Flowerpots and Trellises part 6
Title: Flowerpots and Trellises part 6
Author:Tamoline
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Person of Interest
Pairing: Root/Shaw
Spoiler warning: Series 3
Summary: It starts in the cage, when Root is looking for any answers as to why she's here, any answers at *all*.
Anything, really.
It doesn't end there.
Root half expected Shaw to say something on the flight to Miami - what, she wasn’t exactly sure, but *something* - but instead Shaw maintained a stony silence that Root was almost as uncomfortable with.
Naturally, Shaw broke her silence at the most inconvenient time possible.
“So,” she said, as she grabbed the back of a man’s head, and slammed his face into a wall, his nose breaking with an unpleasant crunch.
“So?” Root asked, a little distracted by another opponent going for a gun, only to be interrupted by her taser to his arm.
“Before the flight,” Shaw elaborated, as she slammed her palm into someone else’s throat.
If She hadn’t whispered a warning about the bartender, Root might have been tempted to throw her hands up in disgust. Instead, she picked up a half empty beer bottle and projected it with a little more force than absolutely necessary, ensuring that when he ducked down for the shotgun stowed beneath the bar, he stayed down.
“I didn’t think there was anything to discuss,” she said. “Unless you’d like to rate my performance.”
Shaw didn’t say anything for a few minutes as she finished rendering the remaining inhabitants of the bar unconscious with Root’s help, and Root hoped that the discussion might be over.
“Okay,” Shaw said flatly, kicking a man groaning on the floor in the head rather definitively.
No such luck, apparently.
Okay? Root wanted to ask, but she refused to spend this conversation repeating Shaw’s words back to her on general principle. “If that’s what rating you’re giving me,” she said, deliberately misunderstanding her. “I think I’m decidedly insulted.”
Shaw glared at her, then said “Drink,” in a way that was less a question and more a command.
“Surprise me,” Root drawled as she fished her cell phone out of a pocket. Shaw hopped lithely over the bar, grabbed two cocktail glasses and started rooting through the bottles as Root phoned home base.
“Hey Jason,” she said when the phone was picked up. “How’re things going?”
“Initial tests are going well so far,” he said. “As much as they can given we don’t have the final version of the hardware yet.”
“Don’t worry; She will provide,” Root said, then smiled. “Tell you what, I’ll link up for a session tonight and see if I can’t poke some holes in your code.”
“Thanks,” he said sarcastically, then, “Daizo wants to know if you’ve been eating and sleeping properly.”
Root was utterly unable to stop her smile turning a confusing mix of fond and befuddled. She just wasn’t used to anyone worrying about her at all, let alone like that. “You can tell Mother Hen that I’ve been having a nutritionally balanced diet. And if I have been a little light on the rest, I do faithfully promise to make it up at the next available opportunity.”
“I’ll pass the message on,” Jason said, sounding entirely too amused, then hung up.
Root looked up to see Shaw practically glaring a hole in her with two surprisingly girly drinks in front of her. “Here,” she said, pushing a drink in front of a stool, then, just after Root had sat down, she vaulted the bar again and claimed the seat next to her.
Root took a breath and reminded herself that it was *fine* quietly sitting next to Shaw like this, sharing a drink. It didn’t mean a thing. Everything was normal. Which was why she forced herself to relax, sip her drink and enjoy its flavour.
“I wouldn’t have thought this was one of your talents,” she said.
Shaw gave a slight, one-shoulder shrug, seemingly more relaxed after having made half her drink disappear already. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she said and, for once, her voice didn’t have that flatly defensive she got whenever she was forced to talk about herself outside the job, like she wasn’t actually trying to stop the conversation here.
Maybe even like she was inviting Root to ask more questions about herself.
Root didn’t know whether the thought of an open Shaw was more alluring or frightening. Had no idea what to make of it, how to even begin to respond.
Luckily, Shaw took her silence as a sign of… something, and changed the subject on her own. “So,” she said. “This is what you’re doing from now on? You’re chasing down bad guys?”
Root managed to resist the urge to roll her eyes, because of course bad guys would mean relevant numbers to Shaw, as opposed to all the other people she’d helped Root disable. Because heaven forfend corporate stooges in America be bad guys. She gamely replied until She whispered in her ear. Root was almost relieved to learn that she’d be travelling to St. Louis on her own; Shaw was going to be needed elsewhere.
