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On a beach in Europe. In Cannes, in Santorini, Root can picture Shaw and drinks with umbrellas and a nice breeze, the sun beating from clear skies as Shaw makes a comment about tanning her out a bit.
The moments last between heartbeats and blinks. Then, they're gone and Root sees something better, and worse, and everything in between. She is not the Machine, but she can still see multitudes and Sameen Shaw; Sameen Shaw, asleep on her bed was an outcome she once repeated over and over in her mind like a lullaby.
It was never an outcome she anticipated.
Beaten and bruised but far from irreparable, Shaw clutches the bedcovers, shuddering every few minutes before she stills completely. It's a repeated cycle that keeps Root awake for hours.
She gives her the entire bed, sitting cross-legged on the windowsill with her chin perched on an open palm. Root drifts into near sleep until Shaw shuffles, whimpers or groans and it wakes her with a chill. It's a repeated cycle until the sun comes up.
In the thick of dreams, Sameen Shaw is alive and once, that was all Root wanted.
Now what, she wonders.
Root keens in an empty church and the noises that echo into the ceiling sound nothing like her (sound suspiciously like Samantha Groves).
It scrapes out of her until she tastes copper, a hard bitter thing that rakes against her throat, stings when she tries to swallow and she almost enjoys it. The sensation ripples down her entire body, makes her feel raw and real.
The silence that follows is whole, hateful, and she considers if this is what insanity feels like. Another dead end, another empty trail. Reminds her of a girl; couldn’t quite get to Oregon.
There are no cameras here, no lens to look into when she comes across another failure. She isn’t saying anything, but the low hum buffers a sea of admonition.
They are at odds, she and Her, in such a way that Root could never have predicted. Institutionalized, drugged and patronized just to coax a long abandoned empathy back to the surface and what has that left her with.
A dry mouth and an empty chest.
Weeks ago, her mouth pounded in the wake of Sameen Shaw and filled her to the brim with feeling. She remembers now, what the aftermath of Hanna Frey had left her with; it all comes back to her in a wave of grief and fury and she remembers now, why she retreated so far in the first place.
She breaks in alone, slips in and storms out of the church empty-handed, to a man with a cane and a dog. He watches the floor – Harold has grown to look so much older underneath the lines at his forehead.
Outside, Bear nuzzles into her palm, giving a quiet whuff as Harold avoids looking at her all the way back to the subway. He blinks ahead without a word but she’s learned to read volumes in his reticence, just as in Hers and it all reeks of pity.
"You don’t have to follow me every time, Harry," she says, grinding it out with a thinly veiled contempt. Her voice falters, making her sound brittle and worn. Not when you've given up, is what she wants to say, with more bite, but it dies at the back of her throat.
He swallows hard, like he understands.
Shaw lets Root help her and she realizes that this, too is all she's ever wanted.
She doesn't protest when Root slips to her side in the morning, wrapping an arm around her neck to help her to the bathroom. Watches silently as Root checks her wounds, looking at her like she knows it's for the both of them because it is. Shaw lets her touch linger when it isn't necessary and never tenses when it wanders and it's nice. Root lets herself revel in the idea that maybe she trusts her.
There is beer and take-out for dinner because Root has never been much of a cook and because Shaw has always enjoyed a good helping of beef chow fun. They get partway through an episode of the first show they find on TV before Shaw tells her that she'd rather sit through one of Finch's lectures about unnecessary violence and it makes Root laugh, for the first time in a long while.
She never says thank you, but Root wouldn't expect it anyway.
Instead, in the evening, Shaw watches Root try and settle into the couch for a moment, before she tilts her head and lifts her blanket.
"Don't push it," she says when Root aligns herself along Shaw, but lets them stay like that anyway.
She dreams in fragments. Broken, incomplete things that ripple through her when she wakes. They mold into her like memories – she sees a girl in a library, a woman on the other side of an elevator. She feels nails scrape dark red lines down her back, teeth at her neck and a kiss that’s full and slow and nothing like the first; a kiss with a resolution to it, with promises of more and more and more.
