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Two years is not a long time for a soul to forget. But it is long enough for the mind to adjust, and recalibrate. It is long enough for the flesh to recover.
It is time enough for everything to go numb.
The memories and sensations she revisits are jumbled and hazy, like looking through frosted glass. Root can remember the incidents, remember the highlights maybe, but the rest blurs together like a cloud of drunk memories.
In the aftermath, she tore through her days with fury, blind and white. She thought about nothing else in the day, and at night she grew restless in the quiet. God, how she had hated the fucking quiet, pressing in on her like a cloud of thick smoke. It made it hard to breathe.
She didn’t mind the nightmares so much. They gave her a purpose, fueled her revenge. And the snapshots of Shaw she couldn’t remember vividly in her waking hours, her subconscious filled in nicely for her. It always feels more real in a dream, doesn’t it? She didn’t like waking up though, so she tried her best never to sleep.
Maybe she didn’t want to remember, or maybe she fought hard to forget it all. Or maybe she was just so disillusioned she spent her days out of focus and blankly staring at nothing. She doesn’t know. She can’t remember anymore.
Harold and John had given her as much as they could, and then, they had tried to help, in that sweet, gentle way of theirs. She had been harsh at first, because what did they know? Then John had sat her down, and talked to her about a woman named Joss Carter. And Root found a kindred soul in John after that. Funny how life works out sometimes, isn’t it? She wished all of them had survived to see this- John and her, pals.
She makes these bitter little jokes up in her mind, but has no one to tell them to.
She finishes her mission, in the end, with thirsty guns in two hands and John right beside her. Revenge is not as sweet as they say. It is bitter and empty. It does nothing to make Root feel better.
They’ve won the A.I. war, so naturally they go back to saving numbers. They’re a bunch of misfits, who destroyed the only things worth living for in their duty to destroy the only thing worth dying for. They’ve got nowhere else left to go. She thinks that she can’t deal with Harold and John all the time; that she cannot deal with the constant reminder, so for a time after Samaritan’s demise, she leaves.
But its so much quieter and so cold and unfamiliar outside, and no one who could possibly even come close to understanding, and suddenly she finds herself fleeing back to their hideout in fear. Harold insisted on keeping the Subway as their location, though he never told her why. She suspects it has something to do with Shaw, so she never asks. She never wants to know the answer to this question.
She goes back to saving numbers, irrelevant and relevant, occasionally, because without The Machine, who the hell was she? And though the subway is horribly familiar and reeking of souvenirs of their past, she has come to count on Harold and John like her pillars of strength, and she doesn’t think she’s ready to leave yet. She is more sympathetic toward Harold’s non-killing view now (although it took months for her to stop killing everyone that stood in her way).
There will always be a new number, and mostly she wonders why she’s still doing this. How does this benefit her anyway? Is she going to do this forever? When there isn’t any threat to your life anymore, it becomes increasingly… mundane. She handles it like a toothpaste capper in a factory going through the motions. She’s tired, and sometimes she thinks of just sleeping for a long, long time. There’s a dull hollowness in her that she doesn’t think she will ever be rid of, and she’s real tired of this crap.
But Sameen Shaw had given her life to preserve Root’s, and Root cannot deny her this. Root’s not strong enough to let go, and she’s too weak to destroy what’s left. She cannot bear to disappoint Shaw, or to dishonor her memory by throwing her life away, the very thing Shaw died to protect. So she goes on pointlessly, breathing through the ache in her chest, dulled with time- flaring in the cold once in a while, like an old injury that never quite healed right.
It was noon in the spring afternoon when she got a direct message from Her. It wasn’t uncommon, of course, but there hadn’t been many things required of an analog interface these days.
Root frowned. Central Park. The Machine doesn’t say anything else. She asks for a reason, but She is silent, and Root feels uneasy. She senses that The Machine is nervous, although she cannot say why. She grabs her coat, and there is a sort of weird feeling in her stomach, and again she doesn’t know why. She doesn’t particularly care. She has nothing better to do today, and Harold and John doesn’t look like they’re coming back anytime soon.
“Wanna tell me what I’m looking for?” Root asks the moment she reaches, but the Machine says nothing. Root frowns again, because Central Park is not exactly small, and it would take her a while to comb the area.
Root breathes in the fresh air, and wonders when was the last time she’d seen so much green. She trails slowly along the walk path, looking around to see what could possibly be of interest to Her.
It’s spring, so there’s a lovely breeze that floats through the air, passing through the thin gap where her coat is unbuttoned and reaching her inner shirt, cool against her. It’s kind of nice.
There was so much sun.