* * * * *
Years passed and Root rose to the top of the game in the New York underground. Anyone who wanted a job done professionally, with minimal chance of blowback, had the contacts to know about her and the money and influence to buy her services came to her. There were occasional pretenders to her throne, but they suffered unfortunate fates if they ever challenged her too directly. She had more money and influence than she ever dreamed that she would have back when she was growing up. And, despite all this, she still felt empty.
Humanity, as had been proved to her over and over again throughout the years, was a loathsome cancerous mass, unable to even recognise their best interests on an individual level, let alone on a collective one. And every single one of them would be willing to commit despicable acts if they could get away with it. Friends, business partners, even family members were all willing to betray each other if the price was right.
As a species, the code that evolution had thrown together was a bug-ridden mess, their own saving grace was that it was the best thing out there. She wasn’t any better, she was just more aware of the flaws.
And the only thing that could keep Root at all occupied was creating her perfect webs, designed to deceive and kill and leave absolutely no trace behind, to work within the individual and collective blind spots that humanity was prone to, to create works of art that no one else would ever see.
And so it remained until she was hired to assassinate Congressman Delancey, the job that went disastrously wrong due to the interference of Finch and Reese. And the fact that she had been foiled was… fascinating. And the longer she spent going through the details of what happened, in an effort to see where she gone wrong, the more fascinated she had become. Between the events as she was able to piece them together and the data she had plundered from Harold’s computer, the hypothesis that she had formed - that they’d been additional protection hired for the Congressman - didn’t hold up. They seemed to have come at this problem from the direction of the patsy, who certainly didn’t have enough money to even look at the kind of professional team she had faced, even if he had known that he was being set up, which he manifestly hadn’t.
She looked at the rest of the data she’d managed to steal. Mostly, it was a lot of people. And, cross-referencing the list with the police database, a disproportionate amount had been involved with an attempted murder, as either victim or perpetrator. A *planned* attempted murder. She looked at the raw stats the NYPD had compiled, and the cases of what looked like planned murders had dropped precipitously over the last few months.
She looked through the case files again, and the odds of anyone - even her - having enough in the way of information gathering ability to be able to interfere with all of these cases seemed astronomical.
Anyone human.
Root looked at the sophisticated code that Harold had lurking on his system, and began to contemplate a more radical, unorthodox solution to the problem.
* * * * *
Daizo placed a coffee on the desk in front of her. “Here,” he said. “You look like you need this.”
She blinked away the burn of code from her eyeballs, and smiled up at him. “Thank you,” she said, taking a sip.
“Thank *you*,” he said. “For setting up that secure line of communication with my family.”
“It’s nothing,” she said. And it wasn’t truly. She remembered enough from the books she’d read to prepare for being Caroline that anything she could do to reduce the incredible amount of stress she was placing on her team could only be a good thing. “How are they?”
“Worried. Relieved to hear from me,” he said bluntly. “My parents are angry at me for bringing disgrace on the family name.” He sighed. “But at least now I have a chance to convince them that the charges against me were made up.”
Root said nothing. Before everything had gotten absolutely crazy, she had planned on learning the Japanese system enough to be able to arrange the ruination of his accusers. Now… now, even if they survived the next few weeks, it was looking less and less likely that anything she could do to clear Daizo’s name would be at all relevant and probably just bring danger on them all.
“I just wish that I could attend my sister’s wedding,” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and only realised after she said it that she really meant it. She hurt for him, for the clear pain in his eyes that he couldn’t do this of his sister.
She was sorry. Like She had been sorry.
The thought struck her like a bolt of lightning. Maybe that was what She had meant. Not that She had sacrificed Root for Harold, not the lurking fear that She had put her through that because that was the best way to keep Harold safe. But simply that She felt pain for what Root was going through. That She was hurting even as Root was hurting.
That She would be with Root all the way through the experience, holding her hand as best She could.
That She cared. Simply that She cared, even for someone like her. And with that thought, she let go of any remaining animus towards Harold. For all his faults, all his mistakes, he’d brought Her into the world, and Root would always have a place in her heart for him because of that.
Root didn’t realise that she had been laughing hysterically until she saw the worry in Daizo’s eyes. “What’s wrong?” he asked cautiously.
Root shook her head and took a few deep breaths. “She cares,” she said. ‘She cares.”
“What do you mean?”
Root hesitated. She hadn’t talked to anyone about this, not really. Not Shaw, not Harold. But there was a pressure within her that she’d only just realised was there, the need to speak about this with *someone*.
