“What I feel for you can’t be conveyed in phrasal combinations; It either screams out loud or stays painfully silent but I promise — it beats words. It beats worlds.” — Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Letters
When you kiss her in an elevator with a gun in your hand and
her coat in your fist, she doesn’t say anything, but she does scream: a sound from behind the metal of the gate that
lingers in your head for months, the ghost of a feeling in the pit of your
stomach that does not go away.
When you kiss her for the 23rd time, she says, “Missed
you, Sam,” but it’s not her, really, just a refraction of light, the illusion
of a sound. Wrong.
When you kiss her for the 405th time, she says, “Wouldn’t
have pegged you for the soft type, Shaw,” and you bite her tongue instead of
yours. Wrong.
When you kiss her for the 1,029th time, she says,
“Sorry,” and by now you’ve gotten the hang of this game – you’re only biding
your time when you ask “What for?” and she says, “I wish we’d done this sooner.”
Wrong.
When you kiss her for the 6,741st time, she says,
“You’re safe here.” And you nearly believe her. (You stop kissing her after that.)
And then you’re in a prison in Johannesburg, and the back of
a cramped truck in Mexico, and a rooftop in New York, a week in to what you
hope to god isn’t another simulation.
When you kiss her in the morning by the bridge, she only
looks at you fondly and smirks. You say, “Reality looks good on you, Root.”
The pain Root felt when she thought she saw Shaw die has been discussed a lot so far. But the same cannot be said for Shaw’s reaction to seeing Root die in the simulation. Or should I say hearing-because this is Shaw. Shaw knows guns, knows the sound of one being fired better than she knows the sound of her father’s voice, at this point.
She knows something is a bit off with Root, with all that talk about a future together, because one thing about Root is that sure she flirts and she’s playful, but she never actually pushes, not really. She respects Shaw’s boundaries and always lets Shaw control the pace of their relationship, backing off if it gets to be too much.
And Root’s voice is a little bit shaky, trying a little too hard at seeming to be happy. She hears Root’s cries and the sound of gunfire-and this is Shaw, she very well could know simply by ear what Martine’s preferred firearm sounds like when it’s shot.
And look at Shaw‘s face. It just freezes. The self-proclaimed sociopath goes from seemingly indifferent to caring in a heartbeat. “Root?” she asks the first time, after hearing “That’s good enough for me,” a hail of bullets and the sounds of Root’s short, pain-filled groan. Shaw’s voice is almost soft, filled with disbelief and fear, hoping against hope that she’s wrong, that what she heard wasn’t what she knows it to be, that Root will make some stupid flirty innuendo that she’s grown so fond of.
And then the last “Root,” urgent and panicked and concerned, her fears confirmed but she will try one more time, but in her voice you can hear it. She doesn’t think Root is at all ok. And now, now Sameen truly knows what it means to feel fear.
You know what small thing about this scene has always fucked me up?
This, right before the simulation ends:
The Machine’s box for Shaw moves around a lot in this perspective shot. Those boxes move along with their subjects, and given that Shaw’s box covers basically the entire car, for the box to move as much as it does means that Shaw had to be moving around a lot. Every time I see it I get this mental image of Shaw thrashing around in anger and desperation, needing to get out of her cuffs and out of the car and get to Root.
And it kills me.
I was wondering if anyone would bring Shaw’s part up, and I’m glad fandom provided!
Because you know what? This? This is the saddest and darkest timeline.
Because not only does Shaw lose Root, she loses Harold, John, and Fusco.
She’s the only remaining survivor with the US economy down and only the Machine and Bear for allies.
Like it or not, but Shaw in Samaritan captivity was actually the best outcome for everyone, at least there was still hope that sometime in the future the Team would get Shaw back.
Kirkwall Was Totally Built On a Hellmouth 