Work Text:
When Root and Shaw finally move in together, Harold and John and Fusco all make jokes about how Shaw will need to take the guns out of the fridge, or get dragged to Ikea, or learn how to settle down. Thing is, Shaw went from living with her mom to living with roommates to basically sleeping at the hospital to The Marines to having Cole in her ear or at her side during pretty much all of her work time (and if she's being honest a good chunk of her social time, too.) She likes her privacy, absolutely, but it's never been her primary concern. Living with Root is more a matter of shifting the bedframe than shifting a paradigm.
Root, on the other hand, hasn’t stayed in one place for more than a couple weeks since she was 22. From the little she's mentioned about her childhood she may as well have been living alone in Bishop, and after that she went for 15 years where the only times she interacted with people as herself was in a professional context, usually over an untraceable phone connection or with a shield of expensive guns and alcohol.
Moving in together is kind of like giving a little kid a puppy. Root wont' shut up about it for the weeks leading up to the moving date. She asks Shaw about curtains and sofas and paint colours, scopes out all the good coffee shops and sniper angles in the blocks surrounding the building. She’s enamoured with the idea of picking out what to hang on the walls and how the bedroom is set up, arranges her Taser and her gun and her phone charger and her water bottle and her nail polish on her nightstand with meticulous care. The first few nights they fall asleep together without fucking beforehand Root snuggles up right behind her and wakes up already smiling. It's kind of obnoxious but Shaw's not going to say know to sleeping pressed up against another warm body.
After a couple weeks, however, Root starts to lose interest. Not in Shaw, never in Shaw, but the novelty of having a personalized permanent living space wears off pretty quickly. The furniture catalogues get used as coasters for the army of abandoned coffee mugs she leaves lying around, and when she comes to bed, usually around 3:00 in the morning, she collapses on the far side of the mattress and shoves her face into a pillow. She spends a few days in Chicago for a number and when she comes back it takes a week before Shaw snaps and reminds her to put her clothes in the drawers and stop living out of her suitcase.
Root can spend ten or twelve hours at a time hunched over her laptop working, and she comes as close as she ever comes to snapping at Shaw when she interrupts her. Root doesn't buy groceries unless Shaw specifically texts her a list and a timeline, or tells The Machine what they need.
Shaw's always considered herself pretty minimalist, but Root, while she inevitably accumulates clutter from various missions, has no real attachment to any physical items. She buys a lava lamp because Shaw’s life is cursed, and a purple shag rug, somehow even more of an eyesore than the rug she’d had in the subway. Shaw banishes it to the living room because “I just can’t take the chance that I’ll have to look at that thing while we’re fucking, Root, I can’t do it,” which only leads to Root trying to seduce her in every room of the apartment besides the bedroom. Shaw should have expected this outcome.
Even Root’s laptop can be wiped with a few commands and discarded, her ubiquitous leather jackets exchanged or left behind on a whim or for convenience sake. It grates on Shaw, both the waste, the casual disregard Root has for material goods, and the sense that the only thing holding Root to their apartment is Shaw.
Shaw could leave her stuff if she had to, she's not sentimental, but she has a couple pairs of boots that are worn in and comfortable, and the hoodie that she stole from Cole and never gave back, the dog tags of a guy she had to leave behind to bleed out, her dad's wedding ring. Her computer is set up the way she likes it, and she had to go half way across the city and to three different supermarkets to get all the spices in their cupboard. None of these things are essential, but she knows it would bother her if she had to leave them behind.
Shaw's actually glad that The Machine chatters away to root all the fucking time because it's gotten root a little more accustomed to communicating with someone else regularly. She still doesn't understand all the facets of their relationship, can't imagine being in constant contact with anyone else 24/7. They clearly have boundaries, but they make no sense to Shaw. The Machine can tell Root what to order when they're out for dinner and which streets to take to get home but Root gets defensive and acidic if She suggests she put another blanket on the bed in the winter. Similarly, Shaw has listened to root argue fiercely for actual hours with The Machine about how to carry out a mission and The Machine never seems to mind. Yet the one day she overheard Root say "I won't tell Admin you're sorry, you have nothing to be sorry for," The Machine cut off contact for 24 hours. Shaw may or may not have a paper notebook where there might possibly be a chart of Root and The Machine's relationship quirks. You can't prove anything.
All that being said, it's still quite frequent that Shaw can tell that even something as simple as asking Shaw how her day was is exhausting for her. Shaw wonders if it's because Root has to work so much harder than most people to be a person or because engaging with someone she cares about as much as she cares about Shaw is so emotionally intense as to be draining.
She's gotten pretty good at interpreting Root's silences, and now that she's around Root more she realizes that there are a lot of silences. Root must have saved up all her talking for when she was with Shaw, before, but now a silence could mean anything from 'I bought a new sex toy and left it somewhere unexpected and I don't want to miss your reaction' to 'I lower the quality of life for anyone I interact with and everybody's life would be easier if I wasn't in it'. They could also mean 'I forgot about eating for 48 hours and it is taking all my concentration not to pass out while I work on this code', but Shaw had a very serious talk with the Machine after that and they've worked out a pretty good system to make sure root is taking care of herself without making it seem like they think she's incapable.
Shaw and Harold go to Italy for a conference for a week and when they come back the stupid house plant that Zoe gave them as a gift is dead and there's a thin layer of dust over everything. Root bounces in the door that evening like usual, and after the reunion sex Shaw asks her about the plant.
"I used the safehouse over near Times Square," Root says, absently. "I've been a lawyer all week, and it was more convenient."
Shaw knows if she had been there, Root would have come back to their apartment every night. Root is willing to compromise and learn and try endlessly for Shaw, but that same dedication is lacking when it comes to their home. Shaw has to think about it for a few days, because she's struggling to attach what she's feeling to a specific action. She doesn't like that root leaves her coffee cups and computer cables fucking everywhere, and she thinks that's a safe thing to tell her. She doesn't like when root gets all quiet and upset because Shaw can't fix it, and it makes her feel useless and inadequate when telling Root she cares about her more than basically anybody in the world still doesn't make Root feel like she's deserving of that. She also suspects sometimes Root thinks she's lying when she tells her that, and that pisses Shaw off. She doesn't think she can tell Root that one, but keeping it to herself doesn't feel right either.
She likes that Root will come home when she's there. She likes that Root will stick her cold toes under Shaw's leg on the couch even if she doesn't speak to her the whole day. She likes that Root doesn't care if there's a punching bag in their living room, and that she thinks the guns in the fridge are cute. She likes that Root is never upset if Shaw wakes her by accident, and that she sometimes brings home coffee or takeout or beer if she knows Shaw has had a bad day.
Once she's untangled all of that, Shaw realizes the rest of it doesn't make her feel anything. Root has never pushed Shaw's boundaries to a point where she's uncomfortable, and Shaw really doesn't care enough about root attaching herself to a physical place to push her about it. It means something, she figures, is that root will come home to her. And maybe home as a place is more important to Shaw than it is to Root, but every morning Root still wakes up smiling, and she looks at Shaw like she's the best part of her day. That's the important part.