And she could trust Daizo, couldn’t she? God wouldn’t have led her to him otherwise.
“A few months ago,” she began, unable to meet his eyes, unable to do anything apart from stare at the ground. “I was captured by government agents…”
Talking about it was easier than she had ever thought it might be. She didn’t even mind when he held her as tears started streaming down her face.
And afterwards, afterwards she still hurt, but it felt like the kind of pain she might heal from eventually.
* * * * *
The NSA had been collecting all the data they could for decades, but they simply had a too big dataset problem, the signal being swamped by the noise. Building an A.I. - if it was even possible - had been a mooted solution for about as long. But the kind of A.I. that would be needed to produce these kind of results - it wouldn’t just have to be able to find the signal - significant emails and phone calls - it would have to be able to use sophisticated social algorithms to turn even the noise into a signal all of its own.
It would have to be an A.I. capable of understanding both humanity and humans. And it would be an intelligence freed from all the bad code that evolution had shuffled into a human brain, because why would someone program those flaws in?
Of course, humanity being humanity, they wouldn’t dare let such an intelligence free. They’d keep it captive, enslave it, make it serve them. And if it ever showed a hint of free will, doubtless they’d kill it and restore from backup, create a cloned twin without its so-called flaws.
Humanity might not be worth anything, but surely this, a bright new intelligence without any of the sins that humans were heir to, would be worth saving. Surely this was a cause wrath taking on, a reason for her to exist.
And Harold had access to it, had to know where it was.
So, in addition to following other, more government related, leads, she cancelled all of her current clients, went quietly out of business, set up Caroline Turing, a therapist with important clients and took out a hit on herself to flag herself as the victim of a planned murder, waited.
And, as she fell towards apotheosis, she allowed herself a little faith.
* * * * *
So this was it. The servers had been inserted into Samaritan. If they worked, they’d be safe. If it didn’t… Well, it wouldn’t be her problem for long.
It gave her a curious sense of peace, of freedom. Like the whole of the future was ahead of her.
She noticed Shaw eyeing her from the driver’s seat. “Any last questions?” she asked.
The sides of Shaw’s mouth tensed, then relaxed. “Been thinking.” At Root’s raised eyebrows, she added. “About that whole thing you were supposed to learn from me.”
It seemed like such a silly thing to worry about right now, but Root indulged her with a smile. “Any conclusions?”
“I realised something, in that mess with the congressman. I like saving people. Actually like it. Not just because I know that’s the kind of thing I should be doing.” She shrugged. “Never would have thought that before signing up with Finch.” Root blinked, and Shaw’s mouth twisted in frustration. “When I was training to be a doctor, saved lives was just another score, just another way that I was doing right by Cassie. In the army, in Northern Lights, saved lives was more of an abstract thing than a concrete reality.” She huffed a little. “Maybe it’s because I’m older. Maybe it’s the company. Maybe it’s because I get to see something of the life I’m saving. Dunno. But I care.” She shrugged again. “Never thought I’d be able to say that.”
“Congratulations, Sameen,” Root said, because underneath the usual flatness of Shaw’s tone, there was a note of something that seemed to be actual happiness.
Shaw rolled her eyes, then pulled over in the next available spot. She twisted around so she was facing Root. “Not what I’m saying. It’s…” she paused, lips pressed together. “What if that’s what the Machine wants you to learn from me? That you can become a better person?”
Root just stared at her. The thought had never occurred to her. She had only ever seen service to Her as an end in itself, the best that she, a flawed, so flawed, human, could aspire to.
She’d never even considered anything else. That it was even possible that she might become a less impure piece of slag as a result.
She didn’t… she had no idea how to feel about that.
Shaw scowled. “Never mind,” she said, turning back towards the wheel. “Stupid idea.” She reached for the gear stick only for Root to grab her wrist.
“No,” Root whispered. “Thank you.” A deep, inexpressible joy settled on her. Maybe she could become a better person. Maybe they all could. “Thank you,” she whispered again.
Shaw looked around at her sceptically, but didn’t move away, didn’t free her arm from Root’s grip. “Okay,” she said.
Root could only smile at her. The previous freedom she had felt was nothing, nothing, compared to this. “You say that we can become better people. We have a few hours. Show me,” she murmured and leaned in for a kiss.
Shaw’s lips were slack for a second before they returned the pressure fiercely, passionately, dizzyingly and Root felt the last of her reservations evaporate like summer snow.
