When Satya wants to feel something that cuts deep, she reads about DNA.

The series of letters that all but spell out a person's fate: A-C-G-T. Much of one's lot in life is cast in the 40 weeks before one is born. Height, personality, eye color, diseases; all framework laid down before one can be called a person. A few proteins misplaced and the seeds of one's death are sown.

Few things can change this fate. Even money, the universal solution, has limited success.

Science is the ultimate Cassandra; it sees the doom and spreads the word but cannot stop it.

On most days, Satya sees a woman who can manipulate a person's body down to the cellular level and pull people back from over the brink of death and even Angela cannot rewrite what DNA has cast.

There are a few things that can rewrite the script of the human body.

What can? Radiation.

What a cruel joke.

She flips through the latest research she can find. Biology and medicine is not in Satya's wheelhouse but she is well read enough to acquire a patchwork knowledge and the news supplies. She could always ask Dr. Ziegler for clarification, but to do so would reveal what she is looking for. And she knows Angela would shoot down any false hope, as any good doctor should.

She wants false hope. She wants assurance, even if it a sliver of a chance. Even if it's not real.

Satya spent her whole life planning. Her life was picked out for her the day she was plucked out of the overcrowded housing by the Vishkar Corporation. She knew from year to year what she would be studying, when she would begin work for the corporation, when it would optimal in her career to perhaps marry and have a child, when she would retire. There were very few "ifs" and many "whens". She knew when every event in her life would take place and that gave her such comfort and serenity. To go from not knowing when her next meal will come to knowing what her purpose was in life and how well compensated she would be for it! Relief could not describe the weight and fear taken off her shoulders!

Then she threw it all away.

In a few short months, she threw away her career, her future, her home merely to do the right thing. Ha! She left Vishkar and turned around to fight it from Overwatch's side. She pulled the very threads she knit to built up her former company.

It was terrifying yet thrilling to be free. Satya could make her own mistakes. She could ruin her own life, if she wanted to! Every day was a choice to keep going forward and always be threatened with falling. Absolute freedom!

And then-

And then she met Jamison.

In her old life, they would have never met. Could never meet. Or at least she couldn't imagine how they would ever cross paths. A terrorist Junker and a world renowned architect? Any chance encounter they would have had in her old life would only end in disaster.

But her world was in disastrous ruins already, destroyed by her own hands and her own choice to rebel. After all, now they were two outlaws working for the same vigilante group. What could it hurt to get to know this bizarre man who also joined Overwatch?

It turns out, it could hurt a lot. More than she thought a person could feel and still live.

In this extralegal life, time together should not be measured by a calendar but by a clock. Either of them could die a dozens ways any day of the week. Yes, they were both capable agents in their own right, but old soldiers are rare and far between for a reason.

But-

There is a questionable time limit when it comes to Jamison. It is a time limit that does not apply to her.

How could a child stare up at the poisonous cloud of a nuclear reactor pouring up into the sky and still be fine? How could the days in that hell under the sun not plant the seeds of cancer in his hungry frame?

Not to discount all the ways he could die due to his own actions. He was already down two limbs thanks to carelessness. He didn't have much body parts to spare.

She could have Angela read his blood, his cells, and tell her what might happen. But she was terrified to learn about the ticking clock of their time together. Better to worry and not know. To know, to be truly certain of an end time... It would be unbearable.

She knows there is a countdown to his days. She knows that it is unlikely he will live to an old ripe age, despite anyone's best efforts.

According to her research, all her money and access to the most cutting edge research could help. Or it could do nothing. Or it could end his life even sooner than even the poison in his body can.

There is no right answer.

She seeks comfort in the pain of reading. She scans her feeds for the latest in medicine, the cutting edge of DNA therapy, and what little research has been done on Junkers. Not much of the last topic make it to the press. As she expected, there was little research done on these backwaters terrorists but what little she did read about said they did not lead long lives for the reasons one would think. Violence - both self inflicted and not. Cancer of every type. Hunger and dehydration. Old diseases that no one in century had died of outside of the Australian wilderness.

He would die and she would never know when until it was too late.

Fate played a terrible prank on Satya.

She just had to fall in love with the one person who truly might perish on any given day, body eaten up by the cells within, She felt anger at herself for being so foolish. How could she not pick anyone else to give her heart to?

But she couldn't. Her heart - hidden away by a lifetime of strict, calculating control - laid in the hands of a mad man. He would never hurt it; he would never hurt her. Not on purpose He would be as gentle as his calloused and mechanical hands would allow. But if- no, when - he died, he would drop her heart. And it would shatter like a diamond on impact. Dropped to the ground and fractured into dust and slivers of unrepairable glass so fine that she could never sweep the pieces up and reassemble them into what they once were.

