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The team’s headquarters was quiet.
And the ladies were finally having a good moment.
Alone.
No numbers over their heads, no one else in sight—just the two of them.
The last part was rare, and therefore precious.
Why?
Because there was always something… or more accurately, someone.
Someone in the subway lair, or a persistent third-wheel barging in unannounced.
But now… now finally it was just them.
They lay on the narrow couch, quiet, tangled in a kiss.
The so-called master of no-feelings lay beneath the master of flirtation—right now she let her guard drop.
It had started simply enough:
Root had picked up Shaw’s favorite—pastrami drowning in mustard and a milk tea—thinking it would be the perfect cover for a casual evening together.
But the longer they talked, the shorter the distance between them became, until the harmless chatter blurred into something intimate.
Fusco was stuck at the precinct doing overtime on a serial homicide case.
Finch was laid up in his apartment, resting his knee after a flare of old pain.
Reese was out chasing a potential perpetrator on an irrelevant number—not likely to return soon.
And Bear, having liberated a brownie straight out of Fusco’s hand, was currently spending the night at the vet.
So maybe someday would be today.
The day they finally talked about what this was.
What they were to each other.
The hacker wanted an official title—GIRLFRIEND, signed and stamped.
Something she could parade in front of the team of hopelessly single dogs, including the four-legged one.
But every time the hacker tried to steer the topic toward feelings, the master of emotional deflection would dodge.
And then, like clockwork, some socially tone-deaf third party would derail the moment.
Then the dark-haired woman would shut the scene down immediately with a flat, “I don’t have feelings,” and take off faster than Bear chasing a suspect.
Every. Single. Time.
Root was certain—absolutely certain—that Shaw felt the same way.
But she had a pathological desire to make the Axis II personality disorder case admit it out loud.
Fine. Yes.
Someone’s actions were already saying it out loud—look, they were literally kissing.
But that wasn’t the point—she just…
She just wanted the words, too.
Her hand slipped under the hem of her tank top, and fingertips traced the hard, defined line of her abs.
A low, husky warning escaped her throat, “Root.”
But that kind of voice, that tone—only made her want to tease her more.
Like she said, they were having a very good moment.
And then fate, as always, was a bitch John Greer.
Because then came it—subtle but unmistakable—the faint metal clang of the subway lair’s entrance door opening.
Next thing Root knew?
Hands grabbed her shoulders in an instant, and then they were sitting upright on the couch, a careful distance apart.
It happened so fast that the hacker could only blink.
Reese, oblivious to what had just transpired, came striding in from a mission, carrying a box of donuts.
“Why are you back this early?”
“The number was just standing outside his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, hesitating forever. I figured I’d just provoke him and put everyone out of their misery.”
“Of course…”
He didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, just set the box on the table as he passed, then paused mid-step.
“Save at least one for me, Shaw.”
“For God’s sake, it was just one time.”
“Not trying to argue, but it was actually twice.”
By the time he reached the weapons closet to drop off his gun and disappeared from sight, Root slowly turned back to the woman she had been kissing seconds ago—the woman who had been hers, if only for a heartbeat.
Shaw was already opening the donut box, clearly more invested in the sugar than in her gaze.
Someone's eyes were fully seduced by the donuts.
The dark-haired woman stood and grabbed plates, “Root? You want tea or coffee with the donuts?”
“Tea would be nice, sweetie.”
After she disappeared from view, the brown-haired woman leaned back against the couch and let out a long, heavy sigh.
At this point, it felt less like coincidence and more like the cosmos had subcontracted a rotating cast of Steves to sabotage her romantic progress.
Shaw was a simple woman.
Probably the simplest person she had ever met.
If she liked you, you would know.
If she hated you, she wouldn’t pretend otherwise.
The ex-ISA might be violent and catastrophically uncommunicative, but she was never fake, never full of speeches, never emotionally theatrical, and never calculating in her intentions.
Sameen Shaw was a straight line.
An arrow with teeth.
Her alexithymia helped, she supposed—the inability to care, or rather the inability to acknowledge, process how much she cared out loud—made her efficient.
Always knew what to do and what she wanted.
Just like when she and her partner Michael Cole were betrayed by the U.S. ISA—she didn’t expose the program and plunge the country into crisis. Instead, she killed their handler to avenge her friend’s death and then continued protecting the program in secret, even after her own mentor tried to kill her.
Like she said—Shaw does not act on feelings.
She is ruthlessly rational.
But if you ask what her sociopath actually loves?
That answer was easy.
Root knew. The team knew. Maybe even Bear knew.
Sameen Shaw loves—
1.Punching people. Shooting people. Blowing people up. In short: anything involving violence.