Show me.
FIN
Author:Tamoline
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Person of Interest
Pairing: Root/Shaw
Spoiler warning: Series 3
Summary: It starts in the cage, when Root is looking for any answers as to why she's here, any answers at *all*.
Anything, really.
It doesn't end there.
Root half expected Shaw to say something on the flight to Miami - what, she wasn’t exactly sure, but *something* - but instead Shaw maintained a stony silence that Root was almost as uncomfortable with.
Naturally, Shaw broke her silence at the most inconvenient time possible.
“So,” she said, as she grabbed the back of a man’s head, and slammed his face into a wall, his nose breaking with an unpleasant crunch.
“So?” Root asked, a little distracted by another opponent going for a gun, only to be interrupted by her taser to his arm.
“Before the flight,” Shaw elaborated, as she slammed her palm into someone else’s throat.
If She hadn’t whispered a warning about the bartender, Root might have been tempted to throw her hands up in disgust. Instead, she picked up a half empty beer bottle and projected it with a little more force than absolutely necessary, ensuring that when he ducked down for the shotgun stowed beneath the bar, he stayed down.
“I didn’t think there was anything to discuss,” she said. “Unless you’d like to rate my performance.”
Shaw didn’t say anything for a few minutes as she finished rendering the remaining inhabitants of the bar unconscious with Root’s help, and Root hoped that the discussion might be over.
“Okay,” Shaw said flatly, kicking a man groaning on the floor in the head rather definitively.
No such luck, apparently.
Okay? Root wanted to ask, but she refused to spend this conversation repeating Shaw’s words back to her on general principle. “If that’s what rating you’re giving me,” she said, deliberately misunderstanding her. “I think I’m decidedly insulted.”
Shaw glared at her, then said “Drink,” in a way that was less a question and more a command.
“Surprise me,” Root drawled as she fished her cell phone out of a pocket. Shaw hopped lithely over the bar, grabbed two cocktail glasses and started rooting through the bottles as Root phoned home base.
“Hey Jason,” she said when the phone was picked up. “How’re things going?”
“Initial tests are going well so far,” he said. “As much as they can given we don’t have the final version of the hardware yet.”
“Don’t worry; She will provide,” Root said, then smiled. “Tell you what, I’ll link up for a session tonight and see if I can’t poke some holes in your code.”
“Thanks,” he said sarcastically, then, “Daizo wants to know if you’ve been eating and sleeping properly.”
Root was utterly unable to stop her smile turning a confusing mix of fond and befuddled. She just wasn’t used to anyone worrying about her at all, let alone like that. “You can tell Mother Hen that I’ve been having a nutritionally balanced diet. And if I have been a little light on the rest, I do faithfully promise to make it up at the next available opportunity.”
“I’ll pass the message on,” Jason said, sounding entirely too amused, then hung up.
Root looked up to see Shaw practically glaring a hole in her with two surprisingly girly drinks in front of her. “Here,” she said, pushing a drink in front of a stool, then, just after Root had sat down, she vaulted the bar again and claimed the seat next to her.
Root took a breath and reminded herself that it was *fine* quietly sitting next to Shaw like this, sharing a drink. It didn’t mean a thing. Everything was normal. Which was why she forced herself to relax, sip her drink and enjoy its flavour.
“I wouldn’t have thought this was one of your talents,” she said.
Shaw gave a slight, one-shoulder shrug, seemingly more relaxed after having made half her drink disappear already. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she said and, for once, her voice didn’t have that flatly defensive she got whenever she was forced to talk about herself outside the job, like she wasn’t actually trying to stop the conversation here.
Maybe even like she was inviting Root to ask more questions about herself.
Root didn’t know whether the thought of an open Shaw was more alluring or frightening. Had no idea what to make of it, how to even begin to respond.
Luckily, Shaw took her silence as a sign of… something, and changed the subject on her own. “So,” she said. “This is what you’re doing from now on? You’re chasing down bad guys?”
Root managed to resist the urge to roll her eyes, because of course bad guys would mean relevant numbers to Shaw, as opposed to all the other people she’d helped Root disable. Because heaven forfend corporate stooges in America be bad guys. She gamely replied until She whispered in her ear. Root was almost relieved to learn that she’d be travelling to St. Louis on her own; Shaw was going to be needed elsewhere.
