopelessly at her. Lara smiled broadly, vicious, hungry. “Cancel all Edicts—Focus 0, Edict 0,” she said. In the mech, none of those words technically had any meaning—she managed cancelling Edicts and Focus mode on her monitors—but she usually said them to let Hannah know she was done with the mission, and here, where none of these words should have had an effect on Hannah’s behavior, they did what they needed to. Hannah let out a long sigh and finally looked back at the stage. The set was magnificent. Without the tension of the fake Focus, she could finally relax and let the music wash over her. Settling in, she tried her best to enjoy the rest of the show with no distractions.

Unfortunately, she just wasn’t able to Focus.

***

Hannah was fidgety the entire ride home. Instead of enjoying the play, Hannah had spent almost all her time after intermission thinking that she needed to get back at Lara somehow. She felt like she needed to toss her around, maybe, fill up her cunt and her mouth, fuck her so hard she didn’t know what was happening, she needed—

—she needed her handler to fuck her to oblivion, in Focus 5, so deep she needed to be reminded to even breathe—

—no, no, that wasn’t what she needed, she needed—

“Hannah,” Lara prompted. “We’re home.”

Hannah started. She hadn’t realized so much time had passed since the play. She licked her lips. “Give me the keys,” she said, holding her hand out. Lara let the keys fall into Hannah’s hand. “Let’s get in the house,” Hannah said. She practically bounded to the front door, unlocking it as quickly as she physically could, and headed immediately to the bedroom. As Lara caught up, Hannah grabbed her hand and practically threw her onto the bed, and looked down at her wife with an expression of gleeful anticipation.

Lara looked up at Hannah with the same expression. “Edict 3: do not cum,” she said.

Hannah stopped dead, feeling the weight of the words settling in on her, imagining the fire that would have erupted in her pelvis had she been in her body. “Come on, Lara,” she said. “Haven’t we done this enough?”

“It’ll be fun,” Lara chirped innocently.

“It probably won’t even work without my—the mech. We’re talking about a biological process, and there’s nothing to enforce it.”

“Well, there’s one way to find out,” preened Lara.

“Fine,” said Hannah, dropping her pants and climbing over Lara to put her waist above Lara’s mouth. “Lick, then,” she commanded. She lowered her pussy onto her wife’s waiting tongue.

Hannah fucked her wife’s face, hard. Grabbing onto the headboard for support, she rubbed forward, back against the sucking and licking tongue beneath her. Before long, she was crying out, ready for the night’s ultimate release.

It didn’t happen.

It should have—she was right there, she was ready for it, she knew her body, she should have been gasping and shuddering by now—

But she wasn’t.

Eventually, frustrated, she got up and found the strap-on. Pushing Lara’s skirt up, Hannah affixed it to her wife’s hips and climbed atop it. She once again lowered herself down, feeling it fill her, and she started desperately fucking herself on it—one hand on her wife’s chest and one on the bed, pushing up, down, desperate to get what was being denied to her.

It didn’t happen.

She tried different positions, alternating between toys, her wife’s hand, her wife’s cock, her wife’s tongue, hoping something, anything would bring her to climax. Eventually, tired from the evening, she found herself sitting on top of the large chest they’d bought months back, wantonly humping a powerful vibrator at it’s top setting.

Lara’s hand closed over hers, turning the vibrator off and taking it from her. Hannah collapsed down on the hard wood, spread eagle, tired and desperate and needy. “Please?” she said.

Lara slowly, deliberately leaned into Hannah’s ear and whispered:

Focus 3, pilot: cum.

Ecstasy roared through her.

Hannah shook and moaned, unable to think through the warmth and pleasure and need rocking its way out of her. She barely could handle the intensity of it all; almost like after the long evening of the musical and the sex and the torment building inside her there wasn’t enough room to contain this flood now that the dam was breaking. Not in this pathetic, human wisp of a body. She needed her mech body to hold this. Tears ran down her face freely, spotting the chest’s wood as they fell. It was too much; it consumed her entirely.

Finally, mercifully, the pleasure subsided. She took some gasping, shuddering breaths atop the box and tried to rise to her feet. Her legs almost instantly gave out, and she sank to the ground and lay there, still shaking form occasional aftershocks. Her handler stood over her, grinning sweetly. “Thank you, pilot,” she said. “You did a good job tonight.”