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Shaw could feel her heart thump away against her ribcage as she ran through the dark night. Being held captive by an AI and tortured for information for nine months hadn’t allowed her to stay as much in shape as she had been in before the Stock exchange. Sameen grimaced as the recently healed bones in her left knee and right shoulder twinged at the strain of carrying her body weight for the last three miles. She stopped by a tree, catching her breath. She hadn’t worn her usual running gear because she wasn’t running for exercise this time. She’d come to this park for a purpose and no one could know what it was.
Finch and Reese had been suspicious of her ever since her return. Finally, this morning Shaw had bristled under the tension in the subway.
“Do you have any idea what I sacrificed for all of you, Harold? Do you even know what they did to me?”
Harold looked guilty, but resolved to his suspicions, “That is precisely what we are afraid of, Ms. Shaw.”
They were all afraid of her, everyone except Root and she should have been afraid too. Shaw hadn’t known it, couldn’t have known what Samaritan’s ultimate goal in taking her captive had been. She remembered the months of drugging and the torture, the going in and out of consciousness because her nerves had been overloaded with pain. They’d tried to break her, make her reveal where the acolytes of the Machine and indeed, even the Machine itself were located, but she’d never cracked and it hadn’t been for lack of trying on Martine’s part. Finally, Samaritan had adjusted its strategy. She’d regained consciousness halfway through the surgery, then again at the end, but aside from a few fragmented images and smells, she had no concrete knowledge of the alterations Samaritan had made to her.
At least not until Martine had walked into her hospital room, tossed her a wireless phone, and told her to contact her team for help. She’d balked at the idea, even resisted for a hot second, but then Martine had said a phrase and everything went blank after that. She had to have called them in the end because from what Harold and John had told her, Root and Harold had showed up, and Samaritan had used their weakness to blackmail the Machine into giving itself up. Sameen had wanted to berate Root and Harold for being so stupid as to walk into a trap for her, but in the end she couldn’t bring herself to scold them. They’d done it to save her, because she was relevant to them. All of them, but to Root especially. Shaw never should have come back in the first place.
It would have been easier if she hadn’t. Everyone would have been safer. She wouldn’t have been able to do…what she’d just done.
Sameen looked down at her hands, still breathing hard. Her palms and fingers were stained with drying blood. She couldn’t remember the actual attack or the phrase that had triggered it, only that she’d been down in the subway with Root, John, and Harold. Everything was fine, then Root had said something and Sameen’s whole world had gone black.
The first thing Sameen saw when she regained consciousness was the blood on her hands, fresh, sticky, and bright in the artificial glow of the subway car’s fluorescent lights. She could smell its irony tang in the air. For a few seconds all she’d heard was the sound of her own breathing in her ears, then a shout so high pitched it was almost a wail. Shaw rose from the floor where she’d been kneeling and looked around unsteadily. All of the monitors that had been on Harold’s desk were broken beyond repair, ripped cords were everywhere, and at the center of it all lay a broken and bleeding Harold being cradled in Root’s arms.
“Harold!” Root shouted again, shaking the man like he was only sleeping and there wasn’t a hole in his chest flooding the floor beneath them with red. “Harold, stay with me. Please!”
In her peripheral vision, Shaw could see John’s lanky body sprawled out across a bench, bleeding from the side, yet alive. Immediately, Sameen went into action mode, kneeling down beside Harold and pressing her hand to the wound in his chest.
“Jesus,” She swore. “What happened?”
“Don’t touch him!” Root shouted, pulling Harold’s limp body away from Shaw and looking up at her with hurt brown eyes filled with tears.
“Root, let me help—”
Shaw reached for them again, but Root flinched away. A flash of fear had replaced the spark of adoration and trust that usually lit up her eyes when she looked at Shaw and it was then that Shaw knew. There was only one thing that could turn Root against her and that was…herself.
She’d done this.
There was a weak gasp from Harold, then his chest fell and it didn’t rise again.
“Harold?! Harold, no!” Root cried, clinging tighter to the body in her arms.
Shaw had backed away, retreating until she had been clear of the subway and her feet hadn’t stopped running until she’d reached the park. She deserved what was coming to her. She’d destroyed Root’s undying faith in her goodness and had involuntarily proven Harold and John’s misgivings about her return to be true. Sameen closed her eyes and pressed the heels of her hands into them, pressing and pressing until yellow flares lit up behind her eye lids.