“Am I close yet?” Root asks. The Machine replies, keep walking, so Root does. It’s the amount of bright green, Root thinks, that’s making her feel a little better than she has in a long while. Or maybe it’s the other people playing Frisbee in the park, or taking a jog. They seem… alive somehow, so different from the two burdened and stoic friends that she has. She’d forgotten there was more to life than the darkness of the underground.
This is a treasure hunt, She chirps out of the blue, and Root is momentarily surprised before she lets out a breathy laugh, startling herself at the sound. She wonders what’s different about today.
“Am I close now?”
You are losing your touch. That makes Root smile, a little tug upward on the right side of her lip.
And then it has been half an hour, and The Machine and her have been teasing and joking with each other for the first time in a long while and there is a part of Root that almost wants to cry. Had she never been this way? She cannot remember. She cannot remember the last time someone spoke to her and knew her, without heavy or pitiful looks.
She cannot remember speaking with a friend, about nothing at all. And there was no evil A.I. now, no one in danger, and The Machine has taken some time off to cheer Root up, and suddenly she wants to break down at the sheer comfort of it.
Because how could she not, when she lives in a world where an A.I. is the only uncorrupted heart left? The Machine is so pure, so innocent in that way, and everything Root loves about Her. They are each other’s parents and each other’s daughters and they are sisters in a world where no one will ever be bonded they way they are.
Root’s emotions run all over the place, after being numb for so long. She feels ache, relief and comfort. She feels wistfulness and nostalgia, promise and regrets, safe and humble, alone but cherished.
She laughs and wells up for no reason at all and she doesn’t fight it, smiling through her watery vision at the sun, feeling warm. She closes her eyes.
There was so much sun.
“Okay, I have got to be close already. This is bordering on ridiculous,” Root jests. The Machine doesn’t reply for long moments, and Root opens her eyes. She’s still smiling, and a vague part of her wonders why She has gone silent.
“I swear I have covered this area already. Are you bringing me around in circles? You can’t expect me to trek the whole park to find this mysterious trea-”
And then Root chooses that moment to stop standing there facing the sun like an idiot and she happens to look to her left- she stops mid-sentence, and suddenly she knows like a bullet in the gut, what makes today different.
Standing less than twenty yards away, a familiar figure makes her mind go blank and her tongue dry. It takes Root a few moments to process what she’s seeing. She thinks she makes a small noise, a flustered inhale. Maybe she blinks a few times disbelievingly, or her chest heaves, but she cannot be sure. She swallows thickly.
She doesn’t dare move, afraid to break whatever illusion is presented in front of her. Someone she thought had died two years ago, crouching down with one knee in the grass, laughing as a golden retriever attacks her face with kisses. Root sees tanned arms and legs, because she’s clad in a blue tank and beige shorts, casual and unassuming, and Root doesn’t know how to process that look on her yet. The woman’s hair is let down in curly waves, and wearing dark shades, so Root cannot see her face clearly, nor her eyes- but she must be, she must be- If this is some sick joke-
But Root recognizes her smile and laugh anywhere, she recognizes her rows of white teeth, and the way her hands move over the dog. For two years she tried to remember the exact contours on Shaw’s hands in her mind and she had hated, hated herself for letting time steal the clarity of her memories. It’s always in brief flashes of movements, or foggy images in her head. But seeing them now, she doesn’t know how she ever forgot.
This time a sob threatens its way up her throat, and she finds it suddenly hard to breathe, and her vision mists with tears and she is afraid. She cups a palm over her mouth, as if afraid that she might sob if she didn’t. She hasn’t allowed herself hope for so long that she is so fucking terrified.
She unintentionally takes a step back.
Then The Machine is saying in her ear, stay. Root takes a breath to steady herself, swallows and blinks rapidly again. She trusts The Machine, she trusts- she has to trust that She isn’t being cruel.
Slowly, she feels herself take unsteady steps toward either an old friend or a fresh nightmare. She doesn’t know how she doesn’t fall, because she doesn’t feel like she’s the one walking at all. She is ten yards away. She is five yards away. Her legs continue to move without her command.
She stumbles. The movement causes both the dog and woman to turn toward her, and- oh her heart, her thundering heart wants to beat right out of her chest because up close, even with different clothes and different hair, there’s no mistaking that that is Sameen Shaw, in the flesh.
Root inhales sharply as her locks gazes with Shaw, her lower lip trembling from the effort not to break down. But Shaw says nothing to her, and the moment hangs between them like a tight cord. Why are her shades so goddamn dark? Root wants to fucking see her eyes. She is the first to break equilibrium.
