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The first time Satya Vaswani saw the Shimada dragons, she was convinced they were some form of hard-light projection. The majestic creatures spiraling across the battlefield from Hanzo’s bow, tearing through Vishkar's hired mercenaries, could only be such, because magic was a myth for little girls who did not know better.
Satya knew better.
Still, she was curious - they seemed both solid and ethereal, an effect hard to achieve with technology. She had never heard of an Overwatch agent being caught in the dragons’ way, but that could be as simple as some sort of Identify Friend-Foe protocol like her turrets had.
Attempts to pry information from the elder Shimada were meant with huffs of dismissal, a hand waved and a grumble that she would not - could not - understand, if she insisted on operating under the assumption that they were tech.
Satya had never felt so offended in her life. She had not stomped off, but it was a near thing, and it had left her in a dismal mood the rest of the day.
Still, she was determined. She would understand the dragons. She had to.
The first time Satya experienced the dragons up close, she realized how utterly wrong she was.
She was cornered, pinned - not at all a position she had any desire to be in, because she was not a close quarters fighter, but it was her, her gun, and four Talon agents she was trying desperately to keep off her teleporter while she ducked around corners and tried to hide in the winding, empty buildings of King’s Row. Nearly as soon as she set up one of her turrets, it was demolished, and while Satya Vaswani did not generally panic, it was rapidly becoming a very near thing.
“This is Symmetra -- I am pinned down near the exit point, requesting backup!” She gasped into her comm. Part of her feared that no one would come -- she knew that to many of them she was still the Vishkar architech, the interloper, the possible double agent.
“I am on my way!” Genji Shimada’s voice echoes over the comms, and Satya felt a rush of relief when her visor informed her he had used her teleporter. Someone was undeniably coming.
She took another turn, back towards her teleporter and towards the safety of a much more competent melee fighter, and ran face to face into the four Talon agents she had been trying to flee.
Her heart dropped. This was...not going to end well for her, it seemed.
She should not have panicked so hastily.
There was a swift hail of shurikens from behind her, and in a blur of quick cybernetic-enhanced movements, Genji moved between Satya and the agents.
“Ryūjin no ken o kure!” Genji called, and Satya was witness to the dragon up close. One dragon, wrapped around Genji’s sword but launching forward viciously to tear through Talon agents, following Genji’s blade.
It was...most assuredly not some kind of hard-light projection. She had seen many, had manipulated more, and knew how they behaved. Genji’s dragon did not behave as a hard-light projection would.
Satya found that she could not breathe, a combination of wonder and the remaining fear for her life that came from facing four guns in her face.
Her legs gave out when Genji and his dragon dropped the last agent, and the cyborg rushed over to catch her before she hit the ground.
“Are you injured, Vaswani-san?” He asked, gently. She shook her head.
“Merely experiencing what I believe is an adrenaline crash,” she said, waving a hand. “I will be fine in a moment.”
“Let me stay with you, Vaswani-san. In case there are more.” He said, and then he carefully propped her back up on her feet. Ordinarily she would not have accepted, but there was no practicality in remaining here alone, not when she was sure the four agents who had found her would have certainly alerted others that there was an Overwatch agent out of place. More would be coming, undoubtedly, and Genji could help her protect her teleporter, which was an important exit for the team once they had properly captured and diffused the EMP bomb they had been sent to stop from taking out as large portion of London's omnic residents.
“That would be very much appreciated, Shimada-san.” Unwavering politeness, always. It was the easiest roadmap for social interaction she would ever have.
“Then stay behind me,” Genji requested. “It would be a shame for Overwatch to lose such a talented agent.”
Talented. Satya had to cover a smile. It was nice to be recognized, even if she was still not quite over the girlish amazement that Genji Shimada - and likely his brother - truly did command dragon spirits, not some sort of hard light facsimile.
Perhaps there was a little magic left in the world.
