Work Text:
The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
— Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.
- The Shampoo, Elizabeth Bishop
There’s a certain look Shaw gets when she’s tending your wounds. She looks over your injuries the way a master player looks at a chessboard: intent, clinical, expert.
“You’re terrible at taking care of yourself,” she says, dabbing the healing flesh of your shoulder with a prep pad. Blots of dull blood blossom onto the pad—a painting in reverse—and the alcohol stings where it seeps into the wound.
“Lucky I have you then.”
She shoots you her stony look. Then her brow twitches, and she leans in close to you, taking a long, deep sniff.
“Root, you stink. And your hair is filthy.”
“I love it when you talk dirty to me.”
“I’m serious. When’s the last time you washed yourself?”
“A few days ago. Kind of hard when you can’t lift your arms over your head.” You look meaningfully over at the sling hanging from the doorknob.
Shaw rolls her eyes and takes a deep breath.
“Come on, then,” she says, tossing the pad into the wastebasket and grabbing you by the hand. “Let’s get you clean.
The first few times Shaw undressed you, her eyes had lingered on the scar where her bullet had grazed you, back in the empty warehouse months before. One night, you called her out when she’d been staring a little too long.
“Admiring your handiwork?”
A soft snort. She ran a finger over the scar, softly, appraisingly.
“Looks like it healed okay.”
“Yes, they do tend to have medical professionals at psychiatric facilities.”
Her fingers drew patterns around the scar’s perimeter.
“A girl never forgets her first time,” you teased.
Slowly, your meaning dawned on her.
“You’d never been shot before?”
“Not often I put myself in the line of fire. I prefer behind-the-scenes work. Or used to, at least.”
Shaw mulled this over for a moment, her expression unreadable. Then she closed her eyes, opened them again, and kissed you, hard—a bruising kiss that made you forget everything else.
You haven’t talked about it since.
The shower in this place—Shaw’s new place—is cool and bleak. A stall, tiled in white—or pale ivory, maybe—hard to tell in the sickly light that filters through the glass doors.
Sameen stands you in front of it and slowly finishes undressing you. After taping a cut-up plastic bag carefully over your wound, she strips down to her underwear and ushers you into the shower.
“There’s got to be a clean washcloth around here,” she muses, and opens a couple of cabinets. “Ah—here we go.”
The tape is tacky on your skin and pulls at your goosebumps. You shiver as you watch Sameen step in after you, unhook the shower head, wet the washcloth, and build a lather with plain white soap. It’s the cheap kind, whose smell used to remind you of your miserable childhood until that smell suddenly belonged to her, to the catalogue of scents labeled Sameen, that blend with her skin and cling to the shirts you steal now and then. You don’t mind it anymore.
Her hand is warm and slick on your elbow; she lifts your arm slightly until you wince.
“Don’t be a baby,” she says, but her grip softens. She slides the soapy washcloth with slow tenderness over your arm and underneath—so gently it doesn’t even tickle. She wets the cloth again before rubbing slow circles over your waist, your belly, your breasts, your collarbone. You watch silently, as passive as a child.
“Feel okay?” she asks, and when you nod, she continues, “I’m going to rinse a little. You look cold.”
She turns the spray on as low as she can, tests the temperature against her fingers, and carefully avoids the plastic shield as she rinses away the foam. Her eyes linger on the rivulets that flow down your body, carrying the dirt and soap away.
Sameen washes you slowly and deliberately, covering your body in methodical paths: the borders of your shoulder blades, the curvature of your hips. She washes between your legs, down your calves, crouches to lift and scrub each foot. Bent like this, a lock of hair shaken loose from her ponytail, she looks a little like an illustration you used to flip to over and over, in early childhood, in a collection of biblical stories from your mother’s shelf. Mary Magdalene washing the feet of Christ.
“Almost done,” says Sameen, after she’s rinsed you off completely. “Just need to wash your hair.”
Shaw taught you how to care for your own injuries. That’s why she gets so mad when you get sloppy. Her word.
“At this rate, I’m going to have to start giving you antibiotics every time you get a paper cut,” she told you once, after an unsatisfactory inspection. She dropped a pill into one of your hands and shoved a glass of water into the other. “Take that while I watch. I’m putting more in your jacket pocket, and they’d better be gone next time I check. Twice a day, morning and night. Eat something first. Make sure that friend of yours in your ear reminds you.”
