「Raven.」
「Raven. I know you are awake, we are in Contact. I can literally feel your brainwaves.」
If anyone else were there, they might have seen a small shape wriggling deeper into a nest of blankets, soft curls of coral red hair still in the process of growing in pressed into the blankets, illuminated by softly glowing drifting strands of actual coral in the same color that twisted in lazy floating shapes.
But even if someone else were there, no one else but Ayre could feel the subtle glow of mischief behind the action. Flirtation. Lust, even.
Ayre rolled her eyes, as much as a waveform consciousness distributed across individually non-sentient microorgansims could, then again at the very concept of her thinking in that metaphor. The more time she spent in Contact, the more she found herself thinking in human terms. Intriguingly, the reverse seemed to be the case for her Raven, suggesting some central meeting point that Ayre tried not to think too hard about, a possible mirage she cherished too much to risk looking at too closely lest it be revealed as too wondrous to not be an illusion.
She gathered her thoughts, and the coral wafting through the room floated downwards, slipping under the blankets and lifting them off, and Ayre felt a thrill up her metaphorical spine as her Raven arched upwards into the drifting red dust that at this moment Ayre was.
Her Raven. She still felt more feelings than she yet had names for when she thought about the pilot below her in that way. She sent the wisp of coral drifting slowly away, and her Raven rolled over, crawling after the it on the small stumps that were all that remained of her natural limbs. She knew how so many humans would see the body below her, armless just below the shoulder, legless just below the hip, a constellation of cybernetic ports all up her spine. The spiderweb of coral laced alongside the neurons in her brain. There were those who saw a human crippled in an act of blasphemy against natural perfection, and those who saw a tool optimized for its purpose and no longer a human at all, and Ayre was unsure which of the two infuriated her more. It was those supposedly 'blasphemous modifications' that allowed her to make Contact with her Raven in the first place, and the depth of humanity inside the supposed 'tool' that turned that Contact into something...more.
As her Raven caught up with the drifting red dust, rubbed her cheek affectionately against it, and breathed in some of it with a happy smile, Ayre curled the remaining coral around her throat protectively. The woman gave a happy little shiver and blush, pressing her head and neck down into the bed so she could feel the pressure of the collar against her neck, and arching her butt upwards for...other reasons, which Ayre obliged by sending another filament of coral down to tease between what remained of her legs. The great irony is that she actually had a very nice set of coral prosthetics, but she almost always refused to use them. Ayre had been trying to get her to buy a set since just after she finished jamming her pulse blade in one side of Balteus and out the other, but her Raven had always refused with only the little grumbly noises that she used to express disagreement. After the disaster of trying to get her into the Junker AC after her capture the argument got even stronger.
(Her captors, seeing what the famous Wallclimber looked like outside of an AC, didn't even think she was worth posting a guard. So Raven had crawled to and tipped over a container of coral, which Ayre had used to form a magic carpet of sorts which Raven had ridden to the AC, but the myriad cranks and levers and connections needed to enter an AC were too much for either Ayre or Raven to operate on their own. Ayre had to resort to densifying coral into crude prosthetic limbs, and it had hurt more than anything else she had experienced in her conscious life that the only way she could anchor them to her Raven's body was to pierce the jagged points into her stumps, and the worst part was the soft smile on her Raven's face and the emotion she could feel through their Contact, the coral dissolving in the pilot's blood magnifying the depth of the link until it felt like Ayre could have seen single atoms of unhappiness if they had been present, but there were none, only a flawless endless landscape of trust, love, and lust. Some people thought the dosers were simple coral addicts, and maybe some were, but what many were addicted to was the substance's ability to link them to the numinous unformed minds dwelling in the coral. But when her Raven partook in the coral, there was but one goddess in her soul, and the devotion with which the pilot worshipped her was almost more than Ayre could bear.)
Even with a stronger argument though, her Raven still wouldn't budge. She only relented when Ayre suggested that she could even operate the limbs for her if they spent a miniscule fraction of the COAM stash to get custom ones with a coral control system. Her Raven had sat bolt upright, turned a red bright enough to put coral to shame, then buried her head in the sheets and made the little purring noise she used to signal agreement. The sheer levels of horny radiating through their Contact in that moment recontextualized several things that had initially confused Ayre. When the prosthetics arrived, she made a show of pinning her Raven down on the maintenance table with cords of coral around her neck and what remained of her limbs, and the way she arched her back and moaned as Ayre controlled the robotic arms above to attach the prosthetic sockets only confirmed her suspicions.
(Mercifully, a miniscule fraction of the COAM stash of the richest mercenary on Rubicon meant they were possibly the nicest prosthetics in the galaxy, and the sockets attached painlessly and seamlessly thanks to cutting edge medical technology. Ayre had even included special instructions that each socket be capped with a layer of cushioning gel so that her Raven could crawl around comfortably even without the limbs attached. She told the makers it was in case of emergency, and she didn't care if they suspected just how much time the Wormkiller was going to spend wriggling around limblessly.)