Satya Vaswani had not, even after the revelation in that King’s Row back alley, ever expected to see the mystical Shimada dragons in any sort of tangible flesh form. She had not realized they had one, until an afternoon spent carefully tuning her hard light projection glove in a small, disused lounge room was interrupted by a weight around her shoulders that had most certainly not been there before, and there was a tiny friendly chirrup from somewhere near her left ear.
Satya turned, and was greeted with the face of a dragon.
It was small, and green, and in this form completely unintimidating - but undeniably a dragon, winding around her shoulder and examining her glove curiously.
Her heart stuttered for a moment in pure shock. No one had warned her about physical, real dragons - there was absolutely no point of comparison or understanding. This was a real dragon. A real dragon that made tiny noises in her ear and pressed its nose against her face and regarded her with concern when she stared for too long in alarmed silence. It chirruped again, worried this time, and she remembered to breathe.
“Aren’t you remarkable,” she said, lifting her glove up to allow the dragon to examine it closer.
She had seen a man turn himself to smoke and take a sniper’s bullet through the head like it was a love tap since joining Overwatch, surely she could handle a real, live, solid, snake-sized dragon.
The tiny creature contented itself winding down her arm and examining her glove, nosing at the area where she pulled hard light from, making chirrupy questioning noises. Satya found herself explaining bits of the technology to the blatantly curious creature without thinking - which was foolish, because she did not truly know where it came from, even if she could guess.
“Ramen?” Genji’s voice called from the doorway, and the dragon chirped brightly, slithering back up Satya’s arm and curling around her, resting its upper body on her head and making a series of bright noises of greeting at the door. She followed its gaze, to see the cyborg standing in the doorway, head tilted to the side and something Satya might have pegged as “embarrassment” in his body language except there was absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about, surely, and so she chalked it up to her usual struggle with reading people and moved on. “I’m sorry, Vaswani-san, was he bothering you?”
“Not at all,” Satya said, feeling magnanimous because real dragon, “I was merely performing some routine maintenance; having someone to talk to much improved the experience.” It had she wasn’t lying. “I had no idea your dragon had a physical form.”
“They do not show themselves often,” Genji said, and there it was again, the embarrassment that still felt utterly contextless. Had she not made it clear enough that the dragon had caused no problems? Was he worried she was lying for his benefit?
“Then I will consider this a rare honor,” Satya said. Genji shifted briefly from one foot to the other, and he took a longer moment than usual to gather himself together to speak to her. How strange.
“Ah, Vaswani-san?” He began, and he sounded much less confident than usual. “Ramen seems quite settled in with you, and I would prefer to keep an eye on him, since he can be something of a troublemaker - would you mind if I sat with you?”
Satya considered. Genji could be talkative, when he wished to be, and bright and energetic, but he could also be wonderfully calm and quiet, and she was mostly certain that he did not mean her harm or intend to in any way mock her. Perhaps he would prefer a quiet afternoon away from the rest of the team just as she did.
“Of course, Shimada-san. Make yourself comfortable,” she offered, scooting over carefully so as not to jostle the dragon - Ramen, what a silly name, but she would keep that thought to herself.
Genji settled in next to her, and Satya found that rather than an irritant, as most people rapidly became, his presence was welcome.
She had thought she was too jaded and apart for something so petty as friendship - but if she was not too jaded for dragons, perhaps she was not too jaded for that, either.
Ramen - and by extension, Genji - became a surprisingly regular fixture in Satya’s off-duty life, to the point where after nearly two weeks of his consistent companionship she had gently asked him to stop calling her Vaswani-san, because Satya would do. His entire body language had read something close to “delighted” when he responded by asking her to call him Genji.
Through Genji, Satya found herself drawn more into the rest of the Overwatch team, and she was surprised to find how much she liked it. Certainly they could be utterly overwhelming at times - so many of them were loud and boisterous - but she felt surprisingly welcomed, and even when she had to withdraw to catch her breath, none of them pressed or tried to draw her back in. She was allowed her space when she wanted it, and welcomed when she did not. Lúcio still regarded her with undisguised suspicion, but she expected that, and she would let him. Vishkar had hurt him - she remembered, sometimes, a little girl in the Rio favela, nearly crushed and burned to death because Vishkar thought it best to clear their homes to make a better world, and she understood why Lúcio was so angry.
