Not So Different, You and I

"And at that very moment, I, Doctor Malpractice, will become the mistress and the ruler of the world!"

The woman clamped to the table with metal cuffs yawned.

"Are you finished, Mal?" Lexa Storme asked. Her evening dress hung rumpled off her body from the rough treatment the night previous, as had her medium length black hair. Far from UNITE's top field agent, she looked like she was fresh from a Walk of Shame after a rowdy party. The raucousness of her evening was a fact, the bandaged wounds to her upper arm and the top of her forehead implied a much less entertaining experience than a one-night stand.

12 hours ago, Lexa had been but a guest at the Zurich Gala and Space Technology Showcase, an annual event where the brightest minds in all of Europe in fields relating to space travel and interplanetary science gather to hobnob and pat one another on the back. Mal, under her "real" name Doctor Malvina Practice, had been cleaning up her image after a series of foiled schemes that landed her in super-prison. Agent 0, Lexa's boss and handler, suspected that the good doctor was up to her old tricks again.

It would seem that she was, given the giant Domination Ray.

The scientist's pale features made the blushing in her face even more apparent. "You talk a strong game for someone about to be turned into a mindless drone!"

Lexa cast a dismissive glance to the giant Tesla Coil-like tube pointing directly at her. Crackles of pink-purple lightning rippled and snapped from its metallic surface, but the agent didn't seem the least bit perturbed. It was but one of many other contraptions that littered the underground headquarters. Lexa recognized half of them, though she might be able to name only one or two.

"I've seen worse. Your Acid Gators were more threatening. And the outbreak of those Zombimbos you unleashed had far more lasting consequences than this will have. Get to the offer."

Doctor Malvina Practice, famed mad scientist, inventor, malcontent, and dreamer of the forbidden, scoffed at her insolence. The recirculated air in her laboratory has a noticeable chill, which contrasted nicely with the brilliant woman's fiery red hair and her terrible temper. In different circumstances, Lexa might have considered the burst of frustration to be cute.

In different circumstances.

"Y-you're doing this all wrong!" the scientist wailed, balling up her fists. "Just let me do my spiel first and THEN you can be your small-minded self. It is my ethical duty to give you a chance, as minute as it may be, to actually work toward the benefit of all humanity, rather than stand in its path."

Lexa tried to shrug, but it was difficult with where the restraints were placed. "Whatever gets you through the night, Doc."

Mal harrumphed, but continued. On the large blank wall directly in front of her, Storme watched an amateurish slideshow presentation take form, aided by a concealed projector in the ceiling. Part of the Domination Ray was in her line of sight, so the scientist made a shooing gesture and the robotic arm that held the energy cannon lifted out of the way. Lexa could still feel its energy crackling just above her right ear.

The first few slides were still shots from their previous encounters. Who had been taking these photos was a mystery, but each were professional grade action stills of particular decisive moments. There was the time Mal had tried to turn everyone at Mardi Gras into spiders, the incident with the stolen UFO over Las Vegas, the herd of genetically modified attack mammoths. Toward the end of the gallery, rather than Lexa confronting Mal, there was a man in various stages of armed conflict with the scientist's cronies. He was all too familiar, though not someone the agent enjoyed recalling for any great length of time.

"We've been fighting for years. Through thick and thin, we have been inseparable. In a lot of ways, you are close to being my friend. You have helped me become a better criminal, Lexa. For that, I thank you."

Lexa scoffed, not that Mal noticed. "If you want to repay me for all our 'fun times' together, why not power down the Ray and let me go? I'll talk to the officials down at UNITE, see if we can't get you on a work release program or something."

"Bah!" Malvina scoffed in her overly dramatic fashion. Though her accent suggested Eastern Europe, her performance reminded Lexa of a hammy English Thespian having difficulty transitioning to holofilm. She was playing to the bleachers in a room with only two people in it, one of which was herself. "The corrupted political order seeks to marginalise me. To contain me. To turn me into a docile slave. I won't allow it! And neither should you."

"And instead you want to turn everyone else into docile slaves?" Lexa asked, gesturing with her head to the will-suppression weapon currently charged and ready to fire at her.