After the sockets came the prosthetics themselves, slender and white like a marble statue, but alive with warmly glowing red traceries of coral circuitry running down the sides in a pattern more organic than electrical. Ayre had triple checked the connection of each, and then taken them over, standing her Raven up on the integrated heels, and then strutting over to a nearby mirror. She felt a sense of possessive pleasure at the way the woman blushed seeing herself carried on limbs that she was not in control of, and both the blush and the pleasure deepened as she ran the artificial fingers along her Raven's body.
What followed was a lengthy questioning, what some might call interrogation or even torture, were it not for the fact that her Raven could have ended the whole thing with a single grumbling verbalization, and she only nodded, moaned, begged, purred, and dripped her arousal onto the floor below, scrupulously avoiding anything that could even be minsinterpreted as asking for Ayre to stop. And in return, Ayre rubbed slow circles that never quite touched sensitive spots that had not felt the touch of another in untold years, dragging her over and over to the precipice of the little death and then holding her there while meticulously dragging all of her secret kinks into the light. And when their session ended, she brushed one finger along her Raven's dripping slit and then removed it, and even while the pilot shook and cried and clenched on nothing through the orgasm caused by the touch and ruined by the removal, the first she could have had since before becoming a pilot turned into a bitter and oh so sweet reminder of what she would willingly give away if she could but find someone she trusted to give it to, Ayre pulled out a chastity belt, pulled it up the artificial legs, and fastened it in place around the woman's natural hips, and that display of the perfect balance of understanding and dominance was so potent to her that her Raven shuddered once more, this time with the uniquely agonizing pleasure of an untouched ruined orgasm as her wetness splattered to the floor through the holes in the belt.
Ayre roused herself from the pleasant memories as her Raven gave a particularly loud purr, the coral drifting through the holes in the chastity belt unimpeded having given her a bit too much stimulation, but her Raven was too much of a good girl to try and sneak an orgasm without permission. Ayre split the stream, curling it around the pilot's pussy without giving her the last little bit of stimulation she would need, then sending it drifting up underneath the top edge of the belt, curling it possessively around her belly, then up her spine which arched with pleasure to prolong the feeling.
「Now now Raven, you did promise, no more rewards until you practice.」
(As much as Ayre intended to always be there for her, as a friend, as a lover, and as a domme, her own sense of responsibility meant she still wanted her Raven to at least have the possibility of living independent of her if she ever chose to.)
Ayre's curiosity rose in parallel as she felt her Raven's sense of mischief intensify again. The woman gave her best puppy dog eyes up at the nearest coral drift, then huffed in mock-frustration before it gave way to a geniune smile. She closed her eyes, inhaled, and suddenly Ayre could feel the coral in the room start to resonate with another wave, forming a perfect harmony with her own. In wondrous disbelief, she watched one of the prosthetic arms float into the air and attached itself to the matching stump, and it, no, not it, she, her Raven reached up into the air with her own arm, twisting her finger around a nearby filament of coral. It was so different and yet so much the same as the way she manipulated the coral, solid instead of amorphous, the same notes arranged into different music. Her Raven used the finger wrapped in coral to trace a design across her lower abdomen, the glowing red dust sliding under her skin in the form of a stylized heart surrounding overlapping waves. The almost eerie precision of her movements seemed oddly familiar, and then it clicked when she realized her Raven was moving her prosthetic limbs with the same exacting standards she held herself to in her AC. When she reached the top of the chastity belt, she gathered the coral at the tip of one finger, inserted it into the keyhole, and after another inhale, twisted, the lock popping loose effortlessly. Even as her back arched at the cool air directly on her dripping wet pussy, she merely continued drawing, until the pseudo tattoo over her womb was complete. Then, Ayre felt her Raven's consciousness detach from her body, which might have sent her into a panic attack, except she could feel her Raven's consciousness resonating in the same coral as herself, looking down at her own body in satisfaction.
「Thank you for being so concerned for me, but do not worry, I could manage on my own now. But while I can, as much as I can, all that I can, all of myself, I give to you. Life on your leash is not a compromise, it is the most transcendent pleasure.」
As Ayre reeled in shock at hearing her Raven's infinitely soft voice in her mind for the first time, and again for what it had said, her Raven breathed in once more as her consciousness returned to her body. She reached down, relocked the chastity belt in place, flashed a little heart sign with her thumb and index finger to the coral drifting overhead, and then the prosthetic detached from her stump and flopped down to the side, and her Raven was wriggling in unfulfilled lust once more, exactly as helpless as she wanted to be, in complete submission to the one person she wanted to submit to.