2.Driving. Ideally the kind that ends with the car crashing and her walking away without a scratch.
3.And the team’s spoiled fur kid—Bear, of course.
4.Last but not least, food—steak, to be exact.
Don’t get her wrong—pastrami with mustard overload from Beatrice Lilie was her favorite sandwich, but it wasn’t her favorite food.
They were not the same tier.
“Steak was better than sex,” Shaw once told Root straight to her face.
The hacker had disagreed at a cellular level, but wisely kept that argument to herself.
It wasn’t like she could fire back with, “My tongue and my fingers can prove you wrong, sweetie,” without earning a concussion.
No, thank you.
She was a smart woman, obviously.
Anyway, steak was leverage.
It was the one reliable method to get her on a “date” without calling it a date.
So here they were—
On the rooftop of a historic, Michelin-starred steakhouse overlooking the city.
Across from Root sat Shaw, eating USDA Prime steak with an elegance that somehow coexisted with taking enormous bites.
It was weird, but she pulled it off.
The hacker rested her chin on her hand, wineglass in the other, eyes fixed on the woman across from her.
And the steak in front of her had barely been touched; meanwhile, she had demolished the side dishes.
The dark-haired woman finished her own plate, then glanced repeatedly at Root’s plate.
She took a few more sips of wine, but her eyes stayed locked on the orphaned meat.
And of course, she noticed.
“Sweetie. I don’t think I can finish mine. Think you could help me with it?”
“Fine. I will help you finish it.” Though the upward curl at her mouth said she was delighted.
Root watched her with a bright, tender smile as Shaw took giant bites of steak and casually washed them down with wine.
She let herself enjoy the moment and lifted her hand to signal for the second bottle of 1869 Lafite.
Like they said, alcohol lubricates the heart, right?
Tonight, with steak and wine on her side, maybe the tipsy Shaw would be more willing to finally talk about it.
About feelings. About them.
They were having a good night
Then the universe reminded her it was a bitch Martine Rousseau.
“Ms. Groves?”
The familiar voice at her ear froze Root’s smile mid-lift.
She slowly turned her head.
Of course. Finch and Hendricks.
Shaw barely glanced up, lifting her palm in greeting without pausing her steak.
“I see you and Ms. Shaw are enjoying yourselves.”
Yes, Harold. You said hi, now please say bye.
That was all the brown-haired woman could think as she smiled politely.
“Evening, Harold, Grace. The steak here has always been excellent, so I thought I’d bring her over.”
Say, “Then we won’t disturb you, enjoy your night,” Harold—just say it!
Her inner voice screamed.
“Sorry to intrude, but if you don’t mind… may we join you for dinner?” Hendricks asked gently.
Finch’s eyebrows shot up as if he wanted to say something, but his wife continued, “I’d really like to get to know you both better. Harold hardly ever talks about his friends.”
Noooooooo, not you too, Grace.
But what could Root say? She just smiled and gestured, “Of course.”
Luckily, acting was one of her stronger skills.
The older couple slowly settled in, and Finch gave Root a sheepish, apologetic glance as he sat.
Shaw? She never once paused her eating.
Their two-person world had officially become a four-person world.
Root’s hand twitched toward her wine glass, thinking maybe one more sip would restore her composure, maybe even coax Shaw into eye-flirting, or at least eye-texting.
But that woman didn’t meet her gaze at all, absorbed in the flavors and textures of the steak.
That night, at the historic New York steakhouse, the city’s skyline reflected in wine glasses, with the faint scent of charred beef lingering in the air.
Four of them talked for what felt like hours.
Their conversation ebbed and flowed, occasionally interrupted by polite questions or laughter.
At one point, Hendricks lifted her glass and the others followed.
Four glasses met with a delicate clink in the soft ambient light.
In that brief moment, Shaw’s pinky lightly brushed against the back of Root’s hand.
Their eyes met.
Her gaze held a subtle smile—it was full of mischief and quiet affection.
Finch simply pressed his lips together in a small, knowing smile.
Maybe tonight had not gone perfectly—but it was sweet in its own interrupted way.
Or—
Maybe New York simply had bad, bad feng shui for her.
That would explain why her plans kept getting third-wheeled.
So when the Machine sent her to Pennsylvania on an assignment, Her analog interface of course, brought the dark-haired woman along.
The legitimate reason she gave her was that this was a relevant number.
A high-level government official who knew about the Machine.
His number was up because he was about to sell the whole ASI development program to another country.
The entire project.
Whatever happened on 9/11, the U.S. government didn’t respond by recruiting a team of IT experts to build a powerful system.