"That's different! The Domination Ray is a STATEMENT. It's a metaphor for what the uncaring mainstream society BELIEVES we should be. To reject becoming a drone is GOOD, because it means that you want to be an individual. And if you refuse to bow to one master, perhaps you might wake up and fight the other people pulling your strings. They call me mad. MAD! Well I am mad. I am LIVID, in fact, at the state of the world today. Only through showing the TRUE EXTREME of MENTAL SLAVERY will the oligarchic madhouse be brought to its knees!"

Lexa made a face. "I think you just wanted to build a mind control ray."

"I'M ALLOWED TO HAVE HOBBIES. WHO SAYS I CAN'T?!"

Before flying off the handle even further, Mal took a deep breath and visibly tried to calm herself. That impressed Lexa a little. Almost as if the madwoman had spent some time trying to work on her explosive temper. The dark, cynical part of her mind wanted to jab her further. Provoking her, breaking her concentration would probably be easy at this moment.

But she didn't want to. She let Mal right her emotional ship before changing topics.

"If you truly want to free the world from the powers that be, why don't you try to work inside the system. You could enact slow, systemic change from within, rather than throwing fireballs and gatling laser fire from your secret redoubt."

Now it was Malvina's turn to appear smug. "Bit rich coming from an extrajudicial agent of an insidious global terror organisation to be preaching about the merits of the system."

"Granted. UNITE does what it can, sometimes it messes up, but-"

"Do you really want this conversation? Because I guarantee you, you don't want to be in the position to defend your awful bosses." Mal shoved her hands into her pockets and mumbled something under her breath.

"What?"

Mal sighed. "I said...'at least you never get misgendered in the world of supervillainry.'"

Lexa's blood froze. "The fuck do you know?" she asked in a tense monotone. The jovial prodding had completely vanished from her voice.

Mal gulped. Even though the agent was locked down to a metal table and within a button's press of being mentally dominated, she was still intimidating to the much smaller Malvina. "I...I said what I said. How did your bosses take your transition?"

Lexa's glare could pierce through titanium plate. "None of your business."

"I see. They weren't particularly open-minded to their top agent revealing that she would rather be herself at work, were they?"

"Drop it, Mal. I'm warning you."

A part of the scientist's mind, probably her sense of self-preservation, told her to do exactly that. But a larger part, maybe her ego, maybe her sense for injustice, pressed her onward. "I'm not just a high-energy particle physicist, you know. I'm also quite good with computers. I've seen the correspondence between your and Agent 0, with the other agents at UNITE. I've seen you struggle. You would never have to do that with me."

One of the metal bracers clicked. Mal's heart hammered in her chest as she saw the once restrained agent lean over and undo the other cuff on her left hand. In her fingers was an earring that, apparently, doubled as a lockpick.

"Guards!" Mal called, fumbling for the Domination Ray's controls. A pair of Senturiods stomped into her lab from their guard post outside the door. Metal bucket heads and coiled tubing for arms betrayed their scrapheap origins. Lexa wrenched her ankles out of the restrains in a dazzling display of flexibility. Then, with an almost casual motion, she tossed a metal ring (one from her bellybutton) at the automatons. It exploded into a haze of sparkles on contact. The room's lights flickered, the Domination Ray died, and both robots fell over, EMP'd and out of commission. Mal mashed her thumb on the DOMINATE button to no avail. Lexa ripped it from her hands.

The agent grabbed Mal by her collar. At her full height, she stood several inches above the redheaded supervillain. There was silence in the lab as Lexa fumed. The whirr of mechanical apparatuses and fans cooling electronics was dead. All there was to hear were each other's breaths. Mal's careless taunts had slammed a pickaxe down into a capped well of emotions that was threatening to spring forth. One of the few ways Lexa knew how to handle her feeling was with violence. It was half the reason she worked at UNITE. She was a blunt object, like a club or a hammer. When a message needed to be sent, she was the agent that 0 called. She was...

She looked at the controller in her hand. Was she any better than a weapon?

"Go on."

Mal blinked. "W-what?"

Lexa let her go. "You were asking me to join you. Continue."

For the first time in a long while, the mad scientist was speechless. She swallowed a little to get the dry feeling out of her mouth before continuing, trying to retrace her verbal steps.