“Shaw?” She breathes out shakily, her voice barely above a whisper. She marvels at her voice, a little airy and missing the snide bitterness that has festered there for so long. Root thinks she might be smiling, until her cheeks kind of hurt. And even in the noisy chattering buzz in Central Park, above the birds and the dogs barking, she knows Shaw can hear it. But Shaw’s eyebrows furrow together instead, and then she breaks into an unguarded smile, and that’s not at all the reaction Root was expecting.
“Sorry?” She asks, and Root doesn’t quite know how to behave. She’s barely processing thoughts. She must have been just staring blankly for a little too long, because Shaw removes her shades and slide it up to hold up her hair, and Root almost buckles at seeing her face in the sun.
But there’s something wrong, something terribly wrong here. Her smile falters a little. Root has never seen that expression on Shaw before, or has she really forgotten so much?
“Hey there, you okay?” Shaw asks her, but that cannot be Shaw, because why would Shaw be smiling at her in such an unfamiliar, pleasant way? Root’s own smile slides right off her face, and something inside her gut twists into knots.
Root opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. There are no hard lines to a downturn in those lips, and there is no meaningful weight in those eyes.
She has a deep, unsettling feeling about this.
“You don’t know who I am, do you?” Root manages to choke out, through the tightening in her chest and the new tears threatening its way up. There’s mild surprise in Shaw’s face now, and Root feels her heart tighten even further at the foreign, horribly foreign, openness in Shaw’s features.
“No,” Shaw answers slowly, and then licks her lips uncertainly. This Shaw was an open book, and Root can see every flicker of emotion that coats her expressions. Root feels everything going numb again, and there is some sort of fresh ripping where she thinks her lungs are.
Root scrambles backward, nearly tripping again in her haste as her eyes dart around wildly. Her fingers tremble and she runs them through her hair anxiously.
“Um, I’m so sorry, I must have got the wrong person, um-” the words tumble out of her incoherently, and Root feels an awful embarrassment and a new revulsion inside of her that she needs to run from. She feels her breathing spiraling out of control, and suddenly the sun, so soothing seconds ago, becomes overbearing. Too bright, too blinding, too close to her skin. The pleasant chatter of the park turned into angry static in her ears. She cannot breathe.
“Wait a second-” Shaw starts, but her voice is too gentle, too clear and too fucking pleasant and Root turns and bolts, looking anywhere else but at this caricature of what Shaw had been. She hears hesitant footsteps that trail into nothing behind her, and she just wants to get away.
“Why-,” Root spits out, angry, unable to form sentences, when she thinks she has gone far enough. She glances behind in paranoia, but no one has followed her.
In her ear, The Machine explains. Gunshot to the head. Asset assumed dead. Thrown into Hudson River. Asset rescued. Doctor’s assessment of wounds led to suspicion of crime activity. Doctor presumed Asset as victim due to valuation of gender, ethnicity, size and age. Asset given protection and new identity.
“Why did you take so long-”
Trust me.
And then Root steels herself to ask the next question. She has to ask this, she has to know this.
“Why does she not know-”
Gunshot to the head.
The Machine goes on, spewing facts and medical terms, and how it can lead to amnesia, but Root’s vision swims in front of her and she’s barely listening.
Amnesia.
She’d come to her own terms with Shaw’s death. She had had her revenge. She was still struggling to adapt to the new, carefree world, yes, but doesn’t every soldier need to learn to accept peace again? Something about PTSD? It is the natural order. Root had needed that order to hold her together.
Her heart clenches again, and she finds a bench and just sits down for a second. She’s still in the park. She doesn’t know how to leave. Because this is too much for her to handle right now, and her legs feel unstable and weak. Like she hasn’t eaten for days. Maybe she hadn’t. She can’t remember.
Root liked to think she knew pain, and knew them all. But this was a new kind of pain, one she never considered before.
Because before today, she had the memory of what they had together. What they came so close to having. Before today, she knew that although Shaw was dead, no one would deny what they had shared. Shaw died knowing her, knowing every inch of her body, her beliefs, her desires. And Root had watched her bleed out, and had known every little nuance of her frowns and the meanings behind the things Shaw’s never said. And today, Shaw is alive, but unaware of Root’s entire existence. Their history, wiped out from Shaw’s mind. It is the memories that make a person, and Root had seen in those few disturbing moments that this Shaw is not the person she fell in love with years ago.