How could she have done this? How could she have killed Harold, frightened Root, and wounded John? This was her team, her comrades, her people. She’d laid down her life for them once, ready to let Samaritan’s agents shoot her down just to give them their best chance at survival. Yet Shaw had done what she always did in nearly fatal situations, she’d beat the odds and survived long enough to see Samaritan turn her into a weapon to unleash on the people she cared about most.
“What does a soldier do to someone who hurts the people that they love? Get revenge or go on protecting those that still matter to them?” Her father had asked her one day, while he had been cleaning one of his service weapons in the garage of their then home.
Sameen had always enjoyed his company, preferred it even to that of other children. He knew so much and there was something about his unflappably calm demeanor, the same resolve she was sure had carried him through the last year of the war in Vietnam and across his tour of duty in the Middle East. She also imagined it was one of the things that had first drawn her mother to him, his ability to hold her steady through explosions and bursts of gunfire. Though Sameen would never admit it to anyone, it was something she both deeply respected about the man and would aspire to in her later life.
“Get revenge?” Sameen asked, shrugging.
Her father looked at her but didn’t say anything right away. Instead, he quietly reassembled the pieces of his weapon. When it was done, he wiped his hands on a cloth and walked over to Sameen, and bent down, squeezing her shoulder.
“A good soldier does both, Sameen.” He said, staring straight into her eyes, “A good soldier will always do both.”
Sameen pulled her hands away from her face and flexed her fingers. Most of the blood had dried and was beginning to flake off. Even so, her hands had probably left red smudges on the skin of her cheeks, but Sameen wasn’t inclined to care right now.
A good soldier does both, Sameen.
Shaw reached behind her and pulled her USP compact from the waistband of her black jeans.
She was overly aware of the lampposts mounted with cameras lining the walkway that was about twenty or so feet from where she stood and slunk back further into the shadow of the trees and out of their line of sight. Shaw held the gun out in front of her and looked at it, black steel gleaming in the dim orange light. It was her favorite gun and taking into account the powder residue and the warmth of the barrel, it was the one she’d used to shoot Harold and John.
What does a soldier do to someone who hurts the people they love?
Sameen pulled back the slide over the barrel, ejecting the used cartridge within and pulling a fresh one up from the magazine into the chamber.
A good soldier will always do both.
She wasn’t going to let herself be used as a weapon anymore. Sweat collected on the back of her neck as she turned the barrel of the gun towards herself. Sameen had never been afraid of dying, but she had good survival instincts and it was hard to suppress those long enough to pull the trigger.
“Sameen.”
Shaw couldn’t see her yet, but she knew it was Root. Her voice sounded small and lost and when Sameen turned around to face her she saw a mixture of compassion, grief, and fear swimming in her eyes. Shaw’s grip on her gun tightened reflexively even as she let the weapon drop to her side.
“Go back to the subway, Root,” Shaw warned, taking a step backwards.
“No,” Root protested, taking an answering step closer.
“Look,” Shaw tried to reason with her, “this is for the best. You, John, Lionel, Bear…none of you are safe as long as I’m alive.”
“What happened to…” Root tried, pausing as if it was too painful to talk about, as if she wouldn’t be able to continue, but she did. “That wasn’t you, Sam.”
“I killed Harold, Root,” Shaw said bluntly, feeling something inside of her constrict at the admission.
Root didn’t say anything right away. She looked like she was breaking inside, as if that knowledge had driven a stake into her heart that had opened a fissure for all of the emotional turmoil, all of the grief, and the emerging tears to gush through.
“It wasn’t you,” Root repeated again only this time the statement was a ghost of its earlier conviction, a whisper.
“It was me, Root, and I’ll probably do it again, to John, or Bear, or Lionel, or even to you. I can’t stop it…whatever they did to my head…it’s not something you can just fix.”
Shaw tried to turn her back on her, but Root reached out and grabbed her arm by the wrist, holding her still in a surprisingly gentle grip that seemed to burn against the pulse throbbing beneath Shaw’s skin.
“Wait, Sameen.” Root said. “The Machine will help us. She has to know what they did to you. She’ll know how to fix it.”
