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Shaw climbs the stairs to her sparse apartment after a tough case, holding tight in her right hand a paper bag with a double meat, double pepperoncini, double spicy mustard, Italian hoagie and enough alcohol to knock out an entire Irish family reunion, and loose in her left hand her keys.
She lets herself in, as casually as possible for a person trained to anticipate a threat around every corner, and she’s still caught off guard.
Nothing in her posture or facial features actually startles, but Root still looks smug, smiling over the back of Shaw’s couch.
Sameen drops her bag on the table and starts to put away the bottles and cans she’s accrued into the fridge, while pulling out of her freezer a chilled 21 year old bottle of scotch, as she takes in Root’s causal posture in flannel pajamas and bunny slippers.
Her brain barely registers “Gaan” before Bear is pouncing at her. She lowers herself so he can slobber all over her face and as she instinctively pulls away from his ardor, she smiles for the first time in days.
She stands away from his affection and pours a glass of the scotch she pulled from her freezer, before opening her hoagie and feeding Bear stray pieces as she devours it.
Root doesn’t say a word or move muscle, beyond the persistent tapping of her manicured fingertips upon the tablet on her ribcage.
She lets him lick the wrapper of her sandwich after she’s finished it and four glasses of scotch, and asks, as she finally puts the rest of her haul away, “why are you here, Root?”
The tapping doesn’t slow as she answers, “She told me you had a rough mission”.
Sameen closes the freezer door with a “well maybe she could consider that before the mission next time”.
“You saved the day didn’t you?”, the tapping finally stops as Root peers over the back of the couch again.
Shaw slugs back her 5th scotch. “Yeah, stopped the Neo-Nazi about to shoot up a concert, right before I heard his seven year old brother’s last words. Kid was strapped up more than I ever was until I got scooped up by spec ops.”
“I did good?”
Root says it emotionless, almost like she’s asking Shaw herself, but it brings back the desperation in that kid's inflection, in his expression, in the way he went slack in her arms before she could come up with an answer. Sometimes, when there’s a kid involved, Sameen comes as close as she ever does to what she thinks feeling must be like.
In the past few years, when there’s a kid involved, she pictures Gen, and she tosses back her 6th scotch as she wonders if the text The Machine sent assuring her that Gen was safe and sound at her boarding school was sent at the same time Root got this invitation to her apartment.
“You want a drink?”
“Not really. But I’ll have one if you want.” The tablet is closed on the table now.
“Well I’m not gonna waste my booze on someone who don’t want it.”
Root is smiling at her as Shaw unceremoniously slumps against the arm of the couch previously occupied by Root’s slippers. She makes a show of slamming the glass bottle and glass onto the coffee table, and then pouring the former into the latter, as Root keeps quietly to the other side of the sofa.
Bear lazes at the foot of Shaw’s mattress, aware of how this night is likely to go, occasionally gazing over to make sure neither of his humans require his protection as he dozes.
Root stays quiet, if obviously interested, in her unabashed observation of Shaw.
Shaw stays quiet as she pounds drink after drink, and meticulously ignores Root.
But when she finally stands, and stumbles, she doesn’t brace herself on the table in front of her, or the couch arm to her right, but instead instinctively reaches for Root, and Root is ready.
Root is ready for whatever comes next, as she lets Shaw lead them to the bed, even though she is supporting both of their weight.
Sometimes Shaw wants to verbally spar, picking fight after fight until she kicks Root out of the apartment.
Mostly, Shaw just wants to be physically hurt and pleasured in equal measure, until her brain is finally empty of everything, including the images that happen to be haunting her on any particular night.
And rarely, it’s just like tonight. No pain, emotional or physical. No pleasure. No teasing or sparring or sex.
Just Sameen Shaw sprawled out on the left side of her queen size bed, quietly breathing in the scent of Root as Bear snuffles into her shins. She doesn’t need to put one foot on the ground to keep the room from spinning like she and her friends did in college and med school.
She wills herself to stabilize her equilibrium with breath and guided imagery. She pretends it’s just coincidence that tonight she picks Root’s bunny slippers dangling over the arm of her couch. Just a random point of focus that’s not that little boy’s face.
And so she faces the unfamiliar, but not unprecedented, experience of falling asleep to Root’s steady breath hitting her left shoulder, and Bear’s uneven snores bracing her lower legs, and those damn bunny slippers the focus of her unconscious would-be visual field.
It’s not the childhood Farsi bedtime stories her mother used to tell her in her own bed, or the sports radio station droning from her dad's radio alarm clock she listened when she fell asleep between her parents, but it’s the closest she’s ever gotten as an adult.
Usually, the closest she gets to feeling, the way most people do, is amidst some unspeakable tragedy, like that boy and the hopeful question he asked her as he choked on his own blood.
But every once in awhile, she’s comfortable, and secure, and at least 12 oz of liquor past drunk, in the company of two of the only few beings she’s ever felt any real attachment to, and as she traces the casual movement of those bunny slippers in her mind, she falls asleep to the stray notion that this is what happy might feel like.
When she wakes up with only a vague idea of what happened the night before, Root is gone, but Bear is there, playing with the latest Tuffy toy she bought him.
There’s a bottle of water and two aspirin on her kitchen counter with a note that features only Root’s scrawled signature and a misshapen heart.
She rolls her eyes as she takes the pills and downs the bottle. Her stomach roils and her head hurts just behind her eyes.
And, in her discomfort, she has no idea that she’s smiling.