The bossiness is part of a pattern. Sameen plays it cool in public, but when it’s the two of you, she won’t leave well enough alone. You’ve caught her adjusting your pillows before you go to bed, and once or twice you’ve felt her throw an extra blanket on you in the middle of the night. When she gets up to refill her water from the sink, she always brings back a glass for you.
“It’s practical,” she protested, the night you pointed out her thoughtfulness between lazy kisses to her neck. “If I don’t bring you water, you’ll get up when you’re thirsty and that’ll wake me up.”
“Whatever you say, sweetie,” you whispered into her ear, followed by a few gentle nibbles.
“It’s just practical,” she repeated, softer this time, and relaxed into the kisses with no more arguments.
Sameen uses shampoo-conditioner, the green kind that smells a little like drain cleaner. You don’t protest.
You close your eyes as she lathers it into your scalp in slow, firm circles. Her fingers are rough, but they feel good—the hardness of them feels good—and you wonder whether this is how she washes her own hair. No—she must be faster with herself. More efficient.
Her fingers comb the shampoo from roots to ends. When she feels a snag, she takes her time plying the knot loose, until her fingers start to slide smoothly, all the way down. Suds sluice down your back, chilling your skin. You feel Sameen step closer.
“Aren’t you getting wet?” you ask her, eyes still closed. Her fingers stop in your hair. She’s giving you her stony face now—you can feel it.
“I just mean,” you amend, “you still have underwear on. All the soap.”
“Pssht. Washable,” she says. “Do you want me to finish this or not?”
“Of course I want you to finish,” you say, gently. “Washing my hair, that is.”
Shaw doesn’t say another word as she rinses your hair clean, roots to ends.
When you touch the scar behind your right ear, the flesh feels like it doesn’t quite belong to you. Behind the scar tissue is empty non-sound, a cottony, phantom sensation.
When Sameen touches you there, it feels like she’s reaching something remote inside you. She touched you, at first, with precision, checking to make sure the site was healing properly. Later, since she noticed how you’d balk or shiver when her fingers or her mouth got close to the scar, she approached it with surprising gentleness, pulling away the instant you froze or made a sound. It’s the kind of sensitivity you expect to find in a good lover—or a good soldier—and Shaw is both.
Shaw the soldier is the one who taught you combat, who spars with you and corrects your form, who teaches you because she depends on you, as you depend on her. Sameen the lover is the one who taught you her body, who studies all of the ways you like to be touched and kissed, because making you feel good makes her feel good. Shaw is a lover and a soldier—and a healer, which may be somewhere in between, or both at once.
As long as she cares for you, does it matter?
You’re tucked into bed now, shoulder patched up with fresh dressings, in an old soft t-shirt of Sameen’s. It smells like she’s owned it for years, and you’re definitely going to keep this until she steals it back. Closing your eyes, you burrow into the sheets to wait for her. Your wet hair is soaking the pillow, but you’re warm all over, and the throbbing in your shoulder dulls as your heartbeat settles.
“Need anything to sleep?” she asks. You hear the soft pop of a cork as she pours a splash of whiskey into a tumbler. “I think I’ve got some painkillers.”
“I’ll have a sip of that,” you say, “if you’ll pour me a little extra.”
An extra splash, the cork replaced, and Sameen pads back over to the bed. “Here you are,” she says, handing you the glass. You take a long, slow sip, letting the whiskey warm your mouth and throat. Sameen swallows the rest, sets down the glass, and pulls you closer, gently, by the waist.
“I’m a little tired,” you protest, but she shakes her head.
“Not that. Just… warm up with me a little,” she says, tucking your body into hers and your head into the crook of her shoulder.
You don’t point out that your wet hair is more likely to chill than warm her, or that your skin is still clammy, or that you’re shivering against her. She feels good, and warm, and safe. It’s just another of the inscrutable gifts Sameen gives to you. Sameen the lover, Sameen the healer, Sameen the soldier. Sameen, who was the first to put a bullet into your body. Sameen, who washed your hair and brings you water in the night and would lay down her life for you. Sameen, who is already falling asleep, with your hair warming in a damp blossom against her shoulder.