Work Text:
“Sameen?” Root’s voice is quiet, almost hesitant, in the darkness. “Are you awake?”
For half a second, Shaw wonders if she can pretend she’s not. If she can act like Root’s screams from the other side of the bed hadn’t woken her up just minutes ago, leaving Shaw paralyzed with uncertainty of whether or not she should do anything as Root’s shallow and scared breathing calmed. Then she realizes that her own pattern of breathing had halted at Root’s question, and Root must already know the truth.
So she nods into the pillow, her back still to Root, and mutters a quiet, “Yeah, Root. I’m awake.” When Root doesn’t say anything for a few minutes, Shaw sighs and flips to her other side. She’s surprised at how close Root is to her. In the dim light of their bedroom, she can see the tear tracks staining Root’s face, though the other woman is quick to wipe them away.
“I’m sorry,” Root says somewhat thickly, smiling weakly in an attempt to laugh off her tears. “I just-”
“You don’t have to explain,” Shaw says quickly. “I get nightmares too.” And she did, now. She’d never had nightmares before. She’d always assumed it was part of who was was. She couldn’t feel fear, so why would her dreams scare her? If anything, she’d laughed to herself at the idea of nightmares. After all, they were just dreams, how dangerous could they be? But after everything that had happened with The Machine and Samaritan, after everything they’d done to her and the long road she’d taken back, Shaw was lucky if she got a good night’s sleep.
But still, she knew her nightmares are nothing compared to Root’s.
Shaw’s words, meant to be an awkward sort of comforting, only make Root clench her jaw as she guesses the reasons for most of Shaw’s nightmares. That concern, borderlining on pity, that Shaw so hated to see directed at herself, is welling up in Root’s teary eyes again and on an impulse, Shaw grabs Root and pulled her closer, pressing their chests together. Root stiffens at the sudden contact, then quickly melts into Shaw’s grip.
It had taken them so long to reach this point. Even after Samaritan and its agents had been stopped, Shaw had still been in a bad place. Samaritan’s men had pulled Shaw through Hell and back twice to get her to come to their side, and that kind of a mental trauma has lasting effects. When the team had finally captured her, Harold had announced that she might not ever return to the woman she’d been. And in some ways, Shaw thought he was right. She wasn’t the same. She’d been torn apart and forced back together only to shatter once more and try to rebuild herself. She’d been broken. She had scars.
Root shifts in her arms slightly, freeing one of her hands. Slowly, gently, she runs her finger along Shaw’s skin. She stars at the wrist and works her way up the shoulder, then down her torso. Along the way she stops at every jagged mark, every bump of newer, tougher skin. Every cut, every burn, every place she’d been broken. Shaw’s not sure if Root even knows why she’s doing it. Maybe she’s trying to prove that this is real, the two of them lying together in bed together (Shaw can’t blame her. After everything they’d been through she’s often had similar doubts of reality). Whatever her reason, Shaw finds the action strangely comforting. Root traces Shaw’s scars with the touch of a lover, but when she reaches the circular mark on Shaw’s side, her finger stops.
“I wish I could take these from you,” Root says so quietly Shaw has to strain to hear her. There are tears in Root’s eyes as she stares at the bullethole. “I’m so sorry. I wish it had never happened, I wish I-”
“Hey,” Shaw whispers, leaning in and pressing her lips to Root’s to stop the flood of sympathetic words. Root kisses back softly, but there are still tears in her eyes when Shaw pulls back. “It’s okay,” She tries to tell her.
But Root shakes her head, “No, it’s not okay. You were taken and you were tortured and you were used and I had to hurt you to get you to stop. But now you’re here and you’re-”
Broken, Shaw finishes in her head as Root’s words trail off. She’s a broken monster who doesn’t deserve any of this. She doesn’t deserve Root’s presence, her touch, her love. Not after everything she’d done.
Shaw’s worst nightmares aren’t flashbacks of pain and torture. Those ones were there, too. But they weren’t the ones that snapped her awake at three in the morning, trembling and drenched in cold sweat.
No, in her worst nightmare, Shaw is herself, well, her new self. She’s full of hatred and anger and fury that aren’t quite hers but she latches onto them anyway. With the bang of a smoke grenade, she barrels into the subway. Through the smoke and haze, she can hear the men under her charge fanning out, looking for three specific targets before they can escape. Shaw can hear the targets, calling to each other, supporting each other, mocking her. She fires blindly at the sound, and a man’s shout of pain tells her that she hit at least one of her marks.
As the smoke begins to clear, Shaw’s men announce that there’s no one in the subway. They must have escaped through the tunnels. Shaw barks the orders for them to fan out, and find them. Her men have all scattered when Shaw sees it, and smiles. There’s blood on the bricks and Shaw follows it. She follows it through a series of tunnels and tracks, sprinting after her prey. She can hear voices ahead of her, and she readies her weapon.
There they are, all three of them, a man and a woman supporting another man wearing glasses between them. Shaw’s bullet had torn through his shoulder. He’ll bleed out eventually if they don’t get him to a hospital. She smirks at the thought as she raises her weapon.
The woman’s head snaps up suddenly, whipping around to see Shaw. She pushes the men aside just as Shaw fires at the spot they’d been standing mere milliseconds ago. The woman shouts something to the taller man, apparently telling him to get their friend to safety. He questions her for just a moment, wondering if she can handle it. But she cuts across him scathingly, and he props their friend up again. They take off running as fast as they can while the woman pulls out two pistols from her waistband.
“Sameen,” She says, her voice wavering. “Sameen, it’s me. It’s Root.”
