Chapter Text
Root didn’t come over often.
Well — “often,” being in contrast to when it seemed Root was smirking around every corner on that damn bike with a second helmet at the ready, or sitting at every bar with her fruity cosmos
No, these days, Root required a particular, distinct method to her madness of showing up at your apartment at midnight.
(It was always midnight. You figured Root thought it was poetic, or some shit.)
Tonight, you were on the couch biting off the cap to another beer, the TV humming into the quiet of your living room, when a triple staccato knock from the front door grabbed your attention, that knock that you only ever heard from—
“Mind if I borrow your blow dryer, sweetie?” came muffled through the door, perky and upbeat.
You buried your face into a lumpy cushion.
Eventually, you rolled off the couch onto your feet, rubbing a few droplets of beer from your chin as you slugged open the door.
And Root stood there absolutely sopping wet, clothes and body drenched, dripping buckets onto the cheap hallway carpet.
Staring at the water stains, you pursed your lips. “I guess I can’t complain, being that it’s not blood this time.”
Root grinned. “I like to leave that area of theatricality reserved for you.”
You took another swig of beer. “Right. Well, blow dryer’s in the bathroom. Obviously.”
Root wrung out her long hair once more and shimmied a bit in the hallway before she made her way inside. “I might snag a quick shower too, borrow your shampoo, if that’s alright.”
“Nothing’s stopped you so far from using the rest of my stuff.”
Root smiled again. “What can I say, I love the way you smell,” she purred, running a finger along your collarbone. You instinctively shrugged her hand away, and she wandered off with a chuckle, heels clicking damply on the tiled floor over to the bathroom. You dipped back onto the couch, gulping another good fraction of the beer down, perfectly content to pretend Root wasn’t even there.
You were just about nodding off when Root snuck up on you, behind the couch. “Are you watching Gossip Girl?” she asked, the lilt in her voice dripping with amusement
Blinking awareness back, you shot out for the remote and hastily thumbed the rubber buttons until the channel changed. “No.”
“Cute,” Root remarked. You looked back at her, and the taller brunette had changed into one of your Knicks jerseys. You couldn’t see whether she’d donned a pair of shorts or not.
You doubted it.
“You didn’t have to stay up for me. Though it’s definitely sweet of you.” Root said softly, crossing around to drape herself over the rest of the couch, ankles up on your lap like deadweights.
Yeah, definitely no shorts.
You refused to look down.
“It’s more self-defense than hospitality. You’re too trigger-happy with tasers for anyone’s comfort.”
Root grinned. “Would a strip-search put your mind at ease?”
Your returning smile was biting and cold. “Not in the slightest.”
Root dipped her head back to the television. “Well, sorry if I interrupted your ladies’ night marathon, but please, don’t let me disturb your plans.”
Her clean, clear face was beginning to irritate you, and you focused on the discovery channel, clenching your jaw. “Every appearance of you is an interruption.”
“You know,” she teased. “Hate and love are just two sides of the same coin: passion. Your lack of indifference tells me a lot, Sameen.”
You wanted to hate her. Anger was tangible in you, rooted in your knuckles. Its predictability grounded you. You wanted to hate her. You didn’t want this… softness in the slashes of your ribcage, the grooves of your chest and the breeze against your diaphragm.
It was suffocating to feel like you’re breathing clean air.
You shoved her feet off your lap and stood, your fist tight around the neck of your third beer bottle. A few stray drops sloshed onto the floor, but you didn’t care. “Don’t be here when I wake up,” you said, not looking at Root.
Conversations with that damn woman always spiraled into the middle of nowhere with nothing in its wake but itchy subtext and your hostile agitation.
You stalked back to your room and slammed the door.
You wanted to hate her; you wanted the fury. But you weren’t angry.
You weren’t angry at all.
You didn’t see Root again for seventeen days, twenty-six numbers later. This having followed a lull of muted crime ratings, even you admitted exhaustion, especially combined with the irritably tactile schedule at Bloomingdale's and the perfume headaches.