Thoughts of Shaw swim into her and all she wants is to drown.
Her throat hurts for hours after they get back to the subway, even when she hasn't spoken a word.
Harold tells her she had screamed – he's never heard such a sound. She doesn't remember.
Caught in a haze between reality and maybe someday.
God was nearly 14 years old when She died.
Funny how the number seems to haunt her.
Six months. Long, long months until Root finally gets used to the complete silence in her ear, but even then balance is still such a slippery thing. Sometimes she fumbles when it's dark, but Shaw is always around to steady her. Shaw is solid and strong, and grasps onto her without hesitation.
(Shaw kisses her without hesitation, like she knows any hint of uncertainty might kill Root where she stands.)
She's lost something – everything, it seems – but Shaw; maybe Root can claim her as something she's gained.
Shaw pads into the apartment well past midnight, slipping in with a quiet click to the door, but the one ear is all Root ever needs when it comes to her.
"Sameen?"
Silence.
Then, as Root sits up: "I didn't want to wake you."
Shaw dreams in totalities, loud, grating things that haunt her long after she wakes and Root understands, to an extent, what it's like to have her mind raked for all its worth.
She also once considered that maybe Martine broke her.
Shaw tells her one evening, between swigs of beer and a mouthful of steak, that she hasn't slept through the night in weeks. "Nightmares," she says, matter-of-fact and Root realizes then that Martine might have come closest, but Sameen Shaw did not break.
She is fractured maybe, but not broken.
Shaw comes back to her in pieces, in steady half-steps until Root finally manages to coax an eye roll and maybe something resembling a smile.
Tonight, under the glow of a half moon, Shaw looks almost peaceful. Cheeks still too gaunt and a perpetually haggard look in her eyes, Shaw comes back to her in pieces, but Root never doubts that she is whole.
"How bad?"
Shaw slides under the covers, leans into Root when she kisses her (definite and unhesitating). "Getting better."
"Liar."
She huffs, but doesn't disagree.
Root shuffles into Shaw, nestling under her chin. Feeling her arm drape over her back was never something Root had wanted until she realized she did.
Now, all she seems to do is want and Shaw doesn't ever appear to mind.
A bottle of Jack Daniels, shared across the divide of their hotel beds. In winter, the air hangs still and sharp and Root’s hands grow cold above the sheets.
She doesn't remember who firsts insists it, but they don't use the nightstand. Reese hands her the bottle directly and it's the first physical contact she's had with another human being in a long while.
Well.
It's the first that doesn't involve violence, and even then she suspects that there are still traces of blood under her nails.
She can almost see her breath but the liquor pushes a pulsing warmth down her throat, to her chest. It doesn't quite reach her fingers but the bottle is back in her hands before she remembers to do much about it.
The bed creaks every time he leans over; they don't talk until they've almost emptied it completely.
"She wouldn’t want a cake, right?"
Root huffs, looking at him with what is almost a smile. The evening persists silently, no spot where they touch except for when the tips of their fingers overlap as they trade the bottle.
They find her in an empty warehouse the day after she turns 35, a small brittle thing whose first word to Root in months (years, it feels) is a hoarse, quiet and unmistakable "trap," but they know.
It's not easy – it never is with her – but Sameen Shaw comes back to them whole.
The Machine returns in pieces, not entirely unlike Her former self, but no one, not even She can come out of all this unchanged.
The numbers come back eventually and, along with it, some semblance of routine.
Mostly, it gives Shaw someone to hunt.
In summer, they're given little time between numbers for an actual vacation, but Shaw never seems to mind. They're giving chase to a number in Brighton Beach, and it's almost the same.
Not really, but they run into a couple Russians and that is arguably more fun.
"Just like old times."
Shaw looks over her shoulder and grins the way she does when she's about to shoot someone, brilliant and smug and so entirely Shaw. "Better."