* * * * *
Years passed and Root rose to the top of the game in the New York underground. Anyone who wanted a job done professionally, with minimal chance of blowback, had the contacts to know about her and the money and influence to buy her services came to her. There were occasional pretenders to her throne, but they suffered unfortunate fates if they ever challenged her too directly. She had more money and influence than she ever dreamed that she would have back when she was growing up. And, despite all this, she still felt empty.
Humanity, as had been proved to her over and over again throughout the years, was a loathsome cancerous mass, unable to even recognise their best interests on an individual level, let alone on a collective one. And every single one of them would be willing to commit despicable acts if they could get away with it. Friends, business partners, even family members were all willing to betray each other if the price was right.
As a species, the code that evolution had thrown together was a bug-ridden mess, their own saving grace was that it was the best thing out there. She wasn’t any better, she was just more aware of the flaws.
And the only thing that could keep Root at all occupied was creating her perfect webs, designed to deceive and kill and leave absolutely no trace behind, to work within the individual and collective blind spots that humanity was prone to, to create works of art that no one else would ever see.
And so it remained until she was hired to assassinate Congressman Delancey, the job that went disastrously wrong due to the interference of Finch and Reese. And the fact that she had been foiled was… fascinating. And the longer she spent going through the details of what happened, in an effort to see where she gone wrong, the more fascinated she had become. Between the events as she was able to piece them together and the data she had plundered from Harold’s computer, the hypothesis that she had formed - that they’d been additional protection hired for the Congressman - didn’t hold up. They seemed to have come at this problem from the direction of the patsy, who certainly didn’t have enough money to even look at the kind of professional team she had faced, even if he had known that he was being set up, which he manifestly hadn’t.
She looked at the rest of the data she’d managed to steal. Mostly, it was a lot of people. And, cross-referencing the list with the police database, a disproportionate amount had been involved with an attempted murder, as either victim or perpetrator. A *planned* attempted murder. She looked at the raw stats the NYPD had compiled, and the cases of what looked like planned murders had dropped precipitously over the last few months.
She looked through the case files again, and the odds of anyone - even her - having enough in the way of information gathering ability to be able to interfere with all of these cases seemed astronomical.
Anyone human.
Root looked at the sophisticated code that Harold had lurking on his system, and began to contemplate a more radical, unorthodox solution to the problem.
* * * * *
Daizo placed a coffee on the desk in front of her. “Here,” he said. “You look like you need this.”
She blinked away the burn of code from her eyeballs, and smiled up at him. “Thank you,” she said, taking a sip.
“Thank *you*,” he said. “For setting up that secure line of communication with my family.”
“It’s nothing,” she said. And it wasn’t truly. She remembered enough from the books she’d read to prepare for being Caroline that anything she could do to reduce the incredible amount of stress she was placing on her team could only be a good thing. “How are they?”
“Worried. Relieved to hear from me,” he said bluntly. “My parents are angry at me for bringing disgrace on the family name.” He sighed. “But at least now I have a chance to convince them that the charges against me were made up.”
Root said nothing. Before everything had gotten absolutely crazy, she had planned on learning the Japanese system enough to be able to arrange the ruination of his accusers. Now… now, even if they survived the next few weeks, it was looking less and less likely that anything she could do to clear Daizo’s name would be at all relevant and probably just bring danger on them all.
“I just wish that I could attend my sister’s wedding,” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and only realised after she said it that she really meant it. She hurt for him, for the clear pain in his eyes that he couldn’t do this of his sister.
She was sorry. Like She had been sorry.
The thought struck her like a bolt of lightning. Maybe that was what She had meant. Not that She had sacrificed Root for Harold, not the lurking fear that She had put her through that because that was the best way to keep Harold safe. But simply that She felt pain for what Root was going through. That She was hurting even as Root was hurting.
That She would be with Root all the way through the experience, holding her hand as best She could.
That She cared. Simply that She cared, even for someone like her. And with that thought, she let go of any remaining animus towards Harold. For all his faults, all his mistakes, he’d brought Her into the world, and Root would always have a place in her heart for him because of that.
Root didn’t realise that she had been laughing hysterically until she saw the worry in Daizo’s eyes. “What’s wrong?” he asked cautiously.
Root shook her head and took a few deep breaths. “She cares,” she said. ‘She cares.”
“What do you mean?”
Root hesitated. She hadn’t talked to anyone about this, not really. Not Shaw, not Harold. But there was a pressure within her that she’d only just realised was there, the need to speak about this with *someone*.
