Chapter Text
Sameen Shaw gets sick twice in her life.
Once, when she’s seven. Her parents take her to the hospital when they hear whimpers from her room, find sweat soaking her bedsheets and a fever that refuses to break. They keep her overnight.
She never misses another day of school after that. (One. She stays home, in bed with her mother, with the phone disconnected, but nobody counts it.)
Years later, an intern checks in for rounds with strep. Shaw notices first, but it’s too late. He sends the rest of her class and three nurses home and she considers switching his penicillin with laxatives for the trouble.
Shaw gets shot. Stabbed and poisoned and killed but she doesn’t do sick.
-
Shaw kicks off her heels the moment she’s through the door to her complex. She walks the several flights up barefoot and tosses the pair of knock-offs onto her apartment floor, closes her eyes and breathes out deeply, until her ribs ache and her feet stop pulsing.
It’s been a long day and an even longer, numberless week, which has left her with hours upon hours inside the garishly bright prison that is her make-up counter and – she isn’t alone.
Root, asleep on her bed. She shuffles in her spot, huddled on top of Shaw’s bedsheets, nose pressing into her pillow.
(The last time Root broke in went like this:
Shaw pads in well past midnight, smelling of burnt rubber and gunpowder, way beyond in need of a shower and a cold beer.
The lights are on.
She greets Root like normal (the barrel of her USP Compact, a dry huff) and almost decides to make some snarky comment about giving her a key, but what would that imply – it’s too late in the evening to tiptoe around. Maybe another time, when she has a better handle of what it is she’s trying not to tiptoe. She has a guess, swallows it down, but it leaves a dry taste in her mouth.
Root is perched on the kitchen counter, poking into a box of Chinese. Her hair, a little longer now, a different shade, another one of her identities seeping in, soaks through one of Shaw’s tanks. It’s just a little too small, hugs her in all the right places.
She waves her fingers in hello.
“Hope you don’t mind,” Root says between bites of chow fun. “Too much, at least. Had a little trouble running an errand, didn’t feel like getting a change of clothes.”
She gestures to an identical box beside her, steam piping up through the open folds.
Shaw moves forward, stepping into the v made by Root’s legs. It’s been a while, she thinks, almost says it out loud but Root watches her like she’s thinking the same. She sets the box down and brings her hand up to press at Shaw’s shoulders, slipping her fingers underneath the fabric of her blouse. Shaw takes a moment, takes her in.
“Not really your style,” Shaw murmurs, pulling at the tank, fingers brushing at the soft skin underneath. She traces crescents around Root’s waist with her thumb before she looks up. “You’re stretching it out.”
Root smiles, a soft turn of mouth that she loves but will never admit – dripping with mirth and challenge and, “Should I take it off?”
Shaw does it for her.)
She takes a moment to marvel, just a little, before realizing she should be annoyed that Root’s encroaching on her own private space. (Maybe, she muses, she’s been doing it all along. Her modus operandi. Always pressing at the boundaries, slipping in through her own carefully crafted barriers.)
She’s distracted, again, when brows furrow and Root twitches in the thick of dreams. She looks beautiful in sleep, maybe a little pale. Shaw wonders what she sees. If the Machine can still reach her like this.
It’s when she notices the sweat along her forehead, despite the 40 degree weather seeping in through a draft.
She gently presses the back of her hand to Root’s neck.
-
The corner drug store has a disconnected camera, an open back door, and a technician asleep at his desk and Shaw almost wants to glance at the traffic cam across the street.
“Didn’t really need the help, but thanks,” she mutters, to no one.
-
It’s been a decade since she traded scalpel for hammer, but there are things she doesn’t forget.
Shaw rarely forgets anything but this, this is clockwork. A little rusty but all the pieces are there and it’s like she’s back in residency, dreaming in sutures and stitches.
Once upon a time, Sameen Shaw fixed people before she broke them. (She knows. Beyond any doubt, she knows she would have perfected her technique. Would have gotten bored.)
“Sorry to bother you like this,” Root says from her perch on the bed, watching as Shaw fixes a cocktail of something definitely unpleasant. She frowns at the slush, before flicking her eyes up. “I was hoping that this visit would have involved a little more…touching.”
Shaw huffs (doesn’t disagree).
-
She doesn’t own a couch.
Or any sort of furniture really, save the bed, the fridge, Gen’s medal. It’s never been a problem because Shaw’s only needed the place to sleep and eat. Store weapons.
Except her place to sleep is occupied by a woman who has infected her entire bed.
“I can take the floor.”
Root frowns. “Let me check in somewhere close. I’ll be fine in the morning, I can see you then.”
“Root.”
“I’m not making you sleep on the floor.”
She sighs. “Take the damn bed. I’ve had worse.”
When Root tries to protest, she steps forward, silences her with a hand pressing softly at her neck. “Fever’s breaking,” she murmurs, fingers skimming along her jaw, under her chin. She pulls up gently, meets her eyes and her face goes soft. “Make it up to me when you’re better.”
-
“102.”
“Check again.”
“Sameen—
“Check. Again.”
Shaw sits at the edge of her bed. She leans forward, elbows on her knees, and glares at Root with all the energy she has – which, it turns out, isn’t much.
Root looks at her for a moment, then at the thermometer between her fingers: (for the third time) 102.2 °F.
Winter in New York, crisp and biting, and the back of Root’s hand is damp with a thin sheen of sweat when Shaw swipes it away from her forehead.
She sighs, and hands it back. “Sweetie, I got you sick,” she tries, to which Shaw growls.
“This isn’t the greatest way of thanking you for yesterday, huh.”
“Root.”
She smiles, soft, sheepish, light in her eyes and it’s almost a consolation, getting to see her so rueful.
“Look at it this way,” she says, coming around the bed, slipping underneath the sheets. “I’m immune now, right?”
Shaw glares.
Root leans up, kisses her cheek. “Then I can spoon you.”
“Fuck off.”
(She lets her, eventually.
They fall asleep flushed, no spot where they aren’t touching.)