She sounded desperate and the way she looked at Shaw was so open, so vulnerable, that Sameen almost couldn’t take it. Root wore her emotions on her sleeve. When she loved, she loved deeply. There was no off button and it was still new and somewhat unsettling for Sameen to find herself on the receiving end of such an onslaught of emotions. She cared for Root, more than Shaw would ever admit, and that was part of the reason why she had to find a way to end all of this. Root would never leave her, no matter what Sameen did. She might be horrified, she might be angry, but Shaw knew without a shadow of a doubt that Root would never let her go again. So running from her into what was sure to be certain death, was going to be difficult without taking Root with her.
Sameen knew she couldn’t reason with Root, not about this, because even if she never admitted it, even if it was never formed into words, Shaw knew. She knew Root loved her. More than was probably healthy for either of them. So, despite knowing it was a futile effort, Shaw had to try.
“Root…” She started, but she didn’t get very far.
The hacker started shaking her head and Shaw knew from the sheen of moisture that was beginning to gather in the corners of Root’s eyes again that she knew what Shaw trying to do.
“No,” Root said, her grip on Shaw’s wrist tightening as she reached over with her other hand to grab Sameen’s opposite arm and bring her closer. “You don’t get to run away from me again. You don’t get to just run off and die, Sameen. You’re not on your own anymore. You have me.”
“And what happens if I stay, huh, Root? Who is going to protect everyone from what Samaritan can make me do?”
“The Machine will protect us.” Root answered automatically, still sounding like she believed it somehow even after everything they’d both been through. “She loves us, Sam. All of us.”
“You know, I’m starting to believe that less and less every day. Where was the Machine when I shot her creator through the heart? Where was your omnipresent robot when Samaritan’s blonde harpy was torturing me for information for five months?” Shaw asked bitterly, surprising herself with the pure blaze of anger that flared up in her chest as if she even had the right to feel wounded or vindicated after everything she’d done. “You tell me, Root, where was your all-powerful God then? She can’t protect you, not from me.”
And for the first time since Shaw had met her, Root didn’t have an immediate omniscient answer or a witty comeback that doubled as a come on. Instead, her dark eyes stared at Shaw longingly as if trying to convey something she couldn’t even begin to put into words, but there wasn’t anything Root could say. Sameen had made up her mind.
What does a soldier do to someone who hurts the people they love, Sameen?
Shaw reached forward with urgency and pulled Root to her by the lapels of her jacket until their lips met in a heated kiss. There was a sense of deju vu sinking into both of them mixed with a sense of dread that seemed to drain into both of their bodies until it buried itself bone deep. The feeling settled heavy and unavoidable in Root’s stomach like a block of ice. Even as Sameen’s lips burned hot, Root felt the cold swell of fear seep beneath her skin and deep into the core of her being until she shivered, reaching for Shaw and grasping her neck to pull her closer like a lifeline. Shaw allowed herself to be pulled closer, letting herself melt into Root.
Get revenge or go on protecting those that still matter to them?
The kiss was like others they’d shared. It had the same disorienting, soul engulfing sort of pull. The kind of feeling that could make Shaw forget where she was and why being aware of her surroundings might come in handy in her line of work. The same kind of fire that could make her forget why kissing Root was a bad idea and why, even though they were good together, they could be bad for each other too. But this time, just like the last kiss they’d shared, Shaw had a mission and she needed to complete it. Shaw released one of Root’s lapels without moving away from the kiss, still feeling the cool weight of familiar metal in her hand even as the feel of leather faded.
A good soldier does both, Sameen.
The single gunshot was the loudest sound Root could ever remember hearing, but it wasn’t the autonomic flinch that seized through her body that caused her to move out of the kiss. It was Shaw who broke it, falling heavily to her knees and sprawling onto her back.
“Sameen!”
Root knelt down and pulled Shaw into her arms. Shaw grimaced and sucked in a shuddering breath, head lolling weakly against Root’s shoulder as she cradled her close.
“It’s been fun,” Shaw whispered, staring at Root.
It was strange. Sameen Shaw had lived through quite a few near death experiences in her life, but they couldn’t compare to the real deal. The quality of everything was suddenly changed: the sounds of Root's voice as she frantically said her name, the feel of Root’s fingers as they clung to her back, it all felt dull like she was being pulled underwater or put under anesthesia and might come back up at another time. But she wouldn’t. Even as Shaw felt Root and the world around her slip away, she knew this time would be different and she was okay with that.
A good soldier will always do both.