Who: Shoot. What: A reunion! And Cheeseburgers. When: Like lol months ago really I think. Where: Columbia. Ratings/Warnings: It's them. Language, etc.
Shaw thought for sure that she was going to die, and when she woke up in a strange hospital days later she was certain that she’d gone to hell. She’d tried to escape the place three times before a woman had to come along to tell her that she had not, in fact, been captured by Samaritan. The old lady, who looked like Betty White, told her some long and complicated story about alternate universes.
Honestly, she didn’t really care. The point that had been driven home was that the hospital was real, she was really alive, she wasn’t anyone’s captive, and she was supposed to concentrate on getting healthy again. Kind of hard when you were as full of bullets as she was, but she’d spent the last month working on it.
It was lonely. She didn’t really care except deep down, of course, but it was. More often than she really wanted to count, her mind wandered in the direction of Bear, Root, and the others. By the time the month had passed, even Fusco’s face would have been a relief to see. Now she was being released, and for the first time in a year she felt completely lost.
The old lady promised her it would all make sense when this day came. She’d been handed a bag with a cell phone and a laptop, given a set of clothing that was black and therefore tolerable. But she stood outside the hospital, and found herself staring at all that open sky. “It’s worse than hell. It’s heaven. Great.”
Root hadn't gotten the "alternate universe" talk until after she'd settled in. It had been part of her packet along with her suite key, and had gone a great deal towards explaining what exactly had happened. It had been easy for Root to accept it. A city floating, which was an impossibility according to every known law of her own universe. Compared to that an alternate reality was easy to believe.
A universe without Samaritan. A world where they could let the Machine grow unhindered. And knowing Harold and John, continue to help people.
She could live with that, as long as she could convince Harry to not shackle the AI. At least, once she's relearned what she needs to. How to care for people. She'd turned around and taught Root how to care about people. At least a little.
And so she immersed herself over the next few days following their arrival. Learning about Columbia and Rapture, and the precarious situation the cities found themselves in while Harry presumably worked the Machine and John most likely was exploring the city on foot. She realized that a benevolent God might just come in handy.
But there was another reason she dove into the internet. Shaw.
Root simply couldn't accept that she and the others would be pulled out and Shaw wouldn't. That whoever or whatever had done it had thought to bring them Bear, to make their new "office" resemble the library and give Harry the hardware he'd need to bring the Machine back, and not bring her Shaw. The Powers that Be had even put in a small gym and indoor shooting range. Like it knew exactly how to make them happy. A part of her might have been alarmed at the thought that they were being pacified.
She found Shaw's name in the records of a hospital and was halfway out the door before the results had finished populating.
Without the Machine to guide her, she had to rely on the old fashioned way. That ear being silent was perhaps the most painful part of all this, but the promise of Sameen, slim as it was, made up for it.
It seemed as though everything had been timed just right. Root pulled up in a sports car, and stared at the woman standing on the sidewalk. She could never forget Shaw's profile, and it took all of her strength not to climb out the window and tackle Shaw to the ground. But that wasn't Sam's way and Root honestly didn't know where they stood in this post 'you kissed me and then sacrificed yourself for me what are we' world. She only knew she loved this woman, and she knew they had to dance their little dance. Luckily, Root loved both their dance, and pain, and this reunion was going to have plenty of both.
She whispered Sameen's name, then fixed a faux smile on her face and honked the horn. "Are you going to stare at the clouds all day, sweetie, or would you like to get a burger?"
Right on schedule, a car pulled up to the curb. Sameen had gotten used to that kind of thing, really. Especially where their little group was involved. Of course out here in... wherever the hell this was, it should have been a little less expected. Was the machine even here?
Nevertheless, there was the car, and a familiar voice, attached to a familiar face. Shaw almost had a feeling as she walked up and leaned her head into the window. Of course it was Root. How could she have expected any less?
"Come on, Root. You know me. You should have brought the burger with you. Where's Bear?" Because the dog was the most important thing. After food, of course. And she wasn't getting in until she got an answer.
Shaw’s voice cut through Root so completely that she hesitated longer than half a second before replying. “Harry won’t let him out of his sight. I was kind of in a hurry, anyway.” There was a small but impossible to hide tick in her voice. Her eyes seemed older somehow, as though much longer than a single month had passed.
She shrugged a shoulder, lips in a quirky smile. “You should see the bathtubs they gave us.”
"Just couldn't wait to come save me from this hell, could you?" Shaw asked, while getting in the car. Of course it was more likely that Root couldn't wait to see her, and she couldn't exactly say she blamed her. She'd never expected to see Root again. Or Bear, Harold, any of them. And she had pretty much died in front of her.
That whole sequence didn't bear thinking too long about. It made her insides twist. No, that was actually probably hunger. "I think you owe me at least THREE burgers. And an entire plate of chili cheese fries."