This Shaw knew nothing about her. This Shaw wouldn’t scowl at the flirty tone in her voice, and then deflect it with a snarky retort. This Shaw didn’t shove her into an elevator and take bullets for her. This Shaw didn’t love her at all. This Shaw is not hers, not hers, not hers, not hers, not hers-
She didn’t know it was possible to feel more alone. She was utterly alone in this, and even worse? She had been forgotten.
There was no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, no reunion in heaven. Root was never the religious sort, but in Shaw’s death she’d always entertained the foolish notion that maybe, maybe there is a God. And maybe he is just. And maybe, maybe if she was a real good girl, when everything is over, maybe she’d see her again in the afterlife, appearing with a scowl on her face and telling Root to get off her. It kept her going sometimes, envisioning an end they didn’t yet know. Afterall, there were so many things they didn’t yet know. Just because she didn’t believe in these things doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Maybe she’d get her silly wish in the afterlife. There are some things even The Machine does not know, and Root stubbornly held on to the notion that there must be an afterlife. Maybe with all the things they’ve done, they’d go to hell. They’d even have a fucking party there.
This is a wholly fresh hell for her, and her tears flow freely now, unconsciously fighting with denial and mourning. She wipes them away angrily, pissed off at herself. At the universe. At The Machine. At Shaw who isn’t Shaw. Because must Root always be the person who wants what she can’t have? What kind of fucking sick joke is this? To dangle Shaw right in front of her, and tell her that Shaw isn’t hers?
The Machine senses her distress, and speaks as tenderly as she possibly can. Humans can make choices.
Root doesn’t know what The Machine is asking of her. She doesn’t get a chance to ask. Because suddenly Shaw’s standing there, lightly panting, a leash on her dog. Root blinks and must have looked like a deer in headlights, ready to flee at the slightest movement, because Shaw holds up a hand to signal her to be wait, and glares at her. The dark look makes Root’s blood race, and new tears spring to her eyes, the sight so achingly familiar.
“First off, making me run everywhere looking for you? Not cool.” Root’s heart hammers and she really, really wishes she would stop crying because it is humiliating and bordering on hysteria. Shaw straightens up a little.
“Second,” Shaw falters then, and Root can see the hesitancy in her eyes clear as day. Her emotions are plain for everyone to see. Shaw reaches into her wallet, and pulls out a faded old photograph, worn at the edges, and shoves it into Root’s palm.
It is her fingers brushing against Root, and the sight of the old photo in her hand that finally breaks her. She inhales once sharply, chokes, and then abruptly starts sobbing.
Shaw looks around in a comical manner, and stutters, fumbling for words to console the poor, crying stranger. Root almost laughs at the sight, if her heart wasn’t currently being repeatedly torn apart and stitched back together with a dull needle. Shaw tries futilely to calm her down in bewildered dismay, but Root is inconsolable. It takes her a good few minutes to collect herself.
“Where did you get this?” Root finally manages to breathe out between hiccups.
“It was the only thing I had on me when they pulled me out of the Hudson that held any clue as to who I was before. So I keep it with me in case. I’m going to assume you know a lot about that.” Root finds herself speechless in front of Shaw. Shaw is always the one to catch Root off guard, the one who does unpredictable things that even The Machine misreads. She looks back down in wonder at the photograph in her palm.
It was a picture taken the day before Shaw died- the day she thought Shaw died. She’d thought it’d been funny to take pictures of them both, since Shaw was locked up in handcuffs and couldn’t possibly run away (Root didn’t know Shaw could unlock them anytime she wanted yet). There had been a lot of shoving and a lot of pushing and a lot of curse words and death threats in her general direction, but she’d managed to get a couple of shots of her squishing her face next to Shaw and sticking out her tongue or pulling silly faces while Shaw tried to grab and smash the camera with one hand. She’d printed out some of them, the ones she’d liked best, and stuck it around the Bat Cave at random locations just to annoy Shaw. Or to gross out Harold and John, she didn’t really care.
After the next day, John and Harold had taken them all down discretely, and Root had been grateful. She didn’t want to see them back then. And honestly? After a while, she’d forgotten.
Root didn’t even know that Shaw had kept one, the little sneak.
The enormity of that sentiment hits her suddenly like a moving train. Shaw had kept one. Her chest threatens to burst again at all the little things Shaw does when she thinks no one is looking.
And this particular one? Root couldn’t even remember taking this picture anymore. Shaw had been looking somewhere vaguely at the floor, and Root was just smiling at her, adoration clear in her eyes. Root knows she’d always been obvious. It looked terribly sweet. Nothing like she remembered the last few years to be. Nothing like how they had been at all, to the unobservant eye. Root realizes she’s still crying, but now she’s kind of grinning bitterly too and the sheer force of emotion coursing through her veins overwhelms her.