Instead, they invited exactly three MIT-graduated citizens under a classified DoD project: Nathan and Harold to design the Machine, and Arthur to design Samaritan.
The reason was simple.
Secrecy.
What the government needed from them was the design and the application layer of an ASI.
But building a sovereign-class ASI from scratch with one or two people is impossible without state substrate—
The rest of the layers, hardware and infrastructure, network taps, cleared data centers, cluster and interconnect, high-bandwidth ingest, fusion pipelines, backbone engineering, ML/DL architectures, C2 integration—the sort of technology terms that any outsider would skip halfway through reading.
All of that was pre-built by the government.
And they didn’t just fund the project for its system design. If money alone were sufficient, some technology billionaire or trillionaire would have done it already.
What made it possible were the highest-classified research assets in existence.
The AI, the core cognitive and learning systems, the adversarial ML research, system-integration frameworks—the kind of resources only a nation-state can supply.
In short, the project this man planned to sell was basically a “How to Build an ASI—Example A and Example B” starter kit.
A ready-made 101 manual. Any nation that acquired it could reproduce one in under five years.
It wasn’t that the Machine was opposed to the existence of another ASI, nor blocking other countries from advancing.
But there was a clear line between independent development and selling the country’s classified information to the highest bidder.
Root didn’t personally loathe traitors, because she was hardly patriotic herself.
Any excuse that removes you from unfavorable terrain is, by definition a good excuse.
Whether that man was greedy, undercover, or just trying to get foreign currency for his retirement—morally irrelevant to her.
What mattered was that leaking a “national-level ASI blueprint” automatically justified intervention—and gave her a mission-grade excuse to get someone away from the cursed city.
The Machine had suggested her Analog Interface bring both primary assets on this assignment.
But she conveniently did not ask Reese.
Well, see—
After the war with Samaritan ended, Reese had finally tried something for himself, for once. He went back to Iris Campbell—
To apologize.
To explain why he ended things so abruptly.
And to finally give her the truth he owed so long.
She accepted the apology but said no explanation was needed anymore.
Because she had moved on.
She didn’t say it outright, but he could see she was tired.
So he didn’t resent her—just as she had never resented him.
Doctors and patients really shouldn’t date, she had joked trying to lighten the moment.
And Reese had forced a smile to match.
Accepted that some things simply aren’t meant to be, especially for people like him.
Just like she said, perhaps they never should have started in the first place.
And how did the hacker know all this?
Well…
Not long after the war ended, Shaw had called her, saying Reese was acting off—he had put on the most expensive suit in his closet and left the lair like a man on a mission.
In her defense, it was too boring a day to resist.
So Root, Shaw, and a then-still-unemployed Fusco followed him.
And they heard every word of that conversation and felt sorry for the big guy.
Since then, the man had been living in mission-mode full-time, even with the Machine recruiting globally and adding a few more assets in New York.
Hence, the hacker wasn’t going to burn him out further.
Okay, fine.
Mostly because she wanted Shaw to herself for once.
Pennsylvania was not New York.
Maybe the curse wouldn’t cross state lines.
99.99% confirmed that the United States of America was a bitch Jeremy Lambert.
It simply hated her because she never loved it—that was Root’s running theory at 6a.m. when she spotted an NYPD cruiser parked beside them.
Lionel Fusco.
They had just wrapped the mission—
Stolen the entire ASI blueprint the man intended to sell, planted enough forensic noise to make it look like he was peddling unrelated classified tech to a foreign buyer, and then watched the FBI take him down through binoculars from a safe distance.
Not a single bullet fired, only one well-timed fist.
Clean, quiet and elegant.
Exactly the way Root preferred her mornings.
She had planned a nice breakfast, and maybe a walk in the park afterward—then finally talk.
At this hour, no one should have been around to ruin that.
That’s what she had believed.
And yet.
Detective Fusco was here—in Pennsylvania of all places—because he had come to interview a witness in a homicide case he was chasing.
Of course.
Of course, the one unpatriotic woman tries to leave the cursed city for twelve hours and the city FedExes one of its detectives across state lines to meet her at sunrise.
Root stirred her coffee slowly with the tiny spoon while the detective bragged about his work.
Something about the 8th precinct sitting on a stack of open cases, and the moment he got his badge back he closed ten in a month.
The other woman only nodded every few sentences, working through her American breakfast plate.
Then he escalated the bragging.
The moment he claimed he “smoothly dodged incoming fire by slipping sideways like a cat.”
That's when Root finally failed to suppress a laugh.
“Hey, I’m faster than I look, okay?”
“But gravity often assists you, detective.”
“I’m very nimble when it counts, you can ask John.”