“Hey Root,” Shaw grins at the hope that rises in the woman’s eyes at her words. Then she smirks humorlessly as her next words destroy it, “Have fun in Hell.”
Root ducks behind a support beam just before Shaw opens fire. They exchange a few shots, but Shaw’s not worried. She’s read the file, and she has most of her old memories to sort through and she knows that Root is far too infatuated with “her Sameen” to ever risk actually hurting Shaw.
She empties her clip, and in the few seconds it takes her to swap out a new one, Root ducks out from behind the beam, and fires.
Shaw feels the bullet rip through her side with an irritating sense of deja vu. As she collapses to the ground, holding tightly to the wound that’s already bleeding heavily, she looks up to see an anguished face watching her before turning and running down the tunnel to safety.
Always, it was the look of horror in Root’s eyes that woke Shaw from her nightmares.
On her good days, Shaw could convince herself that the memory was just that, a nightmare. That she hadn’t betrayed her friends, the only people in the world she cared about, to an artificial intelligence program. That she hadn’t led the attack force on their last safe haven in the city, forcing them to flee with The Machine in tow. That she hadn’t cursed Root’s name for every hour she was stuck in a hospital bed, waiting for her wound to heal, not knowing that by the time it did, everything would be different.
“I shot you,” Root whispers, her hand still tracing the wound on Shaw’s side. “I shot you, and I ran.”
Shaw feels something ache inside her as she realizes that today will not be a good day. It was all real, it had happened, and it was haunting Root too.
She wonders if her nightmare is Root’s worst, too. That had been the last time they had seen each other before the others had destroyed Samaritan while Shaw had been recovering. Shaw had tried to kill them all for that. If Root and Harold hadn’t had the Machine up and running again, Shaw wasn’t sure they would have been able to escape her. As it was, the Machine was able to help them organize a plan to catch her, to help her, to save her. And though putting her mind back together had been the most difficult process of Sameen Shaw’s life, there wasn’t a day that went by that she wasn’t thankful for the chance they’d given her to recover.
“Root,” She says firmly, her tone prompting Root to meet her eyes. “You did what you had to do. You did what I would have done. You have nothing to apologize for. Nothing that happened was your fault.”
“But I could have stopped it,” Root cried, unable to hold back the tears anymore. “I could have held them off at the elevator. I could have saved you from the hospital sooner. I could have talked you out of Samaritan’s control-”
Shaw had no words to counter Roots’ so instead she just pulled the woman closer to her. And with every sob that shook Root’s body, Shaw felt her heart break a little more.
No one but Shaw seemed to know that Root had scars, too. Because hers were all invisible. Root had been bled dry by the what-if’s and could-have-done’s that had eaten her alive for years. Even now, when the pain in Shaw’s wounds had all but vanished, Root’s were still gnawing at her. Shaw couldn’t help but wonder how much of Root’s pain was her fault.
Samaritan’s rise to power had been hard on them all, but it had hit Root hardest. The Machine had backed off, barely speaking to her unless absolutely necessary. She’d been all alone for so long, switching aliases, working cases, without any clear explanation of why. Then she’d lost Shaw.
Root wouldn’t talk about it, but John had told Shaw quietly how much her apparent death had shaken Root. So much that she turned her back on the Machine, on her god. Then after the AI and Her interface had settled their differences, Shaw had slipped through Root’s fingers, she’d packed her god into a briefcase and run.
But sometimes Shaw wondered if Root’s worse pain had come in the aftermath of Samaritan’s defeat. Harold and John had been relieved to return to life as it had been before--chasing numbers, saving people--with the exception of the deranged sociopath they held prisoner at a safe house. And while John and Harold had preferred to keep their distance from Shaw (after she’d broken free of her restraints and broken Harold’s foot and almost grabbed John’s gun), Root was there any time the Machine didn’t have her working a number.
Shaw had hated her presence. She hated the kindness in Root’s eyes every time they looked at each other. She hated the care with which Root would talk to her. And she hated, more than anything that she kept coming back. Even after every insult and threat Shaw could throw at her. Even after she shouted again and again that she’d never felt anything for Root, that’d she’d used her and Root was even dumber than she looked for believing otherwise. After taking everything Shaw could throw at her, Root would always come back.
Eventually, Harold’s therapy treatments started taking hold and Shaw’s world became very unsteady. Root was there for that too, offering a constant presence, reassuring Shaw when Shaw wasn’t sure who or what she was anymore. Where John and Harold had been hesitant and even doubtful, Root had been a beacon of hope. And it was that hope that had stopped Shaw from demanding that they just kill her. It was that hope that pushed Shaw to claw her way back to sanity.
Root had saved her, of that Shaw had no doubt. But she could help but wonder, how many new wounds had she given Root while she’d been trying to heal her own?
Shaw is surprised by how quickly, how immediately, she would jump at the chance to take this pain, this doubt, this guilt away from Root, even if it meant bearing it herself. She plants delicate, light kisses on Root’s ear as she holds her tight. She whispers, too softly for Root to hear, “I wish I could take your scars, too.”
The two of them stay like that for a long time, one broken, one haunted. Shaw doesn’t say anything, just lets Root cry herself out in her arms. As Root’s tears begin to subside, Shaw pulls her closer. They’ll get through this, she told herself, like they always do. This isn’t the first night where one of them has woken the other, and it won’t be the last. But Shaw knows that Root will be willing to talk her down the next time her mind threatens to fall apart, and she knows that she’ll be right here to hold Root whenever her guilt become too much. They aren’t perfect, but together they feel... whole. The thought prompts a small smile on Shaw’s lips, and it stays there as she falls asleep, still holding Root in her arms.
And this time, there are no nightmares.