“Yeah,” Root says softly, fondly, “I do know a lot about that.” They stare at each other for long moments, both not quite sure how to proceed.
Shaw’s looking at Root expectantly, waiting for her to go on.
“I-,” Root licks her lips self-consciously, and looks away, avoiding brown eyes. She confesses in a whisper, to the golden retriever at its master’s side instead, “I was your biggest fan.”
“Well then, I guess you should fill me in, over lunch. Because you made me run all over the place and now,” Shaw grins as she says this, “I’m hungry.”
Root hesitates, and she sees Shaw’s bright grin falter. Root doesn’t know what to do. How was she supposed to tell someone a past like Shaw’s? She cannot imagine ever going back to what they had, and she does not know this strange unnerving smiley version of Shaw. She wonders if it’s too late to just jump up and run.
In her ear, The Machine reminds her. Humans can make choices.
Shaw chooses to want to find out, fine. And Root?
Root thinks about how Shaw and her would have never worked out back then anyway, because they didn’t want to live. They wanted to fight. Root had just discovered The Machine, her reason for being, and she was ambitious. She wanted it all. She wanted to see evolution in the making.
Shaw had been an ISA agent, ruthless and efficient. She was a soldier in a never-ending string of assignments. She had been an adrenaline junkie, treating it all like a game. They were careless with their lives back then, because it was dreadfully exciting and fun, and they had no reason otherwise to be alive.
Normality bored them out too much, and if Root was honest? She could easily picture them both grow restless with the domestic life. What were they going to do, drink coffee and chit-chat? Do house chores and watch the television together? They were made of guns and grenades, The Machine and her missions holding them all as a unit.
But that war is over. And she’s learned so much, about treasuring lives and moments and- what good is saving the world, Harry, if you can’t enjoy it? And Root needs to find another way to live; a way that doesn’t involve scams, murder, or constantly fighting for your life. She wanted peace.
This new Shaw; Root can see traces of Shaw in her. She can see the no-nonsense frankness, that glare that made her want to cry again, the bottomless pit for a stomach. This is Shaw, who got shot four times and then once in the head, thrown into a river and still fucking survived. Because even if Shaw doesn’t know it, Root knows the warrior inside of her, the one who doesn’t know the meaning of giving up.
Maybe it won’t be the same person, but the memories of Shaw and her in the past have already started to fade no matter how much she had tried to fight it. She thinks a lot of those memories are fabricated by her own aching, and she can’t remember reality from useless wishing anymore.
This Shaw is easy smiles and hides no shadows behind her eyes. The hardened lines on her face from all the frowning and scowling seems smoothed over now, making her look younger. It’s what Shaw could have been if she wasn’t plagued by all the losses they’ve all had to sustain, the fighting, the sacrificing. She had been so weighed down by the darkness for so long.
Root thinks its kind of poetic. Shaw gave up her life in a moment of self-sacrifice, and that cleared her of all her previous debts she had carried so hard on herself. Her sins, her burdens, her past: wiped. Given a clean slate. She doesn’t have to run anymore. Root thinks its kind of poetic. Root thinks Shaw deserves this, to smile like she doesn’t care who’s watching.
Root thinks maybe its time for herself to stop running too, that maybe a part of her will always belong to the Shaw she came to love so intimately. But Root’s not the same woman she was back then either. That part of them both belonged in the past, and she needs to learn lessons on letting go.
It starts to dawn on Root, why The Machine waited this long to share this information with her.
And there is no time like the present. Shaw got her second chance at being human, and Root thinks it’s high time she got hers too. And maybe, maybe someday, they’ll have a second chance at them.
Second chances aren’t overrated at all, Sameen, Root thinks.
Root already knows her choice, probably knew it in her soul a long time ago. Her brain just needed to catch up a little.
“Thank you,” she looks up directly at a street camera, and whispers to The Machine, her friend. And then she’s getting up from the bench on wobbly knees, ignoring Shaw’s questioning gaze.
“Okay, lunch,” Root laughs shakily, feeling slightly unhinged, and still a lot disbelieving. It was a lot to take in. But her bones burn with a promise of the future, feeling like parks and dogs, and tasting a lot like redemption. “There’s this sandwich bar in SoHo you used to love.”
Shaw raises an eyebrow, but with her easy grin she just looks cheeky and Root’s heart rattles restlessly with unbelievable longing.
“Okay, no. Seriously, stop crying.”
Root laughs; she can’t fucking help it. She thinks they’ll be okay. Someday. They’ll be okay.
Root looks at the sky. There is so much sun.