But these days, the whole team of you was always exhausted. You weren’t sure how Reese stayed standing, most mornings.
Obviously, it was midnight when Root tapped on the door.
And obviously, Root had a broken nose in need of a reset and a pathetically depressing clown suit splattered with dark, red stains.
Behind the wad of paper towels stuffed against her broken nose, Root’s voice was squeaky and stuffy. “At least I stopped the bleeding before I got here.”
You drummed your fingers against the doorframe. “I’m thrilled.”
You wound up in the kitchen, where she perched up on a bar stool, and you hopped up on the counter to examine the damage. You ignored her delighted eyes at the compensation in your height differences.
As you inspected the awkward angles of her nose, Root frowned and reached out for your face. “What did you do to your eye?” Root’s fingers were feather-like and soft against the swollen bruise along the upper arc of your cheekbone, but you deliberately cringed from her touch. She dropped her hand.
“Fusco's an idiot,” you muttered, still focused. Unlike Root and her goddamn restless affection, that need for contact, your hands never quite touched her skin. “Tried to show me something on his phone in the car. Can’t estimate his own trajectory, or keep to his own space, and his elbow is really a bitch.”
Root smirked. “What did he want to show you?”
“Don’t know. I threw his phone out the window.”
“That’s my gir—”
You deftly pressed the heels of your palms against either sides of Root’s nose and jerked it back into place. Her jaw gaped and she let out a split bitch of a shriek that rattled your ears.
Your following smile had never looked so sincere as Root cradled her face, gasping for breath.
“Fuck you,” Root groaned.
“Given the circumstances, I’d avoid such strenuous activities if I were you.” You were still smirking.
This spark was good. This was a manifest you were on board with.
Dipping her neck back, trying to find the least painful way to balance herself, Root distractedly breathed, “Oh, but think about how fun this could make our activities .”
Root was too busy being a big baby to notice your dark eyes wandering the length of her neck, the corner of her smooth, inviting jawline. You swallowed, the cave of your mouth dry and thick. Yeah, you’re not on board with this.
One glance back at the clown costume, however, had you clearing your throat and rummaging back through your med kit. “So. Did you get beat up by a five-year-old, or what?”
Root was suddenly embracing a physical embodiment of the exhaustion that you currently felt, slumped on the stool and bruised eyes drooping low. “She was nine, actually. But to be fair, I had my eyes on the face painter, and unfortunately the Machine did not inform me of the martial-arts-trained niece.”
You gripped the sides of Root’s face to hold her still again, her tired eyes boring quietly into you, and you began to pack some loose cotton into her nostrils. “Take these out in a couple days,” you murmured, cleaning the blood crusting around her nose. “I’d be too embarrassed to call for backup, too.”
“Thanks, Shaw,” Root sighed, shutting her eyes. You weren’t sure which part she was thanking you for, sincere or not. You saw her sink her fingernails into her thigh, clenched against the pain of your work. Her mien was expressionless, however. Calm, cool. Collected.
You wanted to hate her.
The dead night of your kitchen breathed like it was asleep, quiet exhales. Its silence was nearly stifling, but Root’s warm breath against your chin was something like soothing. It’s stillness was entirely foreign to you. With her eyes closed, she no longer surveilled your every movement around her, like she depended on your predictability, and so you let your own gaze meander again. The circles under Root’s eyes were heavy. They stained her pale skin, smeared like bad makeup. Pasty dry lips, discolored, reminded you of harsher seasons than summer. Staring at her, something tightened in your stomach, and you made a conscious effort of ignoring it.
“You’re welcome,” you muttered.
The slightest of smiles pulled at the corner of Root’s mouth, and it was a look of such open serenity that you could not resist thinking how you could stand to see it again.
A week later, Root was drenched from head-to-toe again, but this time she came up the fire escape and—
“Christ, Root, is that gasoline ?”