“Of course,” she replied, pushing her hair over her shoulder like it was no big thing. “Your knight in sensible heels, coming to your rescue.”
One block and an order of three burgers and chili cheese fries later, Root was snacking on one while looking at Sameen without appearing to look at her. Which was a dead give-away anyway, but you know, she tried. “I didn’t tell them. What I was doing. Or even that I left. I wanted it to be a surprise, and a little bit of girl time before we make John show emotion might be fun.”
One of the burgers had already been devoured, and Shaw picked up her second burger in her hands before deciding to give Root some of the attention the woman so clearly deserved. She grunted, and nodded. "Yeah, John showing an emotion is always fun."
Root disappearing wasn't that unusual, either. Probably, the boys hadn't even noticed. Shaw kind of liked that it was a surprise, but she felt weird about where they were headed next. She didn't know the new place. John was John but she hadn't secured the place herself. Did they have an armory? Where was the machine?
Shaw decided to just count her blessings that Root wasn't talking about the kiss. "Quit eating my fries. You should have ordered your own food."
"He's been so lost without you, almost as much as Bear was," Root said. She deliberately and slowly stole another fry, and sucked the chili off of it in a manner that wasn't PG rated.
Shaw definitely seemed like Shaw, but there was no telling what Samaritan had done to her. She had barely been able to listen to Greer talk about breaking her. Just thinking about it made Root's heart hurt. "How long after the stock exchange did you come here?" She made it sound like any usual question, with a come-on in her tone.
"I find that a little hard to believe," Shaw replied, with a snort. She was still starving, and she devoured half of the burger in her hands so quickly that most normal people would have gotten sick. Not Sameen, though. She just took a quick break from that to grab a big, gloppy french fry.
She could remember everything about that night clearly. It made her frown, mainly because Martine had won their little one on one, and that pissed her off. She'd gotten the last laugh of course; Root and the others were safe, mission successful as far as she was concerned. But still, she hoped that Martine had found a death that was both slow and painful. "I was laying on the floor bleeding to death and she came by to put one last bullet between my eyes. She hesitated. I thought I'd get one last shot off. Then I passed out, and woke up here."
And with that, she popped the fry in her mouth. Root’s question was far from casual. None of her questions ever were, but Shaw didn’t feel like giving her the satisfaction.
Root stared at her, fry hanging in her mouth. That soon? She slowly started chewing again, looking down at the food as if studying how best to steal part of Shaw’s burger. To her it had been six months. Seven. Months of hunting for Shaw, months of grieving for Shaw, even if she hadn’t entirely been willing to believe she was gone.
In that playfully casual manner of hers, Root replied, “I broke her neck. She earned it.”
This plate of chili fries was absolutely heavenly. The chili was just spicy and saucy enough, the cheese gooey, and the fries had been perfectly crispy before they'd been doused in toppings. Shaw rolled her eyes into her head and let out a bit of a moan, then quickly grabbed another three. "Did it make one of those crunching sounds when it snapped? Damn, I would have given anything to be there for that."
Little did she know that in that place, she hadn't been there because she'd been broken and reprogrammed by the enemy. But she could tell that something was bothering Root, and she squinted at her. "What aren't you telling me, Root?"
God. Watching Shaw eat was always erotic. The woman enjoyed her food the same way normal people enjoyed sex. Root licked her lips, watching the path of fry to mouth. “You always go right for the heart of it, don’t you Sam?”
Tell the truth? Tell a convincing lie? Obfuscate?
“We spent six weeks tearing apart the east coast looking for you. We couldn’t believe you were dead. I couldn’t. But then it wasn’t weeks, it was months. And I never stopped hoping but the numbers kept coming, and then Samaritan found the machine.”
Normal people might have stared at Root in disbelief. Shaw chewed on her french fries while staring at Root like she was a complete idiot. Her eyes could have burned holes right through the other woman, that's how suddenly angry she was.
"That sounds like the perfect thing to do if you want to blow your cover just like I did," She finally said, pursing her lips. But part of her knew it was exactly what she'd have done. That just annoyed her even more. It meant the things they felt about each other were real and not just a figment of blood loss and adrenaline.
Moving on. She shook her head at Root, "Did the Machine make it?"
If you only got here by dying, well, that sucked.
Root’s smile was the kind of smile that a shark had just before pouncing its prey. A predator’s smile, a killer’s smile. She leaned her head on her hands. She could say they were careful, and they had been, but part of them hadn’t really cared. All that mattered had been getting Shaw back.
“Yes. She’s in a briefcase. We had some problems. Had to borrow some really powerful random access memory.”
"In a briefcase." Shaw stared at Root, this time blankly while her mind tried to put that together. "That sounds like a fuckload of problems. How could it fit in a briefcase? The last time it moved itself it needed an entire warehouse."