She couldn't let him know how it weighed on her. No, he would try to make her laugh. Try to use gallows human to get her forget. He would never bring it up without a joke or some irreverent reference that would caused her to scold him for his terrible manner and even worst taste in jokes.

Worst of all, he would know. If he wasn't aware of the hidden countdown - and how could he not know - on their time together, then knowing about her worry would mean it would be on his mind as well.

He would laugh and play it off like a joke, just like everything else. But in the depths of night, when he couldn't sleep, it would weigh on his mind.

Of the two of them, she was infinitely more practiced at worry. With her calculating mind, she could weigh the pros and cons of every day. However her former employer might try to instill the long term calculations of happiness, they never truly broke the human portion of the formula.

She told herself she would let him be happy in his stupid, careless way. Let him live like each day was his last. She didn't - shouldn't - couldn't - wouldn't - change him.

The thoughts - the calculations weighed on her mind and she never let it show.

Instead, she kissed him every morning she saw him and said she loved him. Simple plain words tumbled out of her mouth with the regularity of sunlight. Every day.

For someone as guarded as herself, "I love you"s didn't come frequently or easily until they met. Now she peppered every conversation with the sentiment, as a ward against regret.

Because-

Because if she ever missed a chance and that was the last one -

If she missed it -

Regret would consume her. A missed moment might haunt her forever. But a taken moment would build her memories and assuage the promised future of guilt.

She could not allow that. Better to plan as she can and love him in those moments that time allows.

After a long, sleepless night, Junkrat wakes next to her.

"Ya up readin' all night?" he groggily asks.

She gives him a tight smile and dismissed the holo screen.

"No," she lies. "I just woke up a bit early and wanted to get some reading done."

He yawns but even the threat of daylight can't pull the Junker out of bed if he doesn't want to. He closes his eyes and curls up close to her side without another word, instinctually seeking her warmth, even though he runs as hot a furnace.

Satya, with no scientific articles to distract her, can only focus on her lover next to her. His body heat, his strange smell that is a mix of burnt oil and sand, the way his face relaxes and makes him look like a completely different person. For a moment, her flesh and blood hand hovers above his forehead, poised to brush a lock of tangled hair away from his face. But that would threaten this early morning, half sleeping state that leaves him sighing vulnerably against her side.

After a moment's hesitation of weighing the pros and cons, she brushes the mess of hair out of his face and turns to lay a kiss between his bushy eyebrows.

"I love you," she whispers in English. Even if he is asleep, perhaps he will absorb the words.

"Hmm?" he murmurs without opening his eyes.

"I said I love you," she whispers into his hair and lays another kiss against his head.

He doesn't say anything or even bother to open his eyes but she sees the corners of his mouth turn up right before he tugs the sheet over the both of them before descending back into sleep.

The hazy dawn light filters through the wash worn cotton that tents over them.

But Satya still doesn't sleep.

She doesn't dare call up the screens to read about the percentages and odds of his death again. She won't risk waking him up that way.

She silently mouths, "I love you" in her own language without sound behind the words.

Her heart is grieving for something that hasn't happened yet or might not happen at all. Her mind might be always calculating, always measuring but part of her believes that silent words will keep the worst outcomes of the future at bay, like a spell.

Dawn has filled their makeshift bedroom with light. Yes, their current home might be a partially abandoned military base but Gibraltar's apricot morning skies bring a beautiful light to prod one awake.

Still-

A sleepless night pulls on her eyelids.

Her eyes close and she listens to Junkrat's breathing- still quick and shallow for someone who is asleep.

She teeters on the edge of sleep. Only on this brink of unconsciousness, she could let herself fantasize. Any dreams in the twilight moments of waking and sleeping would be forgotten and once forgotten, they could not hurt her.

She turns over in her mind thoughts of a future with him. She knows that is nearly impossible and yet the call of this impossible future is too strong. Her mind extrapolates what their daily lives would be, how their affection would play out over the years, and what their old age would look lie. She dreams about his daily company. She dreams of having her day-to-day position as Vishkar architect where she could have the money means to take care of him. She wants to buy him a farm in a desert that was less harsh than the Australian outback. She wants to purge the radiation from his body and have him live forever, available to her at a moment's notice. All he would have to do in return is be grateful and adore her every day.

She, who could shape the laws of reality, cannot will this into being.

Eventually, she teeters over the precipice of unconsciousness. Her twilight dreams scatter and are forever forgotten in dark sleep.