So she made her friends where she could, and accepted the ones she couldn’t, and she found herself growing more and more content as an agent of Overwatch.
Always, when she could, she found herself watching the dragons - how Ramen seemed particularly fond of both her and Zenyatta, but he was happy to crawl over any number of agents, even the ever-taciturn Morrison, but Hanzo’s dragons (who, Genji had informed her once in a low conspiratorial whisper, were named Udon and Soba, and it had been a struggle to contain her laughter because that was so delightfully at odds with their partner’s very stern personality) only ever seemed to perch on Hanzo himself or Agent McCree and, sometimes, Genji. Their behavior patterns were absolutely fascinating to her, and also she just liked them. She even found herself liking the brothers - though Hanzo was as sharp-edged and withdrawn as ever, she found that she enjoyed long silences over tea with him, and in turn he seemed to be warming to her.
And Genji...Genji was something entirely different. She was not so self-deceptive as to assume it was simple friendship that had her heart picking up speed every time he laughed, or that drew smiles from her just from his presence. Still, her feelings were irrelevant. There was no need for her to complicate what they had with what might be a fleeting crush.
Alright, perhaps not a fleeting crush. Satya knew she was being silly, knew that nothing could possibly come of her attraction to Genji, and yet she found herself sighing over him, watching with a little too much affection as he flitted across the battlefield in a graceful blur of black and green. Taking a little too much delight in catching him at just the right moment to refresh his shields, feeling a little too much warmth in her chest when he thanked her.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
She simply could not help it.
Satya Vaswani had never thought herself the type of woman to pine or moon over a crush, and yet here she was, and when the only thing she could manage for herself was that at least her pining after Genji was not half as pathetic and obvious as McCree and Hanzo’s insistent dancing around each other, it was a sorry state of affairs. Finally, she decided that there was no use in continuing to be foolish about this, and so she invited Genji to tea one afternoon, feeling very certain of herself, or at least very determined to clear the air and deal with the consequences as they came.
She was genuinely startled when Genji sat down across from her and very carefully removed both halves of his faceplate. She had seen him without the lower half, at meals, but never the upper, and it was remarkable how beautiful she found his eyes. His skin looked scarred, pockmarked - but she had expected that, as a result of whatever horrible battle with his brother had resulted in him requiring a partially cybernetic body. It was a surprise - an honor, almost - to see him without his mask entirely. To see him willing to share that vulnerability with her.
Perhaps her crush was not as silly or hopeless as she had thought.
They were both quiet at first, as Satya delicately poured tea into a pair of cups and they both sipped from them. Now that she could actually observe Genji’s facial expressions, she noted the way his eyes kept flicking to her face and then back to his cup, and the way his cheeks tinted faintly red every time their eyes met.
How curious.
Finally, there was speech - and it seemed both of them chose the same moment, practically tipping over each other’s words.
“Genji, there is something I would like -”
“Satya, I have something I need to -”
They both broke off, and Genji laughed, briefly, and Satya found herself smiling. His voice sounded different, without what she realized must be modulation from the visor, but still pleasant.
“You first, then?” Genji offered. Satya nodded, taking a moment to compose herself. She found herself automatically glancing away from his face, eye contact feeling even more uncomfortable and unnatural than it usually did.
“The more time we spend together,” she said, “the more I find myself becoming...deeply fond...of you. I am happy to have become your friend, but I find that I would like...something else.”
“Satya,” there was something like a warm, fond sigh in the way he said her name. He reached out and gently took her hand, and Satya found that the texture of his armor did not feel harsh or unforgivingly metallic, it felt...comfortable. Safe. “I have had...feelings for you, for quite some time. I thought that you could not possibly return them because of what I am, but I have never been more glad to be wrong.”
When Genji leaned over the table to kiss her, and Satya kissed back, she found herself thinking that maybe there was room for quite a lot of fairy tale magic in her world.