Unbuttoning her blouse out on the metal grates outside your window, Root shrugged. “Christ is actually one of the few aliases I’ve never used for myself, but I’ll take it. Could you bring the trash over, babe?”
You had been rummaging through your fridge for any beer at all when that uneven triple knock had sounded on your kitchen window, and it was three quarters of a second later that had you pumping a hidden gun out of the freezer and aimed at the window. By the time you rolled your eyes hard enough to knock some nerves out of junction and you shoved open the kitchen window, the stench of the gas had you gagging.
You weren’t sure if you were stunned more by the fucking fact that Root climbed fifteen stories of a fire escape sopping wet in gasoline at midnight, or that she was now shedding her pants and was standing in the late-night air on the side of your apartment building in nothing but her underwear and a really rather lacey bra.
“Unless you want these to drip all over your floor?” Root offered sarcastically, holding up her damp pile of clothes.
You blinked, and grabbed the waste basket from around the corner. It was half-full solely from beer bottles and takeout boxes from the ramen station at the corner of your street, and now Root heaped on her rancid clothes. She smoothly hopped inside the kitchen, but she reached back out for a large paper bag that she set down ceremoniously on the counter.
“Do I want to know?” you asked hesitantly, dumping the trash down the chute.
Her smile was sly as she reached in the bag and plucked out a six pack of some expensive New York lagers. The condensation on the glass already had you drooling, and you snatched one out of her hands.
“She told me you’d likely run out at some point today,” Root clarified, still smiling like she deserved a Nobel peace prize, despite being the cause for the stench emanating off her skin in revolting waves.
Although, after popping off the cap against the counter and guzzling the brew back, you thought that maybe she did deserve an award.
“Save me one, I’m gonna pop in the shower real quick.” She patted your shoulder gently as she walked by.
But not before your eyes trailed down the damp skin of her chest, of her tight stomach, and you were caught up in her ass and those deliciously long legs far too greedily before she disappeared around the corner. Shit, the woman was covered in a disgusting, reeking fluid, and she still looked like walking sex.
You tipped back the beer again to shake out the creeping thoughts before calling out to her. “There better not be anything quick about it, or you’re not sleeping anywhere near my furniture.”
“You are more than welcome to join and oversee the process, Sameen,” she called from the bathroom, door ajar. “I could use your supervision.”
“In your dreams,” you grumbled, in a tone you thought too low for Root to hear.
“Every night, sweetie.”
You rolled your eyes, but couldn’t resist the early stages of a smile.
You were only two beers in, taking it slow, by the time Root padded out of your bedroom (wearing shorts), her wet hair twisted up casually. Again, your chest hummed… not unpleasantly upon sight of her so relaxed and at ease, so delicate, yet far from weak.
(You couldn’t quite remember when she started laying herself out like this for you, when you began to witness this private version of Root, dare you call it domestic . You also couldn’t find it in you to reject its dynamic.)
When she sat beside you on the couch this time, her ankles were tucked beneath herself, and you didn’t know if this was something you were supposed to read into.
Not that you were supposed to do anything, for anyone.
Root just showed up when she felt like it. When she needed something, and her safe house was across the city.
None if it meant anything.
You weren’t sure if you’d understand it anyway, regardless if it did.
“Did you want to watch something?” Root asked, her tone stiff with amusement like she was trying not to laugh.
You blinked, and stared back at the dark TV, not having even realized you’d never turned it on.
Yeah, right. You’d sat in the dark of your living room for the last twenty minutes drinking beer by yourself at midnight, waiting for Root. You rolled your eyes at yourself, took another good chug, and passed Root the remote. You tried to ignore the lopsided smile that stretched across her face at the gesture (that didn’t mean anything).
She flipped around for a bit, before Root switched Gossip Girl on and smirked. “Might as well, if nothing else is on,” she said airily, her voice breaching on some heavy sarcasm. You sunk back into the couch with a scowl, ignoring her knowing look.