"I...well, the gist of what I was getting at is that the order I'm fighting against is the same bit that you chafe and struggle to be free from. You are so much more than an oppressive tool, Lexa."

She looked down at herself. Beneath her dress she knew that there was a lifetime of scars gained in service of a greater cause. Every thwarted plot, every intercepted missile, every invasion halted was logged on her body in one way or another. And...what did she have to show for it? She wasn't getting younger. Soon she'd be replaced with a hungrier agent, a more youthful pawn who would be just as willing to do the dirty work of the state as she was. As she had been.

Lexa tried her best to smooth the rumples in her dress. "What is the alternative? I can't let you take over the world, Mal."

This was the most honest they'd ever been with each other. Instead of launching into a familiar tirade about how the Earth would be better served with her at its controls, Doctor Mal Practice decided to let the mask slip for a moment.

"I don't either. I'd be a terrible despot, honestly. I have no idea how an economy works, for one. And I don't actually have an interest with managing the day-to-day affairs of the average person on the street. I just don't know any better way to break us free of the system that binds us than this."

"That's probably because you don't know the system. Or at least understand it," Lexa said. At Mal's confused expression, she elaborated. "You're focused too much on elaborate gestures and outlandish schemes. Nobody's going to fault your creativity, but if you know where to strike, you can get a lot more done with a lot fewer resources. You got a computer I could use?"

Mal lead her over to the nearest console. She was almost too stunned to remember that moments before, they had been bitter enemies. She allowed the agent full access to her system, against her inherently suspicious nature. Far from betraying her, Lexa actually brought up files from UNITE's own servers.

"If you go through the personnel files, you can probably find dozens like me. Marginalized, disregarded, ignored cogs in the machine who want to be more than they are. Approach them with an offer more tempting than a death threat and they'll hollow out the agency from within. That'll cripple them more thoroughly than any hijacked drone attack fleet ever would."

Mal looked like she'd just seen perpetual motion for the first time. She tried to find a fault in the plan, and there were a few she could come up with off the top of her head. But it wasn't an awful plan. The idea of defeating her archrival without actual loss of life, or even replacing anyone with a synthoid, was a difficult prospect to swallow given her plans in the past. But...

"It could be done...but what would you want out of it?" Mal asked.

That was the question that had been dogging Lexa ever since this entire conversation went from banter to actual human communication. Just what the fuck was she doing? She was an AGENT for God's sake. She was not only betraying her comrades at the moment, but she was betraying everything she'd worked for. Every scar on her body was a debt paid. Every bad dream a receipt. How could she possibly just turn away from all that she knew?

Lexa tensed as Mal entered her personal space. Her training sent sirens blaring in her ears. But she suppressed the urge to flee, or take control of the situation. She looked down with an intrigued expression, eager to see where the scientist was going with this. Mal took the larger woman's hands in hers.

"Join me," she said once more. This time, however, it wasn't perfunctory. There was a desperation behind the words. A longing that had long been mere subtext, now coming to the fore. "Be with me. As my partner. We can change this world, you and I. We can be its saviours."

"That's...that's a lot to ask," Lexa said.

"I know. And I don't promise we'll win. I don't even think we stand a great chance at changing everything. But you and I...we have to try, right? We can be the beacon of hope for every person who'd ever been stepped on, or overlooked. We can build a community of people like us and strike back at the forces that seek to keep us in chains. And I'll stand a better chance with you than without you." Mal stepped closer. "Be with me. Please."

There was no grand scheming here. Lexa had been through a thousand million villain speeches. There was just a woman, alone, asking for help. Buried deep, deep in her past, beyond the training and the lifetime of cynical detachment, there was a tiny spark that had lead Lexa into UNITE training in the first place. She wanted to help people. Though she wasn't gifted like Mal, she was a woman of action. When things needed to be done, there was nothing on Earth that could stop The Storme. And so, once again, she took the first step.

She leaned down and kissed Mal, hard. The scientist recoiled from the initial force, and Lexa pulled back. A haze of confusion lingered between them. Was this what they wanted? Did either of them misread the signals? But the gap between them never widened more than an inch. Mal leaned forward again. Lexa kissed her once more, softer this time. It blossomed into a carnal display of affection as years of pent up feeling boiled over. They had been more than arch enemies. Now they could be more than lovers.

