Work Text:
Shaw understood that most people struggled with keeping routines. This was as much of a mystery to her as the concept of actually feeling the pain when someone else got hurt. She loved routines and discipline. In this way she was the ideal dog owner. The book she’d read said that routines were important, as well as sticking to your guns when you were training a dog no matter how long it took. She may not be labeled by society well enough to be a doctor, but she was damn sure going to make sure Bear had a happy, healthy life.
She woke up every day at 5:30am and took him out for a morning run. It had been frustrating at first, because he would pull on the leash and try to cross between her legs and heaven forbid if he saw a squirrel or, for some reason, bicyclists with green helmets. But she followed the steps without err.
If he pulled, she stopped.
She would lock her legs in the ground with the same tight force that could stop a 200 lb man in his tracks and put him on his back, and it worked on her belgian malinois too. Sure, it was frustrating, and broke the steady rhythm of her run. Sure, she wanted to pull back. Yell at him. But her discipline was very firm both ways, and the book had said those things were bad for the dog both training-wise and in their mental health.
She wanted Bear to be healthy in every way.
So she didn’t yell. She didn’t yank the leash tight. She just braced her muscles and held firm as he tried every trick in the book to get her to let him chase his target.
Eventually, he learned.
Now she could go on her 5:30am run and know she would get back right at 6 with the exact step count she wanted. At 6 she rewarded herself with a cold shower and a hot coffee. At 6:30 she left for work. Just before heading out every morning, she would remove from the freezer three kong toys stuffed with ground meat and vegetables that she had measured out to achieve perfect nutrition and hide them around the house. They would keep Bear fed and stimulated through the day.
Something about fulfilling his instinct to hunt for food. She could relate.
Eight hours of work hunting down targets and then she would come back home and take him out to the park. An hour of active attention this time, not just a boring run. All kinds of training, from stretching how long after she had thrown an object he could still fetch it, to running in a pattern that would make him really fucking hard to shoot. He loved it. He needed it. And not just to avoid getting shot. He was a smart dog. Even at four years old, if he didn’t have some task to accomplish or puzzle to master, he would go crazy. Shaw guessed he was like Root in that aspect.
Never less but often more than sixty minutes later, Shaw would head home. In New York, the sun was usually already setting about half of the year. When Shaw’s old college friends expressed envy at how she kept a year-round tan, she found they often became annoyed when told how. People were often like that. It was another of those things she didn’t get.
Why ask a question if you don’t want to hear the answer?
Fellow dog-owners at the park were exactly the same. Always complimenting Bear on his perfect behavior and insisting their own dog could never. Then getting defensive when Shaw—very neutrally, in her opinion—told them he was only like that because she had put the work in and continued to every day. No exceptions. They wanted a disciplined dog but weren’t willing to exercise the self-discipline necessary to achieve that. Whatever. Her therapist always had to remind Shaw that she couldn’t fix other people’s illogic by pointing it out or continuing to stew to herself.
When they got home from the park, Bear got three more kongs, and Shaw got alone time. Mondays and Wednesdays she went to her favorite fighting gym. Tuesdays were for the gun range. Thursdays she volunteered at the food bank.
It had been the Machine’s idea. Apparently saving the world wasn’t enough, and she should be “connected to the community,” too. Whatever. Shaw did the dirty work no one else wanted to and got to keep her earbuds in the whole time. Right now she was listening to a course on Mandarin. It helped make the hour of unloading cans or scrubbing toilets go by faster. On Fridays she went to a sports bar and treated herself with a nice steak and some greasy onion fries. Her body was a temple, but hey, she was only human.
She’d come home and relax for an hour or two. Then collect the kongs, wash them, and scoop some more of his mush into them to freeze overnight. She prepared his week’s work of food in one batch and then slowly doled it out from the fridge. It saved time. She did the same with her own meals (except Friday’s special treat).
When her elderly Punjabi neighbor had needed to borrow some milk and seen the inside of Shaw’s fridge, the old woman had scolded her for nearly a quarter of an hour about how she needed to find a nice wife to cook for her. She would still bring it up when they passed in the halls. Shaw had been trained to withstand seven different styles of torture, and had endured more kinds than that in the field. She had never broken. But watching Arshi flick her sari in disappointment and walk away carrying her mail…Shaw was close.
Maybe she could ask Root to pretend to be the role. The hacker would be ecstatic. Hell, she might be worse than dealing with the old lady. Plus it would have to wait until they were living together—Huh.
When had Shaw started expecting that one day they would be living together?
She didn’t know, but she found it lodged in her stomach like a comfortably full meal. The certainty that her future had Root solidly in the middle of it, in whatever role that might be. Colleague. Roommate. Lover. Something. Whatever it was and whenever it happened, the agent was confident that she would handle the switch to a new routine.
She gave Bear a bone and he wagged happily. Idly, Shaw began coming up with a training routine to have him alert her when someone had been sitting at a computer for six hours without stop and needed to be forcibly removed for ten minutes to eat and breathe. Yeah, that could work.