“You are many things. Nimble is not even in the same dictionary.”
“Watch it, Cocoa Puffs. I survive because of my tactics.”
Shaw, without looking up, added around a mouthful of hash brown, “Tactics require competence. You just happen to be heavy, Lionel.”
That shut him up long enough to chew.
Breakfast finally ended.
The three walked back to their cars and exchanged brief goodbyes.
The brown-haired woman had already opened the passenger door and was just about to sit when Shaw called,
“Root.”
“Yes, sweetie?”
“It’s still early.”
“Yeah, it’s only 6:45.”
“Bear doesn’t get discharged until tomorrow.”
“Okay…?”
“Going back to the subway now would be boring.”
“What are you actually trying to say, Sameen?”
A tiny beat.
“…Wanna walk in the park?”
She shut the car door again, unable to stop the little smile pulling at her mouth.
So it turned out she wasn’t the only one who had wanted to talk after all.
And that knowledge alone settled under her ribs like a slow, pleasant burn.
Officially, on the record: Pennsylvania was better than New York.
Sameen Shaw—taken.
Officially taken by Root.
And vice versa, naturally.
The hacker did what any newly minted girlfriend would do: she shared the joy.
She told Finch first and received his gentle blessing with that quiet smile.
Then she told Fusco next; the detective commented that “one dangerous couple just formed—God bless New York.”
As for Reese—
Given his recent romantic trainwreck and mental state, she wasn’t about to rub salt into that gaping wound. But he of course, noticed the subtle shift in their orbit inside the lair. He didn’t leave any comment, just watched them for seconds.
And simply said, “Finally,” before grabbing his coat and heading back out to tail another irrelevant number.
Days moved on, and on one beautiful afternoon—though to someone, every day had been beautiful lately—still, New York weather actually good.
5 p.m. dusk, wind cool and clean.
After Shaw shut down a soon-to-be school shooter and prevented a campus tragedy, Root showed up with two cups of ice cream.
Because a good girlfriend always drops in on her girlfriend’s work.
The two of them sat quietly on a bench, shoulder to shoulder, watching students and professors stream across campus for evening classes.
They talked about college years, or what counted as such for them.
Shaw of course, had gone to medical school, skipped a grade, and graduated early. Who would ever predict a doctor would jump tracks and become a Tier-1 government operative?
Root meanwhile, had studied Computer Science at Stanford—for a few semesters, until she realized she was better at hacking than her professors. She dropped out and by a twist of fate, ended up becoming a killer-on-hire herself.
They were talking.
They were definitely having a good moment that, statistically, should have ended in a kiss.
And then New York reminded her it still hated her.
Because Reese appeared, holding Bear’s leash.
The grim-faced man asked them to watch the dog for the night—he had to go tail a money-laundering suspect that was suspiciously connected to a mafia lord.
When Shaw offered to back him up, he simply shook his head and declined. And with that, he walked off, leaving the dog in their hands.
Root glanced down at Bear, who immediately caught Shaw’s full attention.
Eventually, she leaned back, a smile tugging at her lips, watching her girlfriend kneel and give the dog her ice cream.
The rest of the evening passed in… Bear’s time—stealing snacks, nudging them for attention, and somehow insisting on sleeping in the middle of the bed.
Once the spoiled fur kid was finally lured onto the sofa and dozed off, the hacker finally had her girl to herself.
They lay together on the bed, breaths shallow, lips pressed together, letting the quiet intimacy stretch across the room.
Fingers tangled in hair, soft touches wandering everywhere.
Root’s hands moved to unfasten Shaw’s bra while murmuring something wickedly playful against her lips, when the whisper came into her ear.
New York was absolutely the worst bitch Samaritan.
Because half an hour later—
Through the glass, the women watched their friend lying unconscious on the hospital bed, completely wrapped in bandages like a mummy.
One person barged into a drug lord’s den—either he thinks he’s the protagonist buffed by the writer, or he has a death wish.
“I hate John…”
“I literally volunteered to cover him.”
“I hate him…”
The dark-haired woman turned her head to look at her girlfriend radiating murderous resentment, “You hate anyone who interrupts our… except Bear.”
“Correct.”
Either way, someone really needs to stop him from being Steve becoming reckless.
So the next morning, doorbell rang at the apartment. A woman got up and opened the door.
And found a tall stranger with long, wavy brown hair standing outside.
“Hi~”
Maybe she still loved him, or maybe not.
But if she could help him get back what he had lost…
Then love could fix him, just like it had fixed her.
And he would finally be less Steve.
If so—
As an extra bonus, she would finally be able to have her to herself.
Just the two of them.