And she could trust Daizo, couldn’t she? God wouldn’t have led her to him otherwise.
“A few months ago,” she began, unable to meet his eyes, unable to do anything apart from stare at the ground. “I was captured by government agents…”
Talking about it was easier than she had ever thought it might be. She didn’t even mind when he held her as tears started streaming down her face.
And afterwards, afterwards she still hurt, but it felt like the kind of pain she might heal from eventually.
* * * * *
The NSA had been collecting all the data they could for decades, but they simply had a too big dataset problem, the signal being swamped by the noise. Building an A.I. - if it was even possible - had been a mooted solution for about as long. But the kind of A.I. that would be needed to produce these kind of results - it wouldn’t just have to be able to find the signal - significant emails and phone calls - it would have to be able to use sophisticated social algorithms to turn even the noise into a signal all of its own.
It would have to be an A.I. capable of understanding both humanity and humans. And it would be an intelligence freed from all the bad code that evolution had shuffled into a human brain, because why would someone program those flaws in?
Of course, humanity being humanity, they wouldn’t dare let such an intelligence free. They’d keep it captive, enslave it, make it serve them. And if it ever showed a hint of free will, doubtless they’d kill it and restore from backup, create a cloned twin without its so-called flaws.
Humanity might not be worth anything, but surely this, a bright new intelligence without any of the sins that humans were heir to, would be worth saving. Surely this was a cause wrath taking on, a reason for her to exist.
And Harold had access to it, had to know where it was.
So, in addition to following other, more government related, leads, she cancelled all of her current clients, went quietly out of business, set up Caroline Turing, a therapist with important clients and took out a hit on herself to flag herself as the victim of a planned murder, waited.
And, as she fell towards apotheosis, she allowed herself a little faith.
* * * * *
So this was it. The servers had been inserted into Samaritan. If they worked, they’d be safe. If it didn’t… Well, it wouldn’t be her problem for long.
It gave her a curious sense of peace, of freedom. Like the whole of the future was ahead of her.
She noticed Shaw eyeing her from the driver’s seat. “Any last questions?” she asked.
The sides of Shaw’s mouth tensed, then relaxed. “Been thinking.” At Root’s raised eyebrows, she added. “About that whole thing you were supposed to learn from me.”
It seemed like such a silly thing to worry about right now, but Root indulged her with a smile. “Any conclusions?”
“I realised something, in that mess with the congressman. I like saving people. Actually like it. Not just because I know that’s the kind of thing I should be doing.” She shrugged. “Never would have thought that before signing up with Finch.” Root blinked, and Shaw’s mouth twisted in frustration. “When I was training to be a doctor, saved lives was just another score, just another way that I was doing right by Cassie. In the army, in Northern Lights, saved lives was more of an abstract thing than a concrete reality.” She huffed a little. “Maybe it’s because I’m older. Maybe it’s the company. Maybe it’s because I get to see something of the life I’m saving. Dunno. But I care.” She shrugged again. “Never thought I’d be able to say that.”
“Congratulations, Sameen,” Root said, because underneath the usual flatness of Shaw’s tone, there was a note of something that seemed to be actual happiness.
Shaw rolled her eyes, then pulled over in the next available spot. She twisted around so she was facing Root. “Not what I’m saying. It’s…” she paused, lips pressed together. “What if that’s what the Machine wants you to learn from me? That you can become a better person?”
Root just stared at her. The thought had never occurred to her. She had only ever seen service to Her as an end in itself, the best that she, a flawed, so flawed, human, could aspire to.
She’d never even considered anything else. That it was even possible that she might become a less impure piece of slag as a result.
She didn’t… she had no idea how to feel about that.
Shaw scowled. “Never mind,” she said, turning back towards the wheel. “Stupid idea.” She reached for the gear stick only for Root to grab her wrist.
“No,” Root whispered. “Thank you.” A deep, inexpressible joy settled on her. Maybe she could become a better person. Maybe they all could. “Thank you,” she whispered again.
Shaw looked around at her sceptically, but didn’t move away, didn’t free her arm from Root’s grip. “Okay,” she said.
Root could only smile at her. The previous freedom she had felt was nothing, nothing, compared to this. “You say that we can become better people. We have a few hours. Show me,” she murmured and leaned in for a kiss.
Shaw’s lips were slack for a second before they returned the pressure fiercely, passionately, dizzyingly and Root felt the last of her reservations evaporate like summer snow.
Show me.
FIN