That was probably what the 'powerful random access memory' was about, but Shaw didn't know computers as well as Root did. She could do some hacking if she needed to, that was all part of the job, but the insides? She'd learned more about that stuff from Root in a year than she'd ever picked up on the job. Plus, she liked listening to Root talk about these things.
And it gave her a chance to work on finishing her burger.
“We borrowed an advanced compression algorithm. It still wasn’t enough to save all of her.” Root’s expression seemed to darken as she spoke. “We saved her core programming. Hopefully more, but there wasn’t enough time or space to get much else.”
Her face lit up, just a little bit. “But what she did and how she did it, oh you would have loved it. She distributed herself across the power network!” And here, Root returned to her cheerful self. “It was brilliant, really. But it was only a stop gap, to buy time while Samaritan hunted her down.”
The remains of the second burger went down the hatch while Root spoke, and Shaw wasted no time in reaching for her third. Had to eat the thing before it got cold, right? There was nothing more sad than a cold cheeseburger. Her eyebrows raised in appreciation at what the Machine had done, and she nodded her head. It was always good to see Root's smile, especially when it was genuine.
"If she'd finished the job she would have been a bitch to track down," Shaw said, with a nod. It was a good play for time. "Probably something I would have done if I was an all-powerful AI."
There was nothing more adorable than Shaw scarfing down a meal. Root had a way of looking at Shaw, bright eyed and with a secret smile and the only difference between the last time and now was the intensity of Root’s expression. She had months of pent-up Shaw watching to do.
But Root thought about the machine, and how human she could be. The kind of god they really needed. “She gave herself up for us. For Harold and me. We went in to rescue you, but we’d just missed you. It was a trap. Of course. So the Machine gave up her location so that they would let us go.”
Clearing plates was definitely Shaw's speciality. But for Root, she pushed the remaining clump of chili fries across the table. The third burger might even be enough food for her, at least for a few hours. Maybe she was even going to work up an appetite in a few.
The Machine gave itself up, but Shaw couldn't say she cared about that the way Root did. It mainly meant that Root was still alive, which was nice. But her brain went back to something else Root said, and her lips thinned into a live. "They got me. They took me away. That's what happened, isn't it? But how the fuck am I still alive there but also here?"
And if Samaritan did have her, or some version of her, or… however that all worked, then she knew herself. She’d rather be dead.
“That’s what happened,” Root replied, her voice almost wavering. But she kept her smile in place like everything had been fine. And would be fine. This is fine. “I can’t explain it, why you’re here and you don’t remember that. Maybe Columbia erased your memories?”
Shaw had a million stares, something Root was probably aware of. This time, her stare was blank, like her brain had just broken in the process of thinking something through. It was the Sameen Shaw version of the Blue Screen of Death. She recovered after a few seconds, and shrugged a shoulder.
"So we're here now. It doesn't matter, does it? You know what does matter?" She paused, and leaned on the table, pushing herself across a bit. "When are we getting new numbers?"
Shaw always had a quick reboot. Her solid state was the sexy kind. Root lifted her head, waggling her finger at Shaw. “So impatient. We’re just not ready yet, Sameen.” She twirled that finger around in the air, eyes never leaving Shaw’s face. “But soon. Once Harry brings her back online. Once she’s tapped into the feeds of this city. And it will take some time for her to adapt, I think. A newborn god in a new world will probably be…” She tilted her head to the left. “...confused.”
"No more or less confused than the rest of us, really." Shaw shrugged a shoulder. But she was impatient. She'd spent weeks laid up, and now all she wanted to do was kick a little ass. "So what, one week? Two? A month? I'm gonna need a side job."
“Probably. You’d look so darling selling shoes.” And Root’s voice was a teasing lilt as they fell back into their old banter. But the hunger that was omnipresent in her eyes around Shaw clearly gnawed at her much more strongly than it had. She’d always flirted heavily but left the ultimate choices up to Shaw.
That was much, much harder now, when every muscle in her body screamed to close the distance between them.
Shaw rolled her eyes at Root, her typical response to the thinly veiled flirting that Root usually flung her way. Today it was worse than usual. Not the actual flirting, but the tension that was lurking right below it. That was going to get distracting, and Shaw couldn't pretend that she didn't have some tension of her own.
The plates of food were nearly picked clean at that point, and she sucked down the last of her soda while she swiped what was left of the french fries. "So. Big bath tubs, huh? I could kill someone for a bath right about now."
And she had new scars. Root would probably make a game of memorizing each one.
Root gnawed on her lip, a thousand possibilities in her eyes like lines of code. She and Shaw didn’t always talk with words. Sometimes the best conversations were the ones where there were no words at all.