The couch was large enough for you to curl over on your side, legs bent at the knee, leaned against the couch’s arm, without quite touching Root’s thigh at the other end. Comfortable would be too generous a term to throw, but it wasn’t horrible.
“How’s your nose, by the way?”
Root refused to peel her eyes from the screen, too seemingly enraptured, but she tilted her better ear towards you. “Fine, mostly. Ruined a couple pillows from rolling over too much in my sleep, but it’s healing.”
You nodded, rolling your beer around your hands. “That’s good.” Another handful of minutes passed, and you interrupted the show again. “You never did tell me why you went swimming in a gas tank.”
Root had that smile again, the one that mockingly suggested a remark like didn’t know you cared, Shaw . “It wasn’t as bad as it looked.” You thought she was gonna leave it at that, for a bloated hesitation followed her words, but she opened her mouth again at the next commercial break. “I had assumed this position in security at an armament manufacturer over in New Jersey earlier this week, earning that all-American lifestyle, and I hired a team to break in and steal some random automatic weapons and explosives to distract from—”
“What you were actually stealing,” you guessed, and there’s a proud glint to her eyes that rubs you the wrong way.
“Exactly.” You really wished she wouldn’t look at you like… like that. “Except they got a little too trigger-happy, just sloppy mistakes that brought the gig too much attention, and I couldn’t exactly high tail it with the PAC-3 without raising any alarms in my direction, so—”
“ Rockets? What the hell do you need a system like that for?”
Root’s eyes glittered wickedly. “You’ll hear all about it in a few weeks, I would never leave out the juicy details.”
“I’m waiting for where you get to why you stunk up my apartment.”
“If you stop interrupting, I might get to tell my story. And technically this apartment belongs to Sameen Grey, not Shaw.”
Your eyes shot daggers through her.
“Right. Well, the team I hired didn’t know me by face, obviously, and I put on some pseudo-heroic act that had them retain me with the rest of the hostages, and as way of getting the rest of the staff and I to cooperate in their mission—”
“The mission you hired them for,” you clarified.
“—They doused us in gasoline and waved some Bic lighters around until we cooperated. No biggie. I still managed to get what I went for. And a perfect excuse to use your body wash.”
You stared at Root. “No biggie,” you echoed dryly. You wanted to back up to the part where Root was hiring sketchy teams off the market and getting that close to being on a government radar, about why Root didn’t call you or Reese for some back-up muscle, that Root had too much of a God-complex for anyone ’s good, and that you really wanted to get your hands on some of those military grade rockets, but it all collapsed from you like dead air. So you bit your tongue.
You polished off your beer and pushed yourself off the couch with a huff, grabbing another two beers from the fridge. The second was for Root, and the corner of her mouth lifted, and you waited all night for that stupid half-smile to fall off.
(It never did.)
You were halfway through this drink, and the episode was almost over, when you plainly said, “You’re not invincible, Root.”
You refused to look at her. Didn’t let those syrupy eyes drown you.
After a beat, Root looked back at the screen. “I know.”
You woke up on the couch, still curled up on your end, but the blanket from your bed was tossed over you. After grudgingly popping the kinks from your neck, wondering how the hell anyone slept on this damn thing, least of all Root, you glanced around for the woman reflexively. The sun had just barely crawled into the sky, and you rubbed at your eyes blearily. She wasn’t around, she never was, and you had a nagging urge to check if maybe she took your bed after you fell asleep on the couch, but you knew she didn’t.
Root always disappeared by mornings, scarcely any sign at all she’d been there in the first place aside from the toothpaste with the cap askew, the coffee maker that was still warm to the touch, the faint smell of gasoline. It didn’t matter; it’s not like you even enjoyed mornings with anything or anyone but a strong shot of espresso.
It was just something you noticed. You rubbed irritably at your neck again.
(And you weren’t sure when you became one to just notice these things.)