Lexa parted, but she took one of Mal's hands into hers. She gently led the scientist back to the table. They explored one another, tracing their hands through each other's hair, planting kisses upon their naked flesh. They disrobed one another, dress and labcoat falling to the floor in unison. Mal felt herself getting slid onto the table, where Lexa continued the amorous assault. Both her nipples were rock hard, and were easy prey for Lexa's questing mouth. Amid the soft moans and whimpers, Mal heard a solid metal thunk.

One of the restraints snapped shut around Mal's wrists, giving her a wide-eyed expression of shock. Had she been betrayed? The thought crossed her mind for an agonising second. But her eyes followed to the erection Lexa was now sporting. That could not be faked. Nor could the animalistic desire in those soft brown eyes. They'd been so sad before, so haunted. There was only a trace of that now. The smile on her lips was no longer the sneer of contempt. It was closer to the anticipatory expression one got the night before Christmas, right before unwrapping a special gift. Gingerly, Mal allowed her other wrist to be slipped into the second restraining cuff.

"Let's see how you like it," the former agent teased, tracing her fingernails gently down Mal's exposed tummy. She inhaled sharply, wriggling uselessly against the restraints. Her legs remained unbound, but they'd been splayed out, with Lexa in the middle, rubbing her erection against Mal's smaller hen. The agent reigned over her, and the woman so obsessed with control and power felt utterly helpless.

Now that she had control, Lexa took her time. She ground herself against her prey. Mal's quivering member was quite stiff, but felt particularly small and useless in comparison. Lexa gripped them both in her hand and held them together, only increasing the pleasure.

"Oooh~" Mal whimpered. Her tip was already dripping pre just as Lexa got a good rhythm going.

"You like being taken advantage of, don't you?" Lexa asked. Judging by the transparent fluid dripping from Mal, the question was quite rhetorical. She shot a hand to Mal's nipple to tweak and thumb around while she frotted the scientist into a frenzy. The noises coming from her mouth were anything but dignified.

"I'm...oh fuck..."

"You're almost there already?" Lexa laughed. "Who knew that the nefarious Doctor Malpractice was a pathetic little quickshot."

That did her in. Mal squeaked and shuddered and pulled at the cuffs as her overstressed cocklet lost its load. She squirted onto her tummy, with dribbles landing on Lexa's fingers. Those same fingers kept up the motion to milk out that humiliating orgasm, making the pleasure she was experiencing undeniable.

"That's a good girl. Let it all out~" Lexa cooed. When it was over, Mal slumped against the table. She didn't get much time to rest, however. Two fingers were pressed against her mouth. She suckled them gently, only noticing later that there had been something on them.

"Wait," she asked, looking down at her spattered tummy, "Did you just feed me my own cum?"

Lexa laughed. "Yeah. You seemed to enjoy it though. Now hold still, I haven't gotten off yet, and I need to punish you for capturing me so many times in the past." She looked around the lab, tipping over and reading the side of any bottle she could find. As it was a mad scientist's den, there were quite a few.

"It's by the computer," Mal suggested sheepishly. Sure enough, behind the monitor was a large bottle of personal lubricant.

"Now what's a nice girl like you doing with an industrial size bottle of lube...at her computer desk no less."

"Shut up and fuck me already, you brute."

"Yes, Doctor!" She snapped to attention, making a mockery of a salute. Her lubing was unnecessarily thorough, and more than once it took the form of simple fingering. The preliminaries restored Mal's erection, though her sore meat only reached half-rigidity before Lexa withdrew her finger. She squeezed more gel onto her cock, stroking herself til she was rock hard.

"You ready?" she asked. Mal nodded.

Lexa placed herself at the brink of insertion before pausing. This wasn't her first experience by any means, but it was different this time. She'd never been with someone she cared about before. The meaningless sex before this had been tension relief, or a display of dominance over someone. It...it wasn't like this. She looked into Mal. Their many encounters, the shared jabs and repartee. In all their battles, they'd never physically harmed one another. It had always been one of the mad scientist's goons, or a mere squeeze of the wrist to slap Mal into handcuffs. How long had they been this close to fucking? How long